What happened in the GDR on 17 June 1953? Using a lot of original footage, Norddeutscher Rundfunk looks back on the events in a detailed report marking their 20th anniversary and shows different interpretations and explanations. Agent coup? Workers’ revolt? Popular uprising? The interpretations were controversial, even among contemporary witnesses and Western historians.

This Marxist education offensive cast into actions and images is part of a bigger cycle of so-called educational films that, following Bertolt Brecht’s concept of the didactic experimental play, use lucid illustration to fill abstract terms with practical meaning. In fifteen learning unites, Harun Farocki and Hartmut Bitomsky address the basic concepts of Karl Marx’s main political work, “Capital”, discussing a section that, according to their own statements, they do not consider self explanatory. “The intention is to make a person who is walking think about walking so that he falls down,” as the two filmmakers noted about their project. It remains to be seen whether such a fall also makes the penny drop among the audience.

“Imminent danger, fear, catastrophe,“ the Austrian-Jewish composer Arnold Schönberg wrote on top of his film score in 1930, to which – except in this collage, swaying like a battered boxer between austere reading document, black film abysses and roaring tempests of images – no film was ever made. Schönberg’s letters articulate the forebodings of the disaster the National Socialists were to bring upon the Jews, describe anti-Semitism that was becoming systematic, marginalization and defamation. Inserted in between, as a look back and forward at historical continuities: bombers approaching Vietnam, the shot Paris Communards in coffins arranged like letter cases.

Walter Krüttner is considered the only satirist among the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto, which was announced at the West German Short Film Festival in 1962. His film begins like those that the Oberhausen group wanted to put a stop to: with ländler music and a quote by regional poet Ganghofer. “Lord, the ones you love you let fall into this land.” Krüttner observes the tourist hustle and bustle at Obersalzberg: tour guides leading Führer travellers through the Nazi buildings. And Krüttner counts the profits West German authorities make by this. He himself profited by winning the “Silberne Lorbeer” (Silver Laurel) of Deutscher Fernsehfunk (German Television Broadcasting), awarded at the International Leipzig Documentary and Short Film Week 1963.