Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness

Mother Krause’s Journey to Happiness

1929. Germany. Directed by Piel Jutzi. Screenplay by Willy Döll, Jan Fethke, in collaboration with Otto Nagel, based on the verbal reports of Heinrich Zille. With Alexandra Schmitt, Ilse Trautschold, Holmes Zimmermann, Gerhard Bienert. The film’s title is ironic and its setting—a working-class Berlin apartment in late 1929—is bleak. Even so, this melodrama, which was banned by the Nazis in 1933, has influenced many filmmakers in the intervening decades—including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who paid tribute with his own Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven in 1975. 104. Silent min.