Hunger spreads all over Germany. Its borders nearly coincide with the borders of the Republic, covering multiple working-class neighborhoods in the north, south, east and west. We are in the middle of expansion, and our industry is booming: that is what you can read about heavy industry and banks in the newspapers. But Silesia did not experience the benefits of work, peace or expansion. Tens of thousands of the working class died of hunger. Censors would not allow a film to show a worker treating his boss like a vampire or a wife of a worker asking her husband to throw out a rude landlord demanding rent. But censors could not delete the whole film, although they did restrict adolescents from watching it. But it was an important work. It was the first German documentary inspired by a social purpose that applied the formal principles used by Russian directors without reaching the same ideological conclusions. No filming in studios, no masks or costumed characters. The workers of Waldenburg and their families are filmed as they are. There is one flaw: the life of these workers is tinged with sentimentalism and distorted by an overly theatrical vision of their actual condition. And yet how natural and extraordinarily simple did Russian and German workers appear before the camera!

Anonymous, “Camera”, Winter 1967.