A charming flower seller offers men “the flowers of her garden and her passion”. Giggi allows himself to be seduced, but then suddenly “someone steals his love”. Giggi lives with his mother and brother and is employed with the latter in a workshop. He falls in love again, this time with Rosa, an experienced women with a rather loose lifestyle. She also turns to another lover. Giggi, who had stolen money from his mother – which had been hard earned by his brother – along with gold jewellery, is overwhelmed by shame and despair and commits suicide. He leaves behind a letter for his loved one asking her to give back the enclosed jewellery to his mother. But Rosa withholds the letter and accuses Gennariello of fratricide, supposedly out of revenge for having been rejected by the family. The police take him off to jail, “the grave of so many lives”. To escape that grave, Gennariello volunteers to serve at the front. The scene in which the camping soldiers, accompanied by their comrades on guitars and mandolins, start to sing songs from their respective homelands is impressively worked out in the film. Gennariello is wounded. Back home Rosa feels a sense of remorse and pity for the old mother; she gives her the letter she had concealed and admits the deception to the police. In the end, Gennariello is rehabilitated. Rosa, the mother and Gennariello are united around Giggi’s grave.

Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann