‘Who will change the world?’: Willi Münzenberg, Kuhle Wampe and the call for a united front

Tyrrell, Freya (2024) ‘Who will change the world?’: Willi Münzenberg, Kuhle Wampe and the call for a united front. Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History , ISSN 1758-6437. (In Press)

Abstract

Kuhle Wampe, Or Who Owns the World (1932) was among the last motion pictures (partly) produced by Prometheus, the film company co-founded by the communist publisher Willi Münzenberg. Whilst the film is often cited for its use of Brechtian montage techniques, its relation to Münzenberg’s media organisation remains less well discussed. This paper explores how Münzenberg utilised the potential of film, alongside his other activities, to open creative, anti-sectarian approaches to the organisation of the working class in response to the call for a united front against the advance of the fascist threat. Here, the focus falls on the tactful ways Münzenberg highlighted the need to move beyond the isolating ‘camp mentality’ that Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge analyse in relation to the German Communist Party (KPD). The aim is to situate the production of Kuhle Wampe within a counterpublic sphere formed from a semi-autonomous media network that operated within, but presented a challenge to, the narrow and abstract public sphere constructed by the Stalinised KPD. The film is interpreted as one of the final attempts to articulate a united-front policy before the victory of German fascism in 1933 and, therefore, as an urgent contribution to the question of strategy just as the strategic debates of the interwar years appeared to be coming to an end.

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