Trotz alledem!

Luckily, the film was shot in widescreen format because otherwise, all those thousands of extras wouldn't fit on the screen. This indicates that the film was clearly conceived as a historical epic. It is strange to complain about the characters' lack of psychology because I don't remember seeing an expensive historical film where the psychology of the characters was worth pondering (only Visconti managed it to some extent). Therefore, don’t expect anything like that here and you won't be surprised. The vectors of action are determined by both sides of the conflict, and it only depends on the individual ideological disposition of the viewer whether they find their presentation sympathetic or not. On the other hand, I appreciate that the film avoids the common 2+2 pattern (I just made that up), where we follow 1 positive protagonist and 1 villain in the positions of major historical figures (Liebknecht vs. Ebert) and analogically 1 and 1 character from the ranks of the people. There is no created character of an ordinary German here, into whom all the evil of the bourgeois world would merge, there is only the character of an old social democrat who realized too late that the SPD is no longer what it used to be. The thesis statement didn't come as a surprise to me, knowing that a revolution is a brief period when even the most cliché slogans are believed. Self-irony is also out of place when we know that the GDR, among other things, built its legitimacy on this event. The film is primarily a very well-crafted piece of filmmaking. (06/07/2014)