Trompete, Glocke, letzte Briefe

In Peter Kahane’s documentary “red” Berlin comes alive as a proletarian family story reaching from the 1910s to the resistance against National Socialism. The siblings of the communist Ernst Knaack, who was executed in 1944, talk about their grandparents’ pub, which was frequented by leading members of the Communist Party of Germany like August Bebel and Hermann Duncker. The film doesn’t glorify its interviewees but seeks them out in their everyday environment and lets them speak about the few surviving souvenirs from that time – the trumpet of the Rotfrontkämpferbund (Alliance of Red Front-Fighters), the bell with which meetings were opened, and their brother Ernst’s last letters from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.