A title like “Mother Krausen's Journey to Happiness” (Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück) has the deceptive cadence of a Grimm brothers' fairy tale, or perhaps a reassuring hearthside drama. It evokes images of redemption, of a path fraught with obstacles leading to well-deserved serenity. But we are in Berlin, in 1929. And Piel Jutzi's camera is not a tool for weaving fairy tales, but a sharp scalpel, a microscope focused on a sample of social fabric in the throes of gangrene. Happiness, in this universe, is not a destination; it is a cruel mirage, an ironic inscription on the tombstone of an entire social class.

The film plants itself with documentary ferocity in the working-class neighborhood of Wedding, an anthill of damp courtyards and overcrowded apartments, and it does so with a gaze that has already divorced itself from the expressionist hysteria of a Caligari to fully embrace the ruthless lucidity of Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity. If the canvases of Otto Dix and George Grosz were an almost clinical dissection of the moral and physical deformities of Weimar society, Jutzi's film is its cinematic equivalent. His camera does not distort or hallucinate; on the contrary, it records with a precision that itself becomes a form of accusation. Every crack in the wall, every damp patch, every face marked by fatigue and resignation is captured with an objectivity that precludes any sentimentality. This is not Eisenstein's heroic and stylized proletariat, but a worn-out humanity, trapped in a cycle of misery that seems to have the same inevitability as a law of physics.

At the center of this microcosm is Mama Krausen (an incredible Alexandra Schmitt), a widow who earns her living by delivering newspapers and renting out beds in her miserable apartment. Her home is not a refuge, but a crossroads of despair. Living with her are her daughter Erna, her son Paul, and a couple of subtenants: a prostitute (played by Ilse Trautschold) and her pimp. The apartment itself becomes a character, a claustrophobic organism whose porous boundaries cannot keep out the rot of the outside world. It is a moral topography that strikingly echoes that described by Alfred Döblin in his contemporary masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in that same fateful year of 1929. Like Döblin's Franz Biberkopf, Jutzi's characters are pawns moved by economic and social forces they neither understand nor control. Their environment is not a backdrop, but a destiny. It is Émile Zola's naturalism transposed to the urban chaos of the German metropolis, a deterministic vortex where free will is a luxury for those who can afford it.

The narrative is triggered when Mama Krausen's son, Paul, steals the money she has painstakingly collected to pay for newspapers, pushing her into a debt from which she can no longer escape. From this single act of weakness, the tragedy unfolds, following two divergent but equally emblematic trajectories of the historical crossroads Germany was facing. On the one hand, the path of predatory and nihilistic individualism: Paul, seduced by the petty criminal who lives in the house, sinks into a world of theft and violence, believing he can force his way out of poverty. It is an illusion of power that translates into self-destruction. On the other hand, there is the path of collective political action: his daughter Erna, in love with a communist worker, finds in class solidarity and party discipline a structured alternative to despair.

Jutzi, coming from documentary cinema and working under the aegis of the left-wing production company Prometheus Film, does not hide his sympathies. But his genius lies in translating ideology into a purely cinematic language, at times almost a precursor to a neorealism that would only see the light of day fifteen years later. The scenes of workers' demonstrations are shot with a sense of order and almost geometric power, a compact mass marching towards a possible future. In stark contrast, the sequences in the nightclub where Paul and his accomplices plan the heist are a chaos of smoke, alcohol, and disordered bodies, a visual image of moral dissolution. It is not a screaming pamphlet; it is a thesis demonstrated through images, an intellectual montage that juxtaposes two possible destinies, letting their representation speak for itself.

And then there is her, Mama Krausen. Excluded from both solutions. Too old and rooted in the old traditions of honor and respectability to understand the horizon of class struggle; too weak and morally upright to embrace the path of crime. Hers is an exquisitely twentieth-century tragedy: that of the individual crushed between the rubble of an old world and the violent birth of a new one, without the tools to navigate the change. Her “journey to happiness” is a descent into hell that culminates in one of the most heartbreaking and unforgettable sequences in the history of silent cinema. While outside the windows, workers' demonstrations march to the sound of a promise of renewal, Mama Krausen, evicted and disgraced, performs her last, desperate act of care and annihilation. Accompanied by the prostitute's young daughter, the only creature even more innocent and powerless than she is, she turns on the gas tap. Hers is not a theatrical suicide, but a methodical, almost domestic gesture. For her, happiness turns out to be oblivion, the end of pain. It is the final silence of those who no longer have a voice or a place in the world.

This work is a seismograph recording the last tremors of an era. Made on the eve of the Wall Street crash, which would deal the final blow to the already fragile Weimar Republic and pave the way for the rise of National Socialism, Mutter Krausens is a document of almost prophetic urgency. It is the swan song of German proletarian cinema, a genre that would soon be silenced by censorship and history. Watching it today is like undertaking a cultural archaeological dig, unearthing a masterpiece that shows us not only what the world was like, but also what it could have been. Its raw aesthetics, its anti-dramatic acting (many of the actors were non-professionals taken from the streets), and its refusal of any consolation make it a work of disconcerting modernity. It is a film that does not ask for compassion, but for understanding. A ruthless and, for this very reason, deeply human analysis of the breaking point where hope dies and the only way out becomes a door locked from the inside. The journey is over. Happiness was a lie written on the ticket.