First things first — Kuhle Wampe is one of the greatest socialist films ever made, up there in the pantheon with Battleship Potemkin, I Am Cuba, Land and Freedom, or Sorry to Bother You. An early sound film, made in 1932 by a collective including the Bulgarian director Slatan Dudow, the playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, and the working-class novelist Ernst Ottwalt, it is brief (a mere seventy minutes), dynamic, and constantly imaginative. The narrative thread is about a working-class family in the tenements of Berlin, who are thrown out of their home due to no longer being able to pay the rent — the men of the family are all out of work, as the Great Depression grips the city. The daughter, Anni, and her boyfriend, Fritz, break up when she becomes pregnant. The family goes off to stay in Kuhle Wampe, a tent camp on the city’s edge, where they get sentimentally drunk on the couple’s reluctant engagement. This drives the youngsters to explore an alternative to this miserable life, in a sports festival organised by the Communist Party. At the film’s end, the young Communists travel back on the S-Bahn and get in a row with their fellow passengers.

In terms of ‘plot’, that’s all you get in Kuhle Wampe. But its episodic structure and its use of music as commentary carries much more than its basic story, and it is the music and the sketches that stick in the mind. Take Hanns Eisler’s scything, atonal score, as fleets of young men on bicycles search for work (and fail to find it), and the great songs that Eisler and Brecht wrote for the film, which provide a sort of Greek chorus — the haunting ‘Spring’, for the lovers’ tryst, the charging, angular ‘Learn to Win’, for the sports festival, and the magnificent ‘Solidarity Song’, on which the film ends. Although the central story is engaging and well-acted by Hertha Thiele and Ernst Busch, equally moving are almost stand-alone sketches such as an extremely-matter-of-fact suicide scene in the first act, or the scene where a working-class patriarch at a bare dinner table in his tenement stiltedly reads out a lurid newspaper story about Mata Hari.

The film is an assault on the capitalism of the late Weimar Republic — the misery created by austerity and mass unemployment — and it is also an attack on a way of making films. Brecht was infuriated by G. W. Pabst’s lavish, stately film adaptation of his play The Threepenny Opera a couple of years before, and this is his alternative. Kuhle Wampe was made cheap and fast, and makes a virtue of this — a great idea can go by in almost an instant. It is sharp-witted and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and it has a strident, modern rhythm to it throughout. This combination of formal invention and socialist politics is part of what makes the film so compelling. Its other target, though, is the old world of the German working class. Older workers in the film — those who then still mostly voted Social Democrat — are depicted as sluggish, muddle-headed, sentimental, and religious, their minds stuffed with tabloid bullshit, and unable to rouse themselves to revolt. However, it is worth noting that the middle classes, embodied in the commuters who engage our heroes in a hilarious debate in the S-Bahn carriage, are presented as being even stupider.

The Communist Party’s membership at the time was overwhelmingly dominated by unemployed youth, who supported the party in numbers massive enough to make it the third largest in Germany and the largest in Berlin in the last free elections, held the year the film was released. The people who made it will have imagined themselves on the verge of power. They were not in the mood to make allies, nor to imagine a united working-class opposition to Nazism; in fact, the Nazis’ rise — far more dramatic than that of the Communists — is only very lightly implied, in the nationalist claptrap spouted by some of the S-Bahn passengers. The film mirrors Communist politics of the time in regarding the older working-class organisations as its main enemy. This makes for enduringly great cinema, but as politics, well, we know what happened next.

In this new edition, the film is bundled up with an engaging lecture, originally included on the VHS release, by Andrew Hoellering, the son of Kuhle Wampe’s producer, Georg Hoellering (who as an exile in London managed an important arthouse cinema, the Academy) and, for some reason, a ragbag of British thirties shorts. These include some shoestring films made by British Communist Kino Collectives, alongside much more familiar works like Edgar Anstey’s oft-screened Housing Problems. The accompanying booklet has more words about Britain than about the Weimar Republic, making this a rather bizarrely parochial package. These British shorts are worth seeing, but their connection with the feature is obscure, bar the fact that some of the people making the films were Communists and that they all depict unemployment and poor housing conditions.

There’s much more to Kuhle Wampe than poverty or documentary. This is an experimental film, fizzing and popping with ideas and discoveries. Above all, it’s a film about hope, about how youth could build a new socialism, breaking free from the relics of the past. That hope was crushed within months of its release. Forwards, not forgetting, as the song says.