Shortly after the end of the Second World War: a road movie that takes place on a waterway. The story focuses on the first few months of the establishment of the Soviet Occupation Zone, which later became the GDR. Worker Kalle Blücher must transport seven barrels of carbide from Wittenberge (Brandenburg) to Dresden in Saxony; he has no vehicle, and his journey turns into a surprisingly comical odyssey. Frank Beyer, who was able to make CARBIDE AND SORREL despite the film officials’ fear of the Russian authorities, described the mood: “Humour on the outer edge of a catastrophe, that was the tone I wanted for this film.” Many of the film’s details remained topical even at the time of its premiere in 1963.

Shortly after the end of the Second World War, during a time of hardship and improvisation: Kalle Blücher is sent out to Brandenburg by his colleagues in Dresden; he must transport seven barrels of carbide from Wittenberge to Saxony. The carbide is urgently needed for welding and rebuilding a destroyed cigarette factory. As a vegetarian, he is especially suited for taking care of his nutritional needs while on the road. The only problem: Kalle neither has a vehicle nor any official documents that would allow him to transport carbide from one administrative zone to another.

Kalle is handed over the dented barrels in Wittenberge. Each one of them weighs 50 kilos, and he rolls each one out in front of him and then proceeds to get the next one. At least Sisyphus only had one hill... But Kalle manages to find help. At first it comes in the form of Karla, who takes him and his freight along in her wagon, all the way to her home and into her bed. To him, a bachelor but no longer a spring chicken, this is more than just a short erotic adventure. In the end, he even returns to her, as she’s expecting his child. At the time, one could hardly have imagined more optimism and anticipation.

His next ride is paid for with cigarettes. Another reason he was sent on the mission is that he is also a non-smoker. Signs on the country roads are written in Cyrillic script and the Red Army is only indirectly present at first. This changes, however. Before that, Kalle faces his first danger when he oversees a warning sign and starts looking for mushrooms in a minefield; this scene (apparently based on an experience that Frank Beyer’s director friend Kurt Maetzig had) especially establishes the “humour on the edge of the abyss … on the borderline between the permissible and the non-permissible” as the film’s key tone. Kalle “pays” the next driver of a light lorry with the mushrooms he unwittingly gathered at the risk of his own life and has now cooked: people’s hunger also paved the way for many new opportunities. But then the Russians arrest the man with the carbide. Kalle made the mistake of sleeping in a haystack where Red Army soldiers had been hiding and hoarding “noble wares”: food. In exchange for his release and an official certificate of export issued by someone working at the other administrative district, Kalle “pays” them with two barrels of carbide. After another temporary arrest – Kalle tried to catch fish with exploding carbide – and a ride on a lorry together with an opportunistic singer whose job was to entertain the troops, and a homeless young girl, Kalle continues his journey on a boat going down the Elbe River, which used to be the border river between East and West. American soldiers are guarding one side of the river (or lurking on, depending on one’s perspective), and Russian soldiers the other. Kalle passes between them on his barge, constantly at the risk of his life: a scene underlined by a musical score that feels just as menacing, as it is absurdly comical in a way that DEFA films very rarely managed to be.

Kalle ends up back with a woman, a widow, who could use his help running her ramshackle sawmill just as she could use him in bed, but the man never loses sight of his objective, even if it means having to drive a hearse, hold a funeral eulogy and get arrested for selling goods on the black market. When he arrives in Dresden, he only has two barrels of carbide left, his colleagues are thankful, and Kalle hurries back to Karla. A long journey, which gets off on the wrong foot, begins once again.

Frank Beyer tells “a picaresque story with a lot of sophisticated slapstick humour, which constantly uses the absurdity of the passage of time as its jump start,” according to Hans C. Blumenberg in his book “Film in der DDR“ (Film in the GDR) (Reihe Film 13, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1977). The boldness of CARBIDE AND SORREL was certainly not only based on the film’s easygoing way of presenting the Red Army officers that scared the GDR’s film officials so much: There are many moments in the film, which premiered in December 1963, that must have seemed ambiguous to viewers in the GDR, who, at the time, were particularly sharp-eared. “It would nice to be a bird”, Kalle says when he sees sparrows picking about in horseshit. And birds were one the few species that were able to easily overcome the wall built in 1961 and the border areas filled with mines. The innocent young girl hitchhiker exclaims, quite candidly, that she’d like to go to America, and nobody argues with her; In 1945/46, that was still possible! “What goes up, must come down”, Kalle explains as he slowly rolls his heavy carbide barrels up a steeply ascending road. That was at a time when the economic problems in the GDR stood in clear contrast to official propaganda, which claimed the country was heading inexorably upwards. That’s how dialectical Frank Beyer’s humour could be!

Production Period

1963

Production Year

1963

color

b/w

Aspect Ratio

1:1,37

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film

Genre

Road Movie, Drama, Comedy

Topic

Work, World War II, GDR

Available Media

Blu-ray Disc, Digital Film

Original Version

German (de)

Blu-ray Disc

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Indonesisch (id)

Digital Film

Subtitles

German (full), English (en), French (fr), Spanish (Latin America), Portuguese (Brazil), Indonesisch (id)