Word: thalmann
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...gone berserk in a factory, killing his boss's son and then killing himself. The press exploits his family and distorts the picture of the man. His wife (Mother Kusters, played by Brigitte Mira), deserted by her children, seeks comfort where she can find it. First, with the Thalmanns, a couple of armchair communists who ask Mother K. to "unburden" herself to them. Herr Thalmann tells Mother K. that her husband "killed to help others." She tells him "you put it so nicely." The Thalmanns convince her to join the Party in order to right the wrongs committed against...
...ranks. Mother K. is the woman who can never be a revolutionary because she is too easily swayed, too easily disillusioned. She is anxious for rapid and broad-sweeping change but, when that fails, will satisfy herself with petit-bourgeois dreams of contentment. Fassbinder satirizes the bourgeois Communists (Mrs. Thalmann wears Cacherel blouses; she serves Mrs. K. from her sterling tea service while telling her "out aim is to get all a rightful share in what is produced."), the anarchists who lack the stamina to continue their sit-in through dinner hour, and the press which distorts and manipulates people...
...critics charge that his technique was made in Moscow; he first served the cause of the late Ernst Thalmann, Germany's famous Red boss, in 1927. After years of underground work for the Comintern, he announced his disillusionment with Communism in 1942, decided to try for a Socialist seat in West Germany's first Bundestag in 1949. The district Wehner fought, was Hamburg-Harburg, a tough workers' area where the Communists were strong; he beat the Reds hands down, became the tough, unyielding voice of the Socialists' left wing in Parliament...
...Ulbricht was a Red big shot, marked for bigger things. Now he was wearing a necktie and having Berlin's best tailors make his suits; he sat in the Reichstag itself as a Communist Deputy. He was grandly aware of his station. Once, when Ernst Thalmann, the new party leader boarded a train at a Berlin railway station and took his seat in a third-class railway coach, Ulbricht stiffly declined to join his colleague, choosing instead a seat in the plush first-class section. He was entitled to such preference as a member of the Reichstag...
...Weathervane. Few in Germany will forget Ulbricht's traitorous attacks on his own fellow Communists, many of them colleagues of long standing. Even today, contemporaries are sure that he tipped off the Nazis who arrested Thalmann and later executed him. In 1938 Ulbricht moved to Moscow to serve Stalin more closely. Of the many other German Communists who sought refuge in Russia, some 3,000 were killed or sent to labor camps by Moscow's harsh dictum. Ulbricht had not so much as raised a finger to protect them...