The writer Arnold Zweig (1887-1968) had been living in exile in Haifa for several years when, in 1937, he read in a German exile newspaper about a Hamburg butcher who carried out four executions for the Nazis, hoping to revitalize his flagging business with the 2,000 marks he received for the killings. When news of the atrocity leaked, and more and more patrons shunned him, financial ruin became imminent and he committed suicide. Zweig had "the vision that this was the core of the fable that could depict the fall of the Third Reich even as it rose," and from it he created his masterful novel The Axe of Wandsbek. Hamburg filmmakers Heinrich Breloer and Horst Ktein investigate both the emotional and the factual bases for Zweig's novel, using its text as a veritable map of the working-class suburbs-in particular, Altona, the harbor town where the people still refer to "that bloody Sunday" in 1932 when a demonstration by brownshirts led to death sentences for four Communists who eventually were executed by the local butcher. Alongside the documentary footage is a dramatic recreation of the novel, interpreted by Hamburg actors. Variety's Ronald Holloway called the resultant film "An astonishingly researched and mindboggling historical tract...a must for any devotee of German cinema and history...Don't miss it." The filmmakers combine two unique talents in this joint effort: Breloer frequently has used diaries to approach German history, while Ktein has conducted conversations with residents of Hamburg suburbs, at once recording contemporary experience and gathering clues to a collective history.