“A human being can be killed with an apartment as easily as with an axe,” wrote Heinrich Zille, the Berlin artist on whose reminiscences Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glueck is based. One of the earliest and most visually striking of the German Neo-Realist (Neue Sachlichkeit) films based on a Marxist thesis, Mutter Krausens...is set in the tenements of Berlin, about whose “Lumpen” inhabitants Zille wrote. Its imagery is based on the drawings of Zille, Kaethe Kollwitz and other artists who collaborated on this important work. Mother Krausen lives with her daughter, her unemployed son and a family of lodgers in her small apartment. When her daughter is seduced and her son arrested for theft, Mother Krausen opens the gas valve - embarking on her trip to happiness. Her daughter, however, chooses a different route: through her friendship with a militant Marxist, she becomes involved in “the struggle for a better future.” With this film and its successor, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1931), director Piel Jutzi, already a well-known photographer, made his mark as one of the most important German directors of the late Twenties and early Thirties. After making several less important films, his career ended under the Nazis, and he disappeared.