"A human being can be killed with an apartment as easily as with an axe," wrote Heinrich Zille, the Berlin artist on whose reminiscences Mother Krausen's Journey to Happiness is based. One of the earliest and most visually striking of the German Neorealist (Neue Sachlichkeit) films-based on a Marxist thesis and with a concern for documentary detail evidently influenced by Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)-it is set in the tenements of Berlin, about whose Lumpen inhabitants Zille wrote. Much of the film's 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 north Berlin 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, choses a different route: through her friendship with a militant Marxist, she becomes involved in the struggle for a better future, and Mother Krausen is revealed, as Siegfried Kracauer puts it, "as the petty-bourgeois heroine of a pseudo-tragedy." With this film and its successor, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1931), cinematographer turned director Piel Jutzi made his mark as one of the most important German directors of the late twenties and early thirties. After making several lesser films, his career ended under the Nazis and he disappeared.