Waldemar Pottier

The young Evelyne lives with a man, her fiancee Frank, with whom she has a child. But her fiancee is a rundown drunk constantly hanging over the bottle. Evelyne wants to leave Frank.

Martin Berger's 'Menschen' serves as a harrowing socio-cinematic autopsy of the human spirit, adrift in the wreckage of a post-war landscape. Far from the escapist fantasies that often dominated early Weimar screens, this 1921 opus delves into the penumbral existence of the disenfranchised. The narrative follows a fatalistic trajectory, where the characters—portrayed with a raw, almost primitive intensity—grapple with the crushing weight of systemic indifference and personal moral decay.