This film is archival cinema of high jewel-like quality. There is no dialogue, only a quote from Franz Kafka at the beginning: “There is plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope – but not for us.” The opening shots captivate with a dynamic dance of people and machines: We witness workers assembling locomotives. Soon we find ourselves mingling with the people waiting on the platform in their old-fashioned hats and coats, later admiring the idyllic landscapes behind the carriage windows and sensing that for some of our fellow passengers, this journey must have felt like an expedition into space. Then soldiers fill the images, streams of soldiers on their way to the First World War. Weapons are being transported, many weapons. They are manufactured in factories.
The ghost of war wanders through Europe. This feeling occupies the film and points beyond it. What is stored in the archive material – uniform caps and top hats, victims and perpetrators, luxury and misery, cattle and command carriages, Hitler and Chaplin – has a connection to the present, even to the future. Whether we can hope for it depends on how well we remember the lessons of history.