Alina Maria Dumitru

Strajk: Die Heldin von Danzig

1. Solidarity movement a social movement through Volker Schlndorffs eyes

Social movement, all over the world, represents a mean of exercising and assuring the civil rights
that people owe. Solidarity movement, among many other social movements, embraced a non-
violent action in which the power of word and the courage of some people united under the same
goals succeeded in fulfilling their down-to-earth and well deserved demands.
Every social movement implies different ways of manifesting solidarity between the participants
and Solidarity movement is a great example in which solidarity is the successful ingredient not
only by joining individual elements of action from different areas that are solidar to each other
but also by being also a source and a fuel for previous and further strikes that followed. In
Strajk: Die Heldin von Danzig we can see the events prior to Solidarity movement and also
events and situations that led to this social movement and for further big events in which the
word solidarity plays an important role because it is that feeling that unites workers in strikes.
Volker Schlndorff is one of the pioneers of the New German Cinema generation of filmmaker
influenced by The French New Wave. The word generation is one chosen by Julia Knight to
define this new approach of the German filmmakers. It is a generation because its members
share some common features and historical background that shaped their approach to filmmaking
(Knight 2004:4-6): they were born around the dates of the Second World War and the historical
context, the events that took place shaped their impact on the public; the experimentations in the
filmmaking were highly exploited because of the low funding. They wrote The Oberhausen
Manifesto in which it was emphasized the importance of the film as a mean of educating and not
entertaining (Fussell). Even if Strajk: Die Heldin von Danzig is a docudrama made late in
directors career, after the activity of the group came formally to an end, the principal feature of
this film is that of a film meant to educate and not to entertain. There is a strong emphasize on
the feeling of solidarity as one of the most important characteristics to build-up and bind the
actions of the workers towards their goals and eventually to the events to come in the entire
Eastern Europe that led to the fall of the Eastern Bloc.
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Even if the director doesnt make a lot of experiments regarding the formal construction of the
movie such as special effects, we see something much more important for a docudrama: the
alternating of the images shot in the time of the making of the movie with real imagistic
documents. This is the main feature that makes this film a valuable one from its category of
documentary movies. Not only that it truthfully renders the history of the events but it also
contributes to the impact of the receiving. The entire movie, not only the visual documents of the
strikes does not focus per total on the explicit violence of the images but it suggests it.
Even so, we have some moments of explicit violence. The strikes are the moments with a
maximum concentration of violence suggested by the armed forces. The violence is not
comparable to the violence seen in other films with documentary value. We can see explicitly
one man shot to death with blood on his face. Another moment with a high concentration of
violence is the one that renders the fire on the shipyard when people could be seen burning alive.
The fact that these events are seen through the eyes of the main character contributes to the
emotional impact of the events because of the point of view of the events is that of a person
which is emotionally involved in the events on the shipyard. The long commitment to the work
on the shipyard, being familiar and friend with the other workers makes it even more difficult to
bare the view of the burning people or of dead corpses (once friends maybe) covered by a white
fabric.
There is another type of violence which is more passive but it is still there. The danger of the
labor on the shipyard is suggested not only through the explicit burning of the workers because
of the gas inside the chamber that exploded but to some extent is a result of the same cause: the
lack of care for the people that work there not only by the unsatisfying payment but also because
of the bad work conditions that makes that environment physically dangerous for the workers,
thing emphasized by the scene in which the viewer could see a big threatening object falling. The
fact that the focus on the explicit violent images is not that considerable but it is more a
suggested violence makes the impact of the images more acute. On the other hand it might be
easier for the young audience to watch this docudrama. Also the imagination is stimulating in an
advantageous way thus fulfilling its educational goal. The young character of the movie makes it
easier for the young audience to enter in an emotional way in the script so the audience can find
different gates to enter emotionally in the action and empathize with the story.
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As it is written at the beginning of the essay, the director does not experiments with the image
but his mark can be seen in different elements like the way of suggesting things that will happen.
For example the image of the dead fish (lets call it the premonitory fish) is associated with the
dead of Kazimir. The image of the dead fish on the beach and the moment in which Kazimir is
dying are succeeding rapidly. The premonitions as a leit motif are used by the director to suggest
what will happen in the future and the role played by Anna Walentynowicz in the movement.
It is important that the time coordinates to be mentioned. The plot narrates the course of events in
the city of Gdansk starting with the summer of 61 until 80 so the events illustrated are previous
to the Solidarity movement (also including the movement) but are in connection. It is obviously
that the events take place under the communist regime. The focus is on the life and influence of
Anna Walentynowicz and the workers community. The main character had an important role and
impact in obtaining the demands of the workers. The director used an efficient way to show the
need for those demands and for change while showing us what was happening there and the
conditions of work. The inadequate conditions of labor are shown from the beginning. The first
demand to be shown at the beginning is that for a longer lunch break. Because of the refusal the
next day the main character is shown in a non-violent way of protesting serving lunch in the
break outside. She is threatened by a superior who says that he will report her. While the plot
evolves the number of demands is increasing to the point where, by the end of the movie, the 21
demands of the workers are stated.

2. The portrait of the worker. The portrait of the main character

The portrait of the worker is a typical one for a worker in a period of high mechanization.
Kazimir is one atypical character in this environment presented in the film. He states that with
the mechanization of labor there is free time which can be used doing other types of job, like
playing an instrument. In the shipyard the situation is different. The workers are drinking and
smoking on the shipyard. They are even blamed for the fire. And they are always under threat
because of the lack of care. Its a sort of paradoxical situation in which even if the system places
the worker in the center the system is in the same time against it.
Another important aspect to see would be the worker and religion. For example we can find out
about the main character that is a religious woman when she did the sign of the cross on the
crane. The director did make sure to deliver us the image of the worker who strives for demands
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and who fights against a system that lacks care of him as being associated with the fight between
good and evil. So the workers are associated with the goodness and furthermore with the
changing of the face of Poland. The strike in 70 finished with the short imprisonment (I would
say politic imprisonment) of a few strikers which were put under interrogations in order to
discover those who were responsible with the protest.
Seeing the relation between the party and the workers is also relevant. The main characters
receives as a reward for working very consciously the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin and a
television set. The statement which is the most relevant regarding this problem is they pretend
to pay, we pretend to work.
The main character around which the story evolves is Anna Walentynowicz and she is a woman,
a mother and a worker. She is presented as a product of the Marxism view towards the role of the
women inside the society. Sharon Smiths words from her article Marxism, feminism and
women's liberation that sums up the ideological background in which the main character evolves
depicts the image of the woman from the Marxist perspective giving those theoretical arguments
brought by Lenin and Engels (Smith 2013).

The rise of the working-class family also began to sharply

differentiate the character of the oppression suffered by women of
different classes: The role of the upper-class woman is to produce
offspring to inherit the family wealth, while the working-class
woman functions to maintain today's and tomorrow's generation of
workers in her own family--that is, to reproduce labor power for the
system. Engels argued that the role of the "proletarian wife" meant
"the wife became the head servant...[If] she carries out her duties in
the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public
production and unable to earn; and if she wants to take part in
public production and earn independently, she cannot carry out her
family duties."

Having said this, the director succeeded in highlighting the ideological discourse of the
communist while keeping the objectivity of a film with documentary value. So the main
character is not only a mother who takes care of the child but she is also a mother who tries to
reproduce the labor power for the system. A key scene is that one in which she gives the workers
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uniform to her son in order to bring him to the factory. She also tells him that she kept a place for
him but he declines in order to go to study and pursue his passion. It was the directors way of
showing us that times are changing and new generation that will change the face of Poland will
come soon. Furthermore, she is not only a worker but a worker that keeps up the high level of
difficulty of her work with no differentiation between women and men. More, she works even
more than everyone so this is the reason why she was awarded as a socialist hero, fulfilling 270%
of her duties for the tenth time. She also works after the finishing hours. So, relating to the
citation, she didnt chose between reproducing the labor force in home and contributing to the
labor force directly but she tried to do both. She is not only a socialist hero but, transcending the
ideological discourse she is also a hero of the solidarity movement. She is always depicted as a
brave woman, who fights for the rights of the workers and who fights for her own goals. Even if
she doesnt know how to read she learns how to do it in order to be able to work on the crane and
earn more. Having said this, the director also depicted the way women were perceived. Before
climbing up on the crane her colleagues are laughing about her and they are telling her that there
is no toilet up there. In this situation we can see again the bad working conditions and also
inequality between men and women. She answers back telling that there is no toilet for women
not even downstairs but only 30 minutes away. The fact that she is illiterate didnt stop her to tell
what she wanted even if in some situation all she was able to do was to use the mimics and the
imitation of some situations with fewer words or without. But we can see her evolving in this
direction. If she said that she is not much of a reader at the beginning, we see her obtaining the
job for which someone should be able to read. She is also a caring mother; she is having fun with
her child while they are searching together for TV channels. This practice of searching for
western TV or Radio programmes was common in the communist regime in the entire Eastern
Europe.
But she is not only portrayed as a courageous woman. She is also portrayed as a courageous
civilian and worker. She makes use of civil disobedience and she is also a non-violent protester
and even if she was not a well-read woman she had her powerful arguments with her all of the
time. The sequence in which she is serving hot soup to the workers speaks again by itself. By
becoming the voice of the others and gaining their sympathy she became one of the leaders of
the Solidarity movement. Her wittiness in using arguments stands out when she is talking with
the father of her child about the fact that it was Gods will that made the chamber to burst into
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flames. Here we have the situation in which she is facing him. But the opposition is not only
between them two, it is an opposition between the average people, the workers and the system in
which the characters are symbols. In this sequence we have actually the lack of care vs. the
revolting people. Her answer is in the form of a rhetorical question stressing the fact that is not
the Gods will that they were meant to work when there was fuel in the chamber. She is also
portrayed like a down-to-earth person.
She is a mirror of the events from the past century. Even if we couldnt see explicit images of the
consequences of the war, they are recalled by the director through the main character. We can
find out about how devastating the war was through her monologue. She states that after the war
what was left were only her clothes that she wore, she couldnt write or read, the city was in
ruins, the streets and the market had German names.
Also regarding the problem of emancipation of women there is another sequence when Anna is
in the son's girlfriend's parents' room. She is asked if her work from the entire life wasnt atypical
for a women and she states that she doesnt know what is typical or atypical for a woman to
work. This is something that stresses the fact that the communist regime promotes a world in
which the struggle for achieving its utopia is the same for women and men and they should work
together for this.
This movie succeeds in sketching the historical and ideological background of the workers
struggle to obtain what they deserve. One of the icons of this struggle is the main character in the
movie and we can see her role in this struggle well defined by the directors marks and features
of creating the movie. The director also succeeded in making it a document and education
material.

Bibliography
Fussell, Michael, http://michaelfussell.tripod.com/new.html
Knight, Julia, New German Cinema: Images of a generation, Wallflower Press, 2004, London
Smith, Sharon, Marxism, feminism and women's liberation, 2013,
https://socialistworker.org/2013/01/31/marxism-feminism-and-womens-liberation