Siegfried Kracauer considered Die Abenteuer eines Zehnmarkscheines the first German film of its kind: what fellow theorist Béla Balázs, who penned the script, would call Querschnittfilm (cross-section film). The story follows an inanimate protagonist, a single ten-mark banknote (serial number K 13513), as it circulates through a range of social strata, revealing hidden connections between otherwise unrelated lives. Though Balázs aimed for a more experimental documentary-style structure, something anticipating the realist impulses of Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) or People on Sunday (1930), Berthold Viertel’s completed film bookends the banknote’s urban adventures with a more conventional romance. The carefully crafted sober visual aesthetic is very much in the vein of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) trend in late Weimar cinema. Though the film itself is lost, the surviving two-minute trailer preserves some of its visual strategies, hinting at a film that struck a plurality of tones, from the darkest all the way to the tonguein- cheek: the trailer’s final shot of a dog chewing up the banknote.

Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert