“‘What can be more beautiful than death?’ says Eugen Klöpfer, summing up all the desires of a group of provincials for whom life is unbearable, and conventions are the only reason for survival. In the constant play of crossing the border between drama and comedy, the following piece of advice is worth remembering: ‘Do not beat him up, we would never find another one playing bass as good as he does’. A film interpreting the Russian soul away from Russia and with many of the best faces of German cinema, the expression of a different cinema made of twists and turns, alongside unexpected intuitions (the bath scene and the subsequent escape), Überflüssige Menschen is a small jewel shining over the superfluous landscape of European cinema”.

Francesco Pitassio

“Prometheus film company, after Potemkin’s success, expanded further. It distributed an increasing number of Russian films on the German market, thus acquiring the monopoly in this field […]. According to a German law protecting national production, each distributor had to produce one German films every three foreign prints he imported. Thus Prometheus was forced to make its own films. However, the company’s first production pursued the old models. At that time a Russian director, Alexander Rasumny, was in Berlin, waiting for his visa to the United States. He was offered a film for Prometheus; therefore he directed Überflüssige Menschen. The subject from Cechov, famous German actors (George, Krauss) and a well known Russian set-designer, who had worked for Moscow’s Art Theatre and in “The blue bird” cabaret (Andrej Andrejew) should have guaranteed the film’s success. However expectations had meanwhile changed and the film missed its mark. Its grotesque depiction, based on ambient psychology, of drunken Russia from the good old times did not suit the new stereotypes […]. Soon after that Rasumny received new offers, this time by Phoebus, which cooperated with MGM: making Pique Dame and Fürst oder Clown. The former subject transposed a Russian tale to Berlin in the period of rampant inflation; the latter was a typical operetta set in the Balkans. In his memoires Rasumny gave his version of his Berlin experience: ‘While waiting for my visa I went to the commercial section of our embassy in Germany […] At the end of 1928 I got permission to go back to my country, where I immediately started working for Sovkino’. He was not the only traveller uncapable of finding an answer to the question: ‘To leave or to stay’”.

Oksana Bulgakowa, Russische Film-Emigration in Deutschland: Schicksale und Filme, in Die ungewöhnlichen Abenteuer des Dr. Mabuse im Lande der Boschewiki, Berlin, Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, 1995