Love One Another

Love One Another is set in Russia before and during the revolution of 1905. The main character is a young Jewish girl, Hanne-Liebe, who has felt the prejudice among the Russians since childhood. As the result of a cruel intrigue she is expelled from her school, and she travels to St. Petersburg where her brother Jakov, a wealthy lawyer, lives. A convert to Christianity, Jakov has been disowned by their father. Hanne-Liebe meets back up with Sascha, a revolutionary-minded student from her hometown, and they fall in love. Meanwhile, a police provocateur, Rylowitsch, tricks Sascha into preparing an act of revolutionary terrorism. The police arrest him and all his comrades, and Hanne-Liebe is deported to her hometown. To deflect the simmering discontent among the populace, the government organises pogroms against Jews. Disguised as a monk, Rylowitsch spreads the poison of anti-Semitism. A joyous demonstration after the tsar proclaims a number of civil rights is warped by anti-Semitism into a nightmarish orgy of violence. Jakov and many others are killed, while Sascha saves Hanne-Liebe at the last minute.

Dreyer based his film on a Danish novel, Elsker hverandre (Love One Another) (1912) by Aage Madelung, a writer with a large readership in Denmark and the German-speaking world. The German edition of the novel was entitled Die Gezeichneten ("The Marked Ones"), which was also the film’s German title. Striving for the greatest possible authenticity, Dreyer and his set designer, Jens Lind, travelled to Lublin in Poland, a city with a sizable Jewish population. They based the film’s exterior sets, which were constructed in Berlin, on the architecture there.

All his life, Dreyer was a sworn enemy of anti-Semitism, though this strong and impressive work was the only time he directly treated the subject in a film. Few, if any, films from this period depict the destructive power of racial hatred as clearly as Love one Another. The violence of the final pogrom still retains its power to shock. The film was not a hit in its day and, considering its unembellished realism, it has undeservedly become a somewhat overlooked work in Dreyer’s oeuvre.

CASPER TYBJERG

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