Living in a tenement block in Berlin’s working-class district of Wedding, Mother Krause desperately tries to scrape together the money needed to keep her family afloat. But her son Paul drinks away what little they have and is also drawn into criminal activities. Meanwhile, her daughter Erna meets Max, a politically active worker. Is there a way out of this misery? As a seminal work of proletarian silent cinema from the Weimar Republic, *Mutter Krause’s Journey to Happiness* was an ambitious attempt by the left-wing Prometheus Film, under Willi Münzenberg, to make a film with a revolutionary stance for a (partly) middle-class mass audience. The film is conceived as an authentic study of social milieu; it was shot largely on location, utilises documentary material and draws explicitly on the works of the Berlin ‘Milljöh’ writer Heinrich Zille.