We Are All Miners

Going into Comradeship (Kameradschaft in the original German), I didn't know exactly what to expect or how it would connect with World War I. After watching the movie, thankfully with English subtitles, I still wasn't entirely sure what it had to do with WWI. Thank you Wikipedia! After getting a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the events of the film, I finally understand it's significance to the First World War and to romanticism.

To give you a quick recap of the movie, Comradeship portrays the real-life event of a French mine, with the structural integrity of a Jenga tower, near the border between France and Germany catching fire and a German rescue team comes to save the surviving miners. This all happened not long after WWI, so France and Germany weren't exactly on the best terms with each other. As an example, there is one point where one of the rescue crew members goes to save a miner and the miner, seeing the German facemask, suddenly flashes back to fighting German soldiers in WWI and proceeds to attack the man. Granted, this is due to PTSD, but it's not the only instance of the tension between these two peoples. There is also a group of three German miners that the film focuses on who are shown as not really liking the people of France, so you get to see the discrimination from both sides.

The movie ends with both peoples realizing that they don't need to dislike each other anymore, because they're all miners! In all seriousness, the overarching message of the film is truly that different countries can, and should, live in harmony with each other, deconstructing the idea of nationalism to some extent because they were only able to fix the situation after looking beyond their national identity and pride, their romanticized, individualistic view of themselves, to see that, whether French or German, they're all human and other labels don't matter. This is definitely a message that is still pertinent to our time and should be something we all strive to live by.

Image Credit: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022017/ Eureka Entertainment