The Folk Upstairs

People from the most diverse social groups live together in a Berlin apartment building. While the lowest floor is occupied by a jeweller and a lawyer, the tenants become poorer and more destitute as the floor rises. Above the jeweller and the lawyer live a widow and a civil servant, on the next floor there is a dance school and a marriage bureau, and under the roof live a balloon salesman and a piano teacher. The silent film Menschen Untereinander (premiere: 3 April 1926 in Berlin) depicts the social microcosm of a tenement building whose inhabitants represent a cross-section of poverty, corruption and compassion.