Fabian Schmidt digs through Berlin’s cinematic archives to uncover the sights and sites of the pre-war city…
Despite Berlin’s significant self-esteem throughout the 1920s and its bloated ego during the Third Reich, film footage of architecture and life in German movies shot before World War Two is much rarer than one might think. In fact, the closer one gets to the city’s destruction, the thinner coverage seems to become.
There are two main reasons for this, neither especially well known. The first is that most releases aimed at international markets during the Third Reich omitted symbols of National Socialism. The Nazis were hardly bestsellers abroad, so sights of typical everyday life – which would have inevitably included emblems of the Nazi Regime – were avoided, generally limiting the amount the capital could be depicted on film.
Some footage of National Socialist Berlin inevitably did slip through the net, which leads to the second reason for the pre-war city’s relative invisibility: other than in historical documentaries, the display of German National Socialism symbols remains a crime according to German criminal code § 86a StGB. Accordingly, especially in the 1950s and 1960s – when Third Reich flicks re-emerged in great numbers as re-runs on TV, as well as in West and East German cinemas – National Socialist symbols were censored.
Despite these attempts to create a ‘Berlin without swastikas’, some forgotten city sights (and sites) have survived in movies, including many that weren’t seen as icons of National Socialism. Undoubtedly the most original and complete picture of the city that once existed is Leo de Laforgue’s largely forgotten, feature length montage Symphonie Einer Weltstadt (not to be mistaken with the better known Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt [Ruttmann, 1927]).
Shot between 1938 and 1939, it was prepared for release in 1943 but then banned, so it wasn’t until 1950 that it was furnished with a new voiceover by Friedrich Luft and finally made available. Due to the editing of this post-war release, it’s almost entirely free of symbols of the Third Reich – a full chapter about government architecture around Wilhelmstraße, for instance, is known to have been cut – but footage of the old city centre around the cathedral reveals the immense destruction suffered by its historical architecture.
In fact, the actual face of the city, in terms of its pre-1933 arrangement of modern architecture, may only have survived in these reels, which expose a pre-War, modernist metropolis much more similar to New York, for example, than other European capitals of the time. The movie itself, meanwhile, is a tour de force, a series of staccato images of places we may have heard of, with minimal voiceover commentary.
The reason Symphonie Einer Weltstadt was seemingly forb…