University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:______

I, ______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in:

It is entitled:

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: ______

Competing Cityscapes: Architecture in the Cinematic Images of Postwar Berlin

A Thesis submitted to the

Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF SCIENCE

In the School of Architecture and Interior Design of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning

2007

Laura Terézia Vas

BA in German and History, University of Szeged, 1999 MA in German, University of Cincinnati, 2001 ABD in German Studies, University of Cincinnati, 2004

Committee Chair: Udo Greinacher Committee Members: Todd Herzog Aarati Kanekar

ABSTRACT

The architecture depicted in films about Berlin has played a fundamental role in fashioning the divided and unified capital’s image and cultural self-understanding, for both sides were acutely conscious of the propagandistic function of urban and architectural planning. By comparing three East-Berlin films with three thematically and chronologically corresponding West-Berlin films, this thesis investigates how cinema corresponded to the changing concepts in modernist architecture on the two sides of the wall. Whereas a competition between two world powers is carried out on a semiotic field condensing cultural, social, technological, and economic achievements - the city - this thesis shows that the diverging styles of government were struggling with similar possibilities and limitations in shaping their sections of Berlin. As opposed to Cold War films, the spatial analyses of post-Wende films show striking divergences.

Keywords: Berlin, East Berlin, West Berlin, Cold War, German cinema, Berlin Wall, Berlin’s architecture, urban planning, prefabricated panel buildings.

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DEDICATION

FOR MY HUSBAND, FERENC TRASER, WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am greatly indebted to my advisor Udo Greinacher who has accompanied this thesis from the beginning with amazing and inspiring insights, comments and film recommendations. I would also like to express my gratitude to my other committee members, Todd Herzog and Aarati

Kanekar, who were always motivated readers and critics. I am indebted to the care and stylistic grace that my committee at the University of Cincinnati has dedicated to the supervising of this

project over the past two years. I am grateful for the invaluable feedback on the various drafts,

abstracts and presentations at our research colloquia from my professors, Jim Bradford, John E.

Hancock, Nnamdi Elleh, Elizabeth Riorden, David Saile, and from my peer graduate students in

Architecture and in German Studies, particularly from Julia K. Baker, Banu Bedel, Ana Botez,

Todd Heidt, and Mihai Ivan.

For many gestures of kindness, words of encouragement offered and administrative help during

the completion of this project, I would like to thank Nnamdi Elleh, Sara Friedrichsmeyer,

Katharina Gerstenberger, Ellen Guetteraz, John E. Hancock, David Saile and Richard E. Schade.

José Kosan and Ferenc Traser provided invaluable technical help and Christopher Colizza has

been a wonderful proofreader. I am also very grateful to my students’ critical and inspiring

questions and discussions in the Berlin in Film course in the spring quarter of 2007 at the

University of Cincinnati. A number of other friends, colleagues, and family members, too many to name, also deserve thanks for their role in making this thesis possible.

My father, József Vas, played a very special role in this project as many of the questions I raised while analyzing the films are coming from conversations with him during my childhood. This thesis became a personal endeavor while trying to come to terms with his life during the Cold

War and his pessimism about architecture in the Eastern Block. The final word of thanks goes to my husband, Ferenc Traser, to whom I dedicate this work. Without his support this text never would have been written.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... II DEDICATION ...... IV FOR MY HUSBAND, FERENC TRASER, WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE ...... IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... V TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... VII CHAPTER OBJECTIVES ...... 1 “ARCHITECTURE FINDS IN FILM ITS TRUE FORM OF EXERCISE”: FILM AND ARCHITECTURE ...... 3 BERLIN’S ARCHITECTURE AFTER WWII...... 9 BERLIN IN FILM ...... 14 CHAPTER TWO – PREFABRICATED PANELS AND SATELLITE CITIES: ARCHITECTURE IN EAST GERMAN BERLIN-FILMS ...... 18 CHAPTER OBJECTIVES ...... 18 THE FIRST SOCIALIST STREET OF BERLIN: THE STORY OF A YOUNG COUPLE (1952) ...... 19 “IDEALS AND REALITY NEVER COINCIDE”: THE LEGEND OF PAUL AND PAULA (1973).... 30 “CONSTRUCTION IS BUILT UPON COMPROMISE”: THE ARCHITECTS (1989)...... 43 CHAPTER CONCLUSION...... 55 CHAPTER THREE – RUINS, REBELS UND RESTRICTIONS: CINEMATIC IMAGES OF WEST BERLIN ...... 57 CHAPTER OBJECTIVES ...... 57 RUBBLES AND RECONSTRUCTION: A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948)...... 58 BERLIN FROM A WORM’S-EYE-VIEW: CHRISTIANE F. (1981)...... 70 ARCHITECTS AND REBELS: BERLIN, CHAMISSOPLATZ (1984)...... 81 CHAPTER CONCLUSION ...... 92 CHAPTER FOUR – EAST, WEST: THE BERLIN REPUBLIC IN FILM ...... 94 CHAPTER OBJECTIVES ...... 94 THE BORDER BECOMES VISIBLE: THE PROMISE (1994) ...... 95 LOST AND FOUND: BERLIN IS IN GERMANY (2001) ...... 104 ‘OSTALGIE’: FICTION AND REALITY IN GOODBYE, LENIN! (2003) ...... 115 CHAPTER CONCLUSION...... 126 THESIS CONCLUSION...... 127 APPENDIX – TEACHING AND LEARNING – SYLLABUS ABOUT THE THESIS ...... 132 REFERENCES...... 136

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CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION – FILM, ARCHITECTURE AND BERLIN

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

How can one effectively represent the complexities of a particular city? Cities are incredibly

dense and constantly changing systems of social, political and architectural relationships.

Furthermore, the politically charged city of Berlin is one of the most complex urban centers of

Europe. One of the best ways to talk about the city is through a narrative that indirectly addresses aspects of the metropolis. Berlin-films with a narrative structure do not only invite the audience to follow the story of its protagonists, but they also indirectly address the city through a deceptively appealing story. By paying attention to the featured locations in these films, individuals learn that the city often becomes a protagonist in Berlin-films and the careful selection of specific locations adds to the plot in a powerful way. This thesis will explore how the depiction of the city strengthens, alters or in some cases contradicts the narrative story in cinematic representations that were all filmed in the postwar German capital.

The introductory chapter aims to provide the theoretical background about the relationship between film and architecture for the film analyses in this thesis that span a period from the end of WWII up to the beginning of the 21st century. The interconnectedness between

cinematography and architecture is particularly evident in early films of the European city (e.g.

Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City, 1927 or Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the

Movie Camera, 1929) and this tradition continues in postwar German films. Even though this

thesis aims to explore postwar representations of Berlin, the large body of theoretical texts produced in the interwar period and the legacy of films about the city produced along with these

texts are important starting points and inspirations of this research. Aided by Walter Benjamin,

Georg Simmel and Sergej Eisenstein, this segment of the thesis will demonstrate that the

perception of film is strongly connected to the perception of architecture and the modern urban environment. While exploring the main points of key theoretical texts from the interwar period and searching for the roots of the interconnectedness between the city and film and architecture and film, this thesis will also highlight the criteria for particular film selections.

After the theoretical discussion I will offer a brief outline of the most important changes in

Berlin’s postwar architecture, which is strongly connected to politics, power, and ideological thinking. The historical changes and the architectural context presented here are the backgrounds for the films selected, thus it does not aim to be a comprehensive review of the urban changes in Berlin’s postwar cityscape. The last segment of the chapter will connect the first two parts and explore Berlin as the birthplace of German cinema. My intention is to show how German history, architecture, and film converge in a powerful way in the city of Berlin.

While exploring the relationship between film and architecture in theory and in praxis in the case of Berlin, this chapter’s main goal is to prepare the ground for the detailed analyses and interpretations of nine films from the divided and reunited German capital.

“ARCHITECTURE FINDS IN FILM ITS TRUE FORM OF EXERCISE”: FILM AND ARCHITECTURE

Ever since the first film camera reproduced the cityscape there has been a continuing relationship between the cinema and the city. As Serge Danley notes “the cinema belongs to the city, […] it did not precede it, nor will it survive it. More than a form of solidarity – a common fate” (quoted in Kruth, 70). The emergence of the metropolis is strongly connected to earliest products of cinematography as Dziga Vertov’s classical film The Man with the Movie Camera on the urban realities of Moscow in 1929 or Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, The Symphony of a Big City (1927) on

Berlin belong to the canon of most European film historiographies. One of the major reasons why the first filmmakers were so fascinated by metropolitan motifs and motion was the fact that cinematography could depict urban reality scientifically as visual evidence. Early examples of film were perceived as true-to-life documents and the everyday life of the growing European metropolises were often the main and only topics of city films in the interwar period. This idea has a strong legacy in postwar Berlin-films and each selected film contains scenes that can be considered as documentary footage and true-to-life document of a particular time period (e.g. the bombed out shells in A Foreign Affair, the construction of the the Stalin Allee in The Story of the

Young Couple, the emergence of satellite cities in The Legend of Paul and Paula and the construction sites in the governmental center after unification in Berlin is in Germany).

The architectural historian Helmut Weihsmann writes that the first city films “emphasized

primarily the (re)presentation and perception of space rather than special effects, fake or pseudo-

realistic, surrealistic and magical elements” (8). Using Weihmann’s approach it is my goal to

approach the chosen films, fictions with explicitly or implicitly embedded documentary footages,

as representations of the city but also as historic records. The selected films will be looked at as

products of historically and functionally determined products of economics, visual and artistic

strategies, and ideologies operating during its coming into being. The medium of film, more

than literature or fine arts, best reveals the relationship between reality and its representation as a

‘picture.’ Architecture and film emerge as complimentary in this process. Film supplies the

action that puts architecture into motion, but equally architecture spurs films, most as subject or

object of an action but also as opportunity and potential. The film actively inhabits architecture,

uses it and with the story told on the screen alters it. In case of architecture film appears to be the

most effective medium for this interplay.

There is a mutual provocation of film and architecture because the architectural form relates to

the form of film as one text to another, in terms of a structure composed of fragments and

organized in time and through space. In a number of theoretical texts by Georg Simmel and

Walter Benjamin, the film becomes analogous to the modern perception of a city, continuous

sequences of spaces perceived through time. Movies attempt to build up a latent whole through

the accumulation of fragments, but fragments which unfold in sequences over time, participating in narrative and other discourses. Pioneering filmmakers walked through the busy streets of city centers as flaneurs, as Benjamin suggests in Das Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project), and incidentally and selectively reproduced various views of different subjects and urban motifs.

The cinema, stemming from theatrical and literary roots, continued the literary tradition of ‘story

telling’ by spatial walks through the built environment and public spaces of cities. Spatial walks through Berlin became topics of literature and cinema in the interwar period in Germany.

Berlin became a protagonist of film as it helped launch international modernism in visual culture in the 1920s. Most enduring is Walter Ruttman’s aforementioned Berlin, Symphony of a Great

City (1927), where the daily rhythm and energy of the city supply structure and story. Along with its avant-garde influence, Berlin figured prominently in narrative films, which also reflected the unadorned visuals of the documentary. Progressive politics, interest in the concerns of young people, and a love of the contradictory beauty of the city’s streets are apparent in such classics as

Kuhle Wampe (1931) and Emil and the Detectives (1931), and mark the aesthetics of the “Berlin

Film” to this day.1 It is no wonder that with this theoretical and practical background both

usages of architecture can be seen as having long legacy in postwar films. Because of the large

body of films that carry on one of the above mentioned traditions, this thesis is limited to the

selection to narrative feature films, each of them centering on a love relationship or marriage in a

specific time in Berlin. The selected films cover a large spatial area of Berlin from Marzahn to

Wannsee and temporally range from 1948 to 2003.

The first two chapters examine six films that can be compared to each other on multiple levels as

they can be described as respective representations of East and West from the late 1940s and

early 1950s, 1970s and 1980s. Besides the temporal criteria, it was important to find

representations that focus thematically and spatially on comparable East and West Berlins. The

representations of ruins, political and architectural new beginnings are the foci of the first two

1 A whole genre for “street films” was created in Germany. More about this genre see in Helmut Waihsmann’s article.

5 films (The Story of A Young Couple and A Foreign Affair). With the second pair of movies Paul and Paula’s Marzahn will be compared to Christiane F.’s Gropius-Stadt, and with the third pair of films the project of the East Berlin architects from the late 1980s to the dreams and limitations of a West German architect. The final chapter contains three representations of Berlin, in which besides the dichotomy of former East and West a number of subplots layer the main division.

While reducing the extremely rich and versatile Berlin film corpus to nine pieces it must be made clear that this selection does not claim to offer a comprehensive trajectory about the role of architecture in Berlin films, rather a blend of qualitative analyses of the featured locations and interpretations of nine stories that are set in carefully chosen places of Berlin from a specific time period. Whereas nine moments in the postwar history of the German capital will be explored, this thesis aims to look for connections and contradictions in the representations of East, West and unified Berlin’s architecture and in the film narratives.

In each of the nine selected film selected story telling becomes more dominating than it is in the early city and street films, however, architecture and the depicted background are used to complement the story in each case and sometimes add to the plot in a subtle way. A relatively balanced relationship between “story telling” and “architectural scenes” is an important component in the film selection process and helped purely documentary films as well as experimental depictions of Berlin be eliminated from consideration. In each film the main story is looked at as an invitation to discover larger questions about Berlin. For instance, in The

Promise by von Trotta the representation of the Berlin Wall and in Goodbye, Lenin! by Becker focus on the urban debates around the GDR’s monuments. Spatial walks integrated into the nine love and family stories through divided and united Berlin connect the nine films and offer nine particular but often similar perspectives of the city. The narratives are employed to control the

6 complexity of the city and illustrate aspects of the urban development of Berlin that might otherwise be left unaddressed. As a result of the mutual interplay between city and cinema, the city becomes a protagonist on the screen, where the urban realities are modified by the narratives.

The cinema is an exemplary product of urban modernity but it is also a producer of urban culture and civilization. It is significant that people such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and earlier, Georg Simmel or Charles Baudelaire, insisted that the “shock of the new” correlates to the history of montage in the different arts, especially among the precursors of the new film language, as exemplified in Sergei Eisenstein and László Moholy-Nagy’s drafts for the screenplay Dynamik der Großstadt (Dynamic of the Big City, 1923). The ‘montage of attractions,’ as Eisenstein said, is aimed solely at the nerves of the audience, to the extent of exploding its visual message.2 This pure nervous stimulation corresponds surprisingly to what

Simmel had recognized in early twentieth-century culture as the basis of the behavior of the metropolitan man.3 Films from the postwar period are also strongly connected to urban modernity and function as producers of urban culture.

2 Another important study about the relationship between film and architecture takes place in Walter Benjamin’s Das Kunstwerk Im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1937). According to Benjamin architecture provides the model of (ancient) art whose reception occurs collectively and in a state of distraction. It is a form of reception that “finds in film its true form of exercise.” The “distracting element” in film is like architecture “primarily tactile” and hits the spectator like a “bullet.” Unlike painting, “which invites the spectator to contemplation,” the viewer before the movie frame can no longer do that: “No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested.” This is the form of perception in big cities, in department stores and in trains: “The film is the art form that is keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man’s need to expose himself to the shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threatening him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus…” (250). 3 For Simmel, the metropolitan individual is subjected to an acute Nervenleben, caused by the constant bombardment of contradictory images, floating in the new flow of information created by the capitalist society. Cf. Simmel’s Metropolis and Mental Life: „Die psychologische Grundlage, auf der der Typus

Whereas city films from the interwar period reflect on urban perception in the emerging

metropolises, films from the postwar period in Berlin shed light on the perception of the

changing environment during the Cold War and after unification. In each of the selected films

contemporary urban planning issues (such as the development of satellite cities in East and West,

restoration versus demolition of nineteenth-century buildings in Kreuzberg, politics of street

names) receive a vital role and make the viewers think about the impacts of architecture and

urban planning on their lives. The films mediate aesthetic perception of specific locations as the architecture of the Stalin Allee is promoted in Maetzig’s film but later becomes criticized in

Kahane’s account. It is important to note, however, that while some of the films derive their meanings overtly from architecture (The Architects and Berlin, Chamissoplatz), in others architecture has mainly a supporting role (The Legend of Paul and Paula and Christiane F.).

Openly or covertly, all of the selected films reflect on the perception of architecture and the city of Berlin and the upcoming film analyses and interpretations aim to explore the perception of the acute built environment in different historical moments.

The initial criterion in the film selection is a search, when possible, for protagonists who are also

“creators” of the city, thus architects, journalists, artists and photographers (as in Kahane’s The

Architects, Thome’s Berlin Chamissoplatz). Some of the films selected are films set in Berlin that backdrop a characteristic landmark of the German capital or speak for a contemporary city planning issue, such as the construction of the Stalin Allee in Maetzig’s The Story of a Young

Couple. A final decisive factor was that all the selected examples were produced as feature films

großstädtischer Individualitäten sich erhebt, ist die Steigerung des Nervenlebens, die aus dem raschen und ununterbrochenen Wechsel äußerer und innerer Eindrücke hervorgeht“ (70).

for initial distribution in theaters, thus seen by a relatively large audience rather then a small

circle.

BERLIN’S ARCHITECTURE AFTER WWII

Berlin, once one of the power and cultural centers of Europe in the interwar period, was reduced

to a pile of rubble after the Second World War. All the major bridges were destroyed, the canal

system was clogged with wreckage and bodies, the subway tunnels were flooded, water sources

were polluted, and rats ran uncontrolled through the streets. As the historian David Clay Large

describes “Russian soldiers careened drunkenly down streets filled with shot-up tanks and

burned autos; dazed refugees shuffled under their enormous burdens; women carrying water buckets lined up patiently at public taps; and escaped horses run amok” (371). One of the first new buildings was a memorial erected by the Russians just west of the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate their victory. “With this memorial,” writes the architectural historian Brian Ladd, “the

Soviets staked their claim to the historical landscape: within sight of the Reichstag, astride the former site of the Hohenzollerns’ statue-laden Victory Boulevard, and at the point where Speer’s north-south and east-west axes were to meet” (45). The very first architectural monument after

WWII reveals that city design projects are symbols of national identity and historical consciousness and that architecture plays a pivotal role in Germany’s turbulent twentieth-century history.

Being on the map where the two systems collided, a fierce rivalry between the two German

states extended to the realm of urban reconstruction and Berlin became the focus of ambitious rebuilding programs – East and West simultaneously. The Federal Republic aimed to turn Berlin into a living example of Western superiority, whereas the East German government was equally

determined to transform East Berlin, which it always referred to as “Berlin – Capital of the

GDR,” into a showcase of Communist progress and power. While well-knows trademarks of

East and West appeared in the vicinity of the Wall, such as the Merdeces Benz building of West

Berlin and the Television Tower of East Berlin, most of the Berlin films take their audience to the periphery of the city and focus on residential architecture. On the periphery, questions and concerns about the built environment are more converging than diverging, as this thesis will demonstrate in the second and third chapters.

In East Berlin the Soviets pushed a grand historicism that was supposed to reflect the heroic spirit of triumphant masses. As a Russian planning document explained: “In its structure and architectural form, the city is the expression of political life and the national consciousness of the people” (quoted in Large 420). The East German government attempted to correspond with this ideal in the construction of the Stalin Allee, an eighty-meter-wide boulevard of six- to seven- story buildings that runs from three kilometers through the working-class district of

Friedrichshain. The Stalinalle was designed to serve as a template for other grand streets in East

Berlin. As opposed to the later showcase buildings the Stalin Allee was far away from the old governmental quarter in Berlin-Mitte, which was in a part of the Berlin that most devastated by the war.

In the first years the Communist government undertook only little building activity in the center

of East Berlin, however they demolished the quarter’s signature building, the Prussian Royal

Palace. Ulbricht dreamed of building a giant skyscraper on the site but the area was converted

into a stage for mass rallies. Later on, the prominent historical landmarks were replaced with

showpieces of the new, forward-looking era. After the Royal Palace, GDR wreckers in 1962

blew up Schinkel’s Bauakademie, another restorable ruin on the old palace square.4 They replaced this structure, the one of the finest pieces of Schinkel’s oeuvre, with the GDR Foreign

Ministry, an eleven-story white slab with abstract aluminum sculptures decorating its façade.

The next victim was another historic square, the Alexanderplatz where GDR planners erected a monument to socialist functionalism. Here is the GDR’s tallest structure, the 365 meter

Television Tower, locally know as “the giant asparagus” with a restaurant on its top offering grand views in all directions. East Berlins films do not reference these inner city explosions, blown-up residential buildings serve as leitmotifs in the 1970s (e.g. Solo Sunny and The Legend of Paul and Paula).

In West Berlin, as in the East, reconstruction symbolized, and even facilitated, political transformation. The West wanted an architectural look that conveyed the Federal Republic’s commitment to internationalism, egalitarianism, individualism and freedom. The image thought to be the most expressive of these values was the bland International Style that was sweeping across Western Europe and America in the postwar era. The construction materials used in the new buildings also had to be politically correct: in place of stone or brick, one had to use glass

4 Whereas Ulbricht’s government had blown away some of the most prominent architectural symbols of Berlin’s Prussian past, Honecker hoped to harness the Prussian residual power by transforming it into a worthy ancestor of the GDR state. For a detailed analysis on this very “careful” sanitation see Ladd’s chapter on “Old Berlin.”

and steel. Thus much of West Berlin was covered over in glass boxes touted as “democratic.”

City officials also thought to give West Berlin a city center with trademark buildings, monuments and distinctive urban flair.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial part of West Berlin’s cultural budget went into the construction of new buildings. In the center of West Berlin, considerable reconstruction occurred in the area around the Wittenbergplatz, Zoo Station, and Kurfürstendamm. At the new

city center stood the ruins of the Gedächtniskirche, to which the architect Egon Eiermann added

a hexagonal tower honeycombed with dark glass in order to represent “the new rising from the

old” (quoted in Large 470). The city needed new homes for its leading cultural institutions, and

it wanted these facilities to make daring architectural statements (e.g. the Cultural Forum and

Scharoun’s New Philharmonic Hall). Other additions to West Berlin’s architectural landscape

were Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery and the International Congress Center. While

some of West Berlin’s new buildings were aesthetically pleasing, they could not transform the

city into a beautiful or harmonious place; on the contrary as the historian Large writes, “they

tended to accentuate its ugliness” (473). Yet this disharmony was a source of local pride. Many

Berliners were pleased that their city had not been tastefully restored, as had so many other West

German cities. The examples all show that in spite of the division of the city and its island-like

position, Berlin was an experimental centre and a source of ideas on new architecture and

progressive developments after the war. As in the East Berlin films, none of the selected West

Berlin films focus on the center of the city. Apart from the worm’s-eye-view that Christiane F.

offers about the underground places of a dark center of West Berlin, most of the West Berlin

films depict life and architectural discussions in the residential areas. These depictions of West

Berlin, the use of the Gropius-Stadt in Christiane F. and Kreuzberg in Berlin, Chamissoplatz both neighboring the Berlin Wall, do not make any references to the existence of the Berlin Wall.

Since unification in 1990, Germany has undergone many social, economic and political changes.

The massive cost of modernizing the eastern regions, as well as the problem of integrating the people of the former GDR into the Federal Republic, the challenges of globalization, along with the continuing legacy of the Nazi past, have had a huge impact upon the Berlin Republic and its place in the world. The two halves of the city have been joined to make a whole and the most recent architectural enterprises in Berlin (the restoration of the Reichstag, the reconstruction of the Potsdamer Platz, the New Historical Museum etc.) aim to fulfill hopes for a new political culture in which democratic politics and impressive architecture, constitutional patriotism and affective symbolism can go hand in hand. The films selected from this period reveal the collision and the conflicts between East and West after unification. Interiors and the built environment are constructed to look distinctly different from each other so that the viewer always knows if former East or West Berlin is shown in a particular scene. As opposed to the pre-Wende (unification) films, the depiction of architecture in the representations of the Berlin

Republic focus on the differences between the former two Berlins creating separate East and

West identities and shed light visually on metal walls after the demolition of the physical one.

BERLIN IN FILM

Nowhere in Germany was and is the climate for filmmaking as fortuitous as in Berlin. The

German capital was one of the international sites of the birth of cinema itself with the experiments of the Skladanowsky brothers in 1895. After the First World War a constantly growing public attended the cinema. By the end of the 1920s Berlin had 180,000 cinema seats and an equal number of people went to the cinema each day (Kirchhoff 34). The public not only grew bigger, but also changed since the middle and upper classes accepted film as the new mass medium. After the end of WWII, film was pressed into the Soviets’ “cultural renewal” campaign when, with their backing, the old UFA studios in Babelsberg were turned into DEFA, which became the East German’s main film factory. DEFA’s first film, The Murderers Are Among Us

(1946) directed by Wolfgang Staudte, tells the story of a former Wehrmacht doctor who, having failed in the war to prevent his captain from murdering innocent Polish civilians, tracks a man down in postwar Berlin and brings him to justice. The ruins of postwar Berlin provided a visual context for this film not only as a background, but also as a metaphor for the destruction wrought on the conscience of leading characters.

The most famous structure of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, appears only relatively late, in the

1980s, in Berlin films. In the 1980s the Munich-based (thus not a Berliner) filmmaker

Margarethe von Trotta, who shot some of her films in West Berlin, argued that “Berlin was the

only city in Germany that looked like Germany should look a half a century after Hitler” (quoted

in Large 474). The Wall and the visible traces of WWII appeared for the first time in the Berlin depictions of the New German Cinema. Their films by this new generation of directors include

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s monumental Berlin, Alexanderplatz (1980), Margarethe von Trotta’s

Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and Wim Wenders’ Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987). The

“wall films” provide starkly different approaches: Helke Sanders’ West Berlin film Die Allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit – Redupers (The All-Round Reduced Personality – Redupers, 1978) for instance presents the Wall and East Berlin as a screen against which to project her critical view of life in West Berlin.

Two films produced after the fall of the Wall, Das Versprechen (The Promise, 1994) by

Margarethe von Trotta and Die Mauer (The Wall, 1991) by Jürgen Böttcher, present diverging ways in which film can record a society’s memory. Böttcher’s self-reflective documentary film is a visual meditation on the physical presence and gradual eradication of the Wall, with poetic evocations of the Wall’s visual traces in the culture of historical images. Whereas in Böttcher’s film the Berlin Wall plays the most important role as also indicated in its title, von Trotta’s film,

which will be discussed in the fourth chapter, tells a story of a young couple whose lives

physically connected to the Wall as she escapes from the East to the West under the Wall and he is forced to serve as a border guard literally on the Wall. The visualization of the Wall and its presence do not dominate but add to the plot of The Promise in a powerful way. The analysis of the latter representations, thus the intermingling between sensitively chosen backgrounds and the narratives are tasks of this thesis.

The next chapter on East Berlin will start with Kurt Maetzig’s The Story of a Young Couple

(1952). Here the rebuilding of the Stalin Allee provides a visual counterpart to the young

couple’s taking up the cause of the Cold War in the name of Stalin. Since a modern, socialist

housing policy was one of the main tenets of the SED regime, its failings often provide a critical

element in DEFA films of the 1970s and 1980s. The use of architecture in Carow’s The Legend

of Paul and Paula (1973) offers such a careful criticism of the GDR’s Baupolitik from the 1970s.

The third film in the East Berlin chapter, The Architects (Kahane, 1989), reveals more explicitly

the shortcomings of the unadorned concrete-and-steel apartment blocks through the project of

young East German architects who feel restricted in their profession.

The third chapter on West Berlin starts with the analysis of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair and will show that similar topics, such as the question about compromises between modernization and tradition, characterize the postwar recovery debates in East and West Berlin. The second film, Uli Edel’s Christiane F. Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981) shows a dark Berlin from a worm’s-eye-view and offers a criticism on the monotonous structures of the high-rises of a West

Berlin suburb, the Gropiusstadt. From the last film of this chapter, Thome’s Berlin,

Chamissoplatz (1984), the limitations of West Berlin architects will be explored through the housing turmoil and public debates around the Chamissoplatz and a love relationship with opposing views on an urban remodeling scheme.

The fourth chapter of this thesis offers an analysis of the East and West Berlin images in contemporary cinema and discusses how they became distinctly different after the fall of the

Wall. The analysis and interpretation of the two Berlins in Margarethe von Trotta’s film The

Promise (1994) will lay the ground for exploring the East and West Berlin images in Stöhr’s

Berlin is in Germany (2001) and Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin! (2003). Both films tell stories about

Berliners who become confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification in the biggest construction site of Europe.

CHAPTER TWO – PREFABRICATED PANELS AND SATELLITE CITIES: ARCHITECTURE IN EAST

GERMAN BERLIN-FILMS

“The symbols of the old Germany – the imperial palace in Berlin, the Hindenburg palace, Hitler’s Reich chancellery, and the police headquarters -- were destroyed in the Second World War. The men and women of the new Germany are clearing away the ruins of the old imperial Germany. From the ruins of the old Germany a new one arises” (Walter Ulbricht, 1951)

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This chapter will offer an analysis of the visual representations and the perception of the East

German construction site and high-rise buildings in three representative stages (construction pathos, subtle criticism and open disapproval) in their architectural development. Each segment will start with a quantitative analysis of the interiors and exteriors shown in the films, thus with a focus on the represented architectural background on the screen. The same categories (the representations of home, workplace and the images of Berlin) will be taken into account in each film followed with an interpretation of the film narrative. Thus, after the examination of the places, the movements of the characters and the development of the film plot will complete the

quantitative outcome. The chapter will demonstrate how film aesthetics and building aesthetics

corresponded to the changing concepts in architecture. Furthermore, the combined approach will

shed light on the metaphoric meanings of the use of architecture in each film. All three films

will reveal that the cinematic representation of prefabricated panel buildings and their perception

also functioned as an assessment of the political events and the everyday life of the GDR’s

citizens.

THE FIRST SOCIALIST STREET OF BERLIN: THE STORY OF A YOUNG COUPLE (1952)

East German cinema existed even before the formal establishment of the German Democratic

Republic in 1949. Together with writers and other artists, filmmakers in the early postwar years sought to and did play a leading role in founding the new socialist society. The old UFA studios in Babelsberg were turned into DEFA, which became East Germany’s main film factory. As in the Soviet Union, the excessive control placed by the state on authors of screenplays, as against other literary works, put off many competent writers from contributing to East German film.

Others found their efforts rejected for ideological reasons at any stage in script development, if not from the outset.5 As a result, between 1948 and 1953, when Stalin died, the entire film

output for East Germany, excluding newsreels and non-theatrical educational films, amounted to less than fifty titles. One of these titles is Kurt Maetzig’s less known film, Der Roman einer jungen Ehe (The Story of a Young Couple, 1952).

5 For more information about the early years of the DEFA see Allan, “DEFA: An Historical Overview.”

The Story of a Young Couple is set in the postwar reconstruction era of Berlin and portrays the conflict of cultural politics in East and West Germany after the beginning of the Cold War and its effects on the relationship of a young artist couple.6 The film clearly functions as a propaganda film and celebrates the construction site, more precisely the building of the Stalin

Allee in East Berlin as a symbol of a new society. Maetzig’s account is one among the many films, posters and poems that celebrated the rebuilding of a new, transformed East Berlin after

WWII.7 The incorporation of the historic footage about the construction of the monumental East

German boulevard named after Stalin justified the film’s selection into this chapter.

Featured locations in The Story of a Young Couple (1952)

6 There are many other films throughout the postwar period that use a couple’s relationship in order to shed light on the differences between East and West Berlin, e.g. Maetzig’s Ehe im Schatten. 7 Kurt Maetzig summed up his life as follows: “I lived under the Kaiser and experienced the First World War, went to school in the Weimar Republic and had my first political experiences during that period. Miraculously I survived fascism and the Second World War and in 1945 went to the place where I felt I could be most actively involved in fighting the root causes of fascism and saw my own future in a state struggling to achieve socialism. I saw its mistakes early on and stayed because I thought it could be reformed. I experienced its disintegration and rightful collapse and now I am living in a capitalist society what I have already been through, namely the past. In the interests of all of us, I sincerely hope that I will be spared a revival of capitalism” (quoted in Allan 78-79).

Berlin as a background appears most dramatically in the first and last scenes of the film. The

opening shot locates the viewer in a harsh winter day with the aid of street signs precisely in

Berlin, which is shown as a severely ruined city. The camera shows Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus

during the opening credits, thus it focuses on a theater implying that the reconstruction of

buildings and art will play an important role in the film. The cityscape evokes the bombed ruins

of the German capital and the urban images of the first DEFA film by Wolfgang Staudte’s The

Murderers are Among Us. The last scenes stand in sharp contrast with this representation in

many levels as they show the inauguration festival of the Stalin Allee on a bright sunny day. The

film begins and ends with precise addresses and moves from the West to the East. It celebrates

the reconstruction of East Berlin and juxtaposes the first dark debris scenes with the shimmering

facades of the Stalin Allee.

Opening shot: Berlin in ruins The construction site on the Stalin Allee

To be sure, the site’s main architect, Hermann Henselmann aimed to transform East Berlin into a showcase of Communist progress and power, thus to create a notable and enviable landmark of

East Berlin. The Stalin Allee, whose original name was Frankfurter Allee until it was named

21 after Stalin in 1949, was the main architectural project in Friedrichshain.8 The first buildings on the boulevard, built between 1949-50, were designed by Ludmilla Herzenstein, one of

Scharoun’s associates (Ladd 182). They were formalist, unadorned, five-story blocks in the

German modernist tradition of the 1920s, harkening back to the Bauhaus. This style, however, was soon rejected by the East German government as the GDR preferred the “progressive”

German tradition and opened the way for a conscious return to national and local styles – above all the Berlin neoclassicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The German architectural past was used for purposes of cultural validation and propagandistic effects. By 1951 the construction had begun on buildings of a new style, which in Ladd’s words was “an amalgam of Schinkel and

Stalin” (183). In contrast to the early simple apartment buildings, the newer and larger blocks were generously proportioned, articulated vertically and horizontally, and richly ornamented with classical details. The bases were clad stone and many were pillared. The stories above were decorated with ceramic titles from Meißen. Referring to the era before WWI, these buildings mirrored the hope for a new society in which ordinary workers would enjoy the comforts of the old bourgeoisie (Ladd 183).

The East German government emphasized the political and visual importance of this street, which was supposed to serve as a new city center. Evoking classical and baroque traditions the street was an immensely wide, tree-lined boulevard in the tradition of Unter den Linden. Thus the architecture of the individual buildings disappears behind the urban planning concept for their function as walls enclosing the street. The street was indented to be a place for shopping

8 It is an interesting fact that postmodern architects saw the Stalin Allee as a unique twentieth-century example of the kind of urban renewal they were themselves aiming for. Speaking in Berlin in 1993, the American architect Philip Johnson said publicly that even in the time of its construction, in the 1950s, he had found the Stalin Allee to be “true city planning in the grand style” (quoted in Ladd 187). For the Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi, Stalin Allee is “Europe’s last great street” (ibid. 188).

22 and eating not only for housing. The government’s goal was to create a spectacular place like the Gendarmenmarkt with its two church towers and Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus. The pairs of towers at each end of the boulevard designed by Hermann Henselmann even refer to the towers of the Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin’s most monumental square since the 19th century. In the opening shots of Maetzig’s film the destroyed towers of the Gendarmenmarkt are shown to the viewer and in the closing shots the camera focuses on the Stalin Allee’s towers. The transformation of the 18th century church towers into a gate of a grand residential street serves as a powerful frame for the film.9 The transition from the destroyed Gendarmenmarkt to the newly constructed Stalin

Allee signifies a new beginning in the Soviet zone.

Construction site scenes are used throughout the film to exhibit a fresh start for East Berlin. The protagonist and narrator of the film, Agnes, is often seen at construction sites. First she is presented as a Trümmerfrau (rubble woman) who helps to clear away the debris, then she regularly visits the construction site and is explained how different it is to build today than it was in the past. We do not see ruins, dust and debris anywhere, building is a clean and honored job in the East as is shown as a Gesamtkunstwerk connected to art and poetry. The construction of the boulevard is depicted in the film as a project that equally addresses emotional and physical needs.

9 The Stalin Allee was supposed to be a template for other grand streets in East Berlin, but the monumental project did not have a lasting influence. After Stalin’s death a return to functionalism became the general tendency in housing projects, thus the Stalin Allee remained a “white elephant” in East Berlin’s landscape (Large 421). In 1961 the street’s name changed to Karl-Marx-Allee and it became an empty and unlived place in Berlin. Only with the German reunification in 1990 declared the government the street a protected historical landmark. At the hands of urban planners and architects from the West the early version of postmodernism has been restored.

Agnes as a Trümmerfrau Art at the clean construction site

Moreover, the apartments being built are for those who are working at the construction site, a

point emphasized by the film. The appeal of the large-scale spectacle and the documentary

images of the festivals that took place in the time of the construction and during the inauguration

are visually overwhelming. The boulevard is shown as the first step in the “socialist”

reconstruction of Berlin and above all in the provision of new housing. Besides the dialogues

about art and theater, architecture is used as the most powerful way to convey a political

message.

In the duration of the film, the city transforms and its borders – both visible and invisible –

become tangible between the West and East part of Berlin. Whereas excitement of building a

new state with a new architecture is dominating in the East Berlin scenes, the Western part of the

city is reduced to decadent bars, neon lights and a corrupt night life. The viewers see masses,

workers, artists, women and children, working round the clock on the contraction site of the

Stalin Allee where they can listen to encouraging poetry and participate in a variety of cultural

events. In the West at the same time mostly unemployed and disillusioned artists are depicted in

shabby night clubs. During daytime we see an American film production company making a

movie about East Berlin. In a West Berlin street they are filming a violent kidnapping scene that

is supposedly taking place on the Alexanderplatz (in the East). With the one-sided and

politically motivated depiction of Berlin, the viewer is convinced that life in the East is more

valuable on the personal and collective level, as well.

Teller girls and neon lights: Images of the West in The Story of a Young Couple

In regard to images of Berlin the film serves as propaganda on the large scale. This division is

also shaping the representations of the home and workplaces. The first home place shown in the

opening scenes is a run-down hotel in West Berlin. After their humble wedding the couple lives

in an old apartment in the West, which becomes more and more cozy and equipped with modern media. However, modern furniture and entertainment do not bring personal happiness to the couple for the long run. In the middle of the film the couple goes apartment hunting in the East, however, they can only see a devastated landscape and empty, unlivable buildings. This scene is

employed to emphasize the construction pathos that will soon emerging in the East. Soon, this devastated neighborhood is shown to us as the corner stone of the new East Berlin. The new home of the couple will be one of the apartments on the Stalin Allee, thus in the depiction of the home there is similar movement on the small scale: from the West to the East. The viewer does not have the chance to see the new homes inside; however it becomes clear that it is a privilege to live in the state-of-the-art apartments on the new boulevard.

Before and during the construction of the Stalin Allee

The same trajectory – a growing polarization between ‘decent East and decadent West’ – characterizes the depiction of the workplaces. The protagonists meet in the East Berlin artist club, Die Möwe, where they are celebrating New Year’s Eve in “the hub of the world” as one of the actors describes Berlin. The first play shown on the stage is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s classical drama Nathan the Wise, one of the most often staged plays in the 1946/47 season because of its appeal to tolerance and love. In this play the ensemble is depicted as a unified group. As Cold War tensions begin the workplace becomes polarized and a growing rift appears between Eastern and Western workplaces, which project utterly opposed views on politics, art, and the responsibility of the individual to society. The West Berlin theater plays Satre’s The

Dirty Hands and Zucksmeyer’s drama The Devil’s General with an apologistic depiction of the

Nazi military. Agnes’ workplace in the East moves from the inside theaters to the street as she performs poetry on the construction site. The West German workplace also moves to the streets but in a completely different fashion as it has been demonstrated above. The polarization of the workplaces also contributes to the propaganda of the film that wants to convince its viewers about the superiority of the Socialist ideology. The most helpful way to depict these differences is to move the protagonists to the streets and construct a virulent Eastern work ethic connected to art during the day and a Western decadence during the night. The main mechanism of the

propaganda film in regard to workplaces is to move the artist couple from the theaters to the

streets and equip the two sides of the city with opposing qualities.

The narrator of the film is an actress, Agnes Sailer, who moves to Berlin from provincial

Dresden. The first scene shows Agnes’ arrival from the province to Berlin, in the words of East

Berlin theater director, “the province conquers Berlin.”10 Agnes incorporates the ideals of the

socialist society and the plot is rendered from her point of view as she has a voice-over narration

in the film. She meets, falls in love with, and marries Jochen Karsten and moves into his

apartment. The growing split between capitalism and communism threatens the young actors’

marriage, as Agnes is working in East Berlin, and Jochen, works at the Westend Theater in West

Berlin. Both of them are assigned to one of the polarized architectural sites and vehemently

defend their utterly opposing views on politics, art, and the responsibility of the individual to

society.

Agnes sees socialist art as “chaste, pure and healthy,” and rejects a main role in Satre’s The Dirty

Hands staged in a West Berlin theater, because the play is “cold, dirty and heartless.” As

opposed to Agnes, Jochen is proud of his fame in the title role of Zucksmeyer’s drama. Agnes

moves to East Berlin, volunteers to support the efforts of building socialism and they file for

divorce. The same polarization appears in the depiction of the built environment: whereas Agnes

is to be seen in East German workplaces and on the construction site of the Stalinelle, Jochen’s

life is completely reduced to West Berlin backgrounds. When the two see each other again in

10 It’s an interesting fact that Walter Ulbricht is like Agnes from Saxony. Agnes is pondering about her leadership role in the Berlin art scene upon her arrival in the city in the midst of the ruins. This parallel and the sentence “the province conquers the city” might be interpreted as a mirror of current political events.

27 court, however, they resolve their differences in a Hollywood fashion.11 Agnes receives a new apartment in the boulevard where she can start a new life with her ‘converted’ husband.

The cinema becomes in Maetzig’s work a powerful producer of urban culture and a successful tool to create a new identity for East Berlin. The heroic spirit of the triumphant masses and the spectacular images of the apartment buildings in the Stalin Allee, where the worker can move into the building, in whose construction s/he participated, function as a visual force to convince the viewer which part of the dividing Berlin to choose. The film celebrates the new architecture and depicts the apartment buildings as magnificent, imposing buildings that provide a new beginning to the citizens of the GDR. The use of architecture is primarily to construct a polarized East and West Berlin for the viewer and convince him/her about the superiority of a human-scaled, artistic East and the inferiority of an economically driven, soulless and decadent

West.

11 While the discussions about art and theater in the film point up to standard Stalinist concepts of cultural politics in the 1950s, the film also addresses some issues that are hardly ever considered in discussions of socialist culture. The story unfolds around the rehabilitation, integration and celebration of Veit Harlan, the well- known Nazi film director of the anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß (1940). At his first appearance, in the audience of the Nathan production in 1946, Harlan (called Hartmann in the film) faces the audience’s shock and is asked to leave the theater. Under the protection of western theaters and businessmen, he is allowed to make films again. The most significant stations of Harlan’s rehabilitation are also turning points in the story of the young couple. Harlan’s trial in a West German court brings Agnes to leave Jochen, whose employers and co-actors she despises for their lack of social responsibility. Similarly, when Jochen receives the offer to play in a film directed by Harlan, he finally realizes that he has been wrong. The choice of Harlan as antagonist makes this film a unique document of an antifascist commitment to overcoming racism, which is only rarely acknowledged (Sieg). This antifascist element of the film is mentioned in previous research; however I did not locate any detailed analysis of this film by Maetzig.

“IDEALS AND REALITY NEVER COINCIDE”: THE LEGEND OF PAUL AND PAULA (1973)

During the early 1960s the western part of the Stalin Allee, linking it to Alexanderplatz and this

to the city center, was built up with unadorned concrete-and-steel apartment blocks. These

buildings were lined up in parallel rows, did not face the street, and contained only residences as

opposed to the Stalin Allee where restaurants and shop were to be found. Only a decade after the

“international style” had been condemned as decadent and dehumanizing in the GDR, it had

returned to East Berlin, moreover, it has shortly dominated its cityscape. The main reason for

this radical change is due to Nikita Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalinist architecture. He condemned it above all on grounds of efficiency and argued that the best way to house the masses was to develop prefabricated industrial forms for apartment buildings. Beginning in the

1970s, and continuing until the fall of the Wall, the GDR had built enormous satellite cities of mid-rise and high-rise apartment buildings constructed with prefabricated concrete panels. Their characteristically bleak appearance is to be seen on the edge of every major East European city and is the background for Heiner Carow’s film about The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973).

Based on a script by the well known writer, Ulrich Plenzdorf, Carow was one of the first to take advantage of the more liberal climate that was created with the change of political leadership in

1971. After a difficult period for artists and writers the replacement of Walter Ulbricht by Erick

Honecker seemed to generate a new era of tolerance. In one of his earliest speeches, Honecker

even announced that “Providing one starts from an established socialist standpoint, there cannot

[…] be any taboo subjects for art and literature.” But the new climate of tolerance was short-

lived, a fact highlighted by the expulsion of the singer-poet Wolf Biermann in 1976. And

amongst those who, in the wake of the “Biermann affair” decided to leave the GDR in the late

1970s and early 1980s were a number of DEFA stars, including Angelika Domröse, the star of

The Legend of Paul and Paula. Despite of the changing political climate, The Legend of Paul and Paula became Carow’s most successful film and achieved a cult status in the GDR.

The capital of the GDR is not mentioned and shown explicitly in the film, there are only some landmarks and references throughout the whole film that tell the viewer where the film takes place. The only time Paul and Paula appear in the center of East Berlin is when they take the S-

Bahn and go to an open-air concert.12 In the background the East Berlin TV Tower indicates that

the love story is taking place in Berlin, otherwise no other visual sign tells the viewer where Paul

and Paula live. Thus, Berlin is depicted as a city of neighborhoods, the periphery dominates in

the cityscape and there are no references at all to the fact that Berlin is a divided city between

East and West Germany. Carow’s Berlin is, however, constructed with polarized residential

architecture images, thus East Berlin itself becomes divided. In the following section, the

depictions of the most striking architectural scenes will be discussed followed by an

interpretation of the represented spaces in mirror of the film narrative. It will be argued that the

built environment and plot are mutually interconnected and depend on each other.

12 Berlin Ostbahnhof can briefly be seen in some of the outdoor scenes.

Featured locations in The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973)

The opening scene of the film tells the love story of Paul and Paula backwards from the end.

Already in the very first scene of the film, the inner logic of connecting new and old buildings

becomes obvious. The opening sequence shows how old and dark houses are blown up and

pulled down, behind which the new, modern, standardized and bright white high-rise block

become visible. They express progress and the promised improvement of living conditions. At the same time the images bespeak the violence with which the new era sweeps away the old one,

symbolized by the old houses and their inhabitants’ traditional way of life. To underline this

message, the demolition scene is accompanied by a song by the well known GDR pop group Die

Phudys: “When man lives for a short time.”

The opening shots of The Legend of Paul and Paula

The song accompanies the camera movement from the opening image – blowing up old buildings and building new ones – to the first scene. Paul is standing at the window of an old house, which is being prepared for demolition. Old furniture and useless household objects are lying around. Paul is clearing out Paula’s former apartment. We see the neighbors, construction workers and children watching what Paul saves from Paula’s apartment and what he throws away. He only takes Paula’s photograph into his apartment in the high rise block. In the photograph, which is the most well-known image of the film displayed at posters and DVD covers, Paula is tearing Paul’s shirt apart. Paul shows this very private image to his audience but he covers Paula’s face for a moment. Simultaneously, the lyrics of the Puhdys evoke lines from the well-known passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes of the Bible about the timeliness for death and life.13 Paula does not live anymore, she is a stand still image. The architecture and the plot become in these scenes strongly intertwined and the use of architectural images adds to the plot in a powerful way. The first static and then violently blown-up buildings tell a story that could not been told explicitly with living characters even in the most tolerant days of the GDR.

13 „Wenn ein Mensch kurze Zeit lebt/Sagt die Welt, dass er zu früh geht./Wenn ein Mensch lange Zeit lebt /Sagt die Welt, es ist Zeit./Jegliches hat seine Zeit,/Steine sammeln,/Steine zerstreu'n,/Bäume pflanzen, /Bäume abhau'n (Puhdys) versus “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted” and “a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together” (Ecclesiastes 3).

Old and new

Paul’s introduction as an acting character and Paula’s depiction as a photograph anticipate the

end of a legendary love story. At the same time, this beginning hints at the socially accepted and legitimized mode in which Paul, who clears out Paula’s place, the scene of their love, leaving it and moving into a high-rise block. In doing so he does not simply inherit Paula’s legacy but he modifies and adapts it to his surroundings. The final sequence shows Paul in his apartment: he is lying with the children in Paula’s old bed, above which hangs the photograph that he took from

Paula’s apartment. Between these two scenes the film tells us the love story of Paul and Paula.

Whereas Paula remains the same, Paul changes.

The scenes before Paul and Paula meet each other show the two main characters’ lives in parallel images, also represented in the polarized built environments. Each morning Paula stands with her children in front of her old apartment house waiting for her old friend Reifensaft while the correctly dressed Paul is waiting on the other side of the street until he is picked up by a his party functionary colleagues.

Paul’s building Paula’s building

Paul’s apartment’s interior Paula’s apartment’s interior

The building behind Paula is dark as opposed to the shiny, bright new apartment block that is across the street. Whereas in his apartment Paul is surrounded with new furniture and has central

heating and state-of-the-art interiors, Paula’s apartment is furnished with old, mostly damaged

and eclectic furniture that remind the viewer on the bourgeoisie past of the building. Paula has a

cockle stove and she is carrying coal from the ground floor up to the stairs in the apartment; an

image that evokes the rubble-women-scenes from the early ruin films and creates a visual

connection with The Story of A Young Couple. In the functionalist building of the Foreign Affair

Ministry, Paul is depicted as the perfect socialist person on duty, whereas Paula is working as a

check-out assistant in a grocery story at the Lenin Square, in a rather messy and often

overcrowded environment. The set-up of these environments reveals two strongly divided

topographies and lives that are not supposed to meet each other in the GDR of the 1970s.

However, Paula, the 23-year old single mother of two children, does meet Paul in a night club, a

place that cannot be assigned to any of the above described topographies, and they fall in love

with each other. Paul’s love on the personal level is far from any ideals as his wife betrays him

constantly and is only interested in the material gains this marriage offers her. Paul is not brave enough to leave his wife and son to be with Paula due to social obligations and his conformity.

When Paula’s little son tragically dies in a car accident, she interprets his death as a punishment for her relationship with Paul. She ceases all contact with Paul, which results in a dramatic change in Paul’s behavior. Risking his career and marriage, he pursues Paula passionately. He camps in the front of Paula’s entrance door and sleeps on the Party’s newspaper Neues

Deutschland and finally he axes down the door to Paula’s flat. Paula accepts him back and finds

herself pregnant with a third child. The film does not have a traditional happy ending as Paula

consciously takes a risk to carry a difficult pregnancy and dies during the childbirth. The film is

truly a legend as Paula attains the stature of a legendary saint, who fought and died for her belief.

The film has been interpreted as a celebration of power of romantic love but those searching for

a radical reassessment of gender relations can be dissatisfied with the film. Feminist critics have often analyzed the love story and dismissed it as – to quote the title of one academic essay on the film – a “sexist schmaltz” from the GDR.14 A journal article by Irene Dölling entitled “We all

love Paula but Paul is More Important to us” shows that Paula’s expectations for happy life here

and now are displaced into an utopian space that is literally “not a place” at all. According to

Dölling Paula only serves to construct and legitimize a modified, improved type of “socialist

version.” The way architecture is used in the film supports the same thesis on many different

14 For instance the West German filmmakers and critics Sander and Schlesier wrote a review in the feminist film journal frauen und film, describing the film as a “frauenverachtende schnulze aus der DDR” (a misogynist melodrama made in the GDR).

levels. The analysis of the depictions of inner and outer spaces of East Berlin in the 1970s show

how Paula’s emotional, irrational side and Paul’s rationality and self-restraint merge in a way, that Paula – and the old houses in which she lives – disappears for the advantage of a changed

Paul.

The Legend of Paul and Paula along with other films from the 1970s and 1980s broke new

ground thematically and aesthetically as well. It is not documentary realism anymore as a

transgression of the customary documentary realism through fantasy is applied in the film. For

instance Paula is collecting coal in one scene and simultaneously she is trying to escape the

present with the aid of movie posters depicting happy couples on the ground floor walls of her

apartment building. Behind the already mentioned polarizations of new/old, insider/outsider of

the society, the characters’ lives, especially Paula’s, are depicted as having a gap between

dreams and reality. Architecture represents these schisms in a number of ways.

Polarized images about reality and fantasy in The Legend of Paul and Paula

The most fantastic place appears in the film’s central unorthodox scene during a magical journey with Paul and Paula in a bed bedecked with flowers floating on a river. In this boat scene the

logic of time and space cease to have any meaning. They can only be groom and bride in this

magical place but even here they are surrounded by Paul’s colleagues. Interestingly, this scene

has left an important mark in the East Berlin cityscape as a stretch of waterfront on the

Rummelsburg Lake in Berlin-Lichtenberg, near where the boat scene was filmed, was renamed

Paul und Paula-Ufer (Paul And Paula Shore). The provocative montage of fantasy and realism did not only add a fairy-tale character to Paul and Paula’s love affair but also occupied the fantasies of the viewers for generations.

Besides the places that can be clearly labeled as reality or fantasy, transitory places – construction sites and a small garage in the midst of high-rise block buildings, have special functions in the film. These are the only places where the couple can be together unlike other public places such as the open-air concert in the city or Paul’s workplace at the Foreign Ministry.

Transitory spaces in The Legend of Paul and Paula: the small garage and construction sites

Seeing the hopelessness of their relationship, Paula is tempted to accept her old friend’s,

Reifensaft, marriage proposal. He takes Paula to his house that he has built in the countryside in order to convince Paula about her decision. Showing her around in this new house is depicted as a marriage proposal and Paula is forced to think about her life in the new building. Reifensaft’s cottage is located outside of Berlin and is a house as opposed to the apartments in which Paul and Paula live. It promises a relatively prosperous living with a swimming pool, new kitchen and bathroom. The long shots in the building reveal Paula’s hesitation and shows that she knows

that this relationship would not satisfy her emotional needs. After seeing Reifensaft’s house built specifically for her, Paula agrees to marry him. The house with its sheer white facades and modern interiors outside of Berlin offers an alternative, however choosing this place for living would be more than a compromise for Paula. Accepting the offer in the form of a built house would also be a decision about giving up her dreams and love for Paul.

Reifensaft’s marriage proposal: a new house outside of the city

Whereas Paula is thinking about moving out from the city to Reifensaft’s house, Paul moves to

the garage outside of his building. Dwelling in this transitory place indicates the changes in his

personality. Soon his co-workers come to pick him up and persuade him to return to his everyday life. While Paul is following them the camera moves from the left to the right, from dark old houses towards new and bright buildings. Paul gets in the car with his co-workers and at the crossing the car takes a left turn. After a rapid cut, we see Paul walking home correctly dressed with presents for his family and entering the new block building. The depiction of the built environment and the slow camera movements tell about a similar hesitation that Paula experiences in Reifensaft’s newly built house. They both have to make a decision and the outcome of this process is mirrored in architecture rather than spelling it out directly in dialogues. Architecture, thus narrates the story in many scenes and takes up the narrative function when inner conflicts and decisions become unspeakable.

Paul’s decision about going back from living in the garage to his job and family

Paul, however, finds his wife Ines with another man and he makes a final decision when he goes

over to Paula’s apartment and asks her neighbors for an ax. In the most famous (and most

violent) scene of the film Paul axes Paula’s door and the couple unite. Surrounded by Paula’s mostly aged neighbors the camera takes a last tour in the stair case of Paula’s old apartment building. The slow camera movement showing an old woman returning to her apartment in the stair case functions as mourning for a loss and indicates that the building and everything it stands for will not exist much longer. This scene prepares the ground for blowing up the building and erasing it for good from the East Berlin cityscape.

Breaking Paula’s apartment door and mourning the building

The last the scenes show the old building with Paula’s apartment to be blown up. Paul and the

children are lying in Paula’s half bed in the new apartment building. The chopped bed can hardly

fit into the cubic half room of Paul’s place, thus Paula’s heritage is represented as a foreign body in Paul’s environment. The way architecture is used in the film conveys that Paula’s irrational

love, her quest for happiness here and now can not be fulfilled in the GDR. As new and old

buildings are polarized and assigned to a man and woman in love, Paula’s life could not occur in

Paul’s apartment, whereas Paul can incorporate some elements symbolized in the half cut bed

from Paula’s life.

The closing scenes in Carow’s The Legend of Paul and Paula

Paula and her dreams are depicted in a utopian space that is literally “no place” at all and

disappears for good from the film. What remains are the new buildings and the hope that

something can be saved from the old buildings. The use of architecture in Carow’s film adds

carefully to the plot when the story cannot be told with words and offers a careful criticism of the

GDR’s Baupolitik and the possibilities and constraints of the “working class” (represented by

Paula) and “elite class” (represented by Paul) in East German society. As opposed to the

East/West polarization of the city in Maetzig’s The Story of a Young Couple, in which the

relationship could be saved with moving the male character from the West to the East, there is no

chance for Paula to be united with Paul in the GDR of the 1970s. The depiction of the built

environment shows the history of the GDR, where in the 1950s the division between East and

West played the major role, however in the 1970s a division between insiders and outsiders

within the East German society created the different poles of the society.

“CONSTRUCTION IS BUILT UPON COMPROMISE”: THE ARCHITECTS (1989)

By 1989, nearly a third of East Berlin’s residents lived in three satellite cities, Marzahn,

Hohenschönhausen, and Hellersdorf. Marzahn alone had fifty-six thousand apartments and this satellite city is the main background of The Architects set in the mid and late 1980s. The

Architects belongs to a series of films which focus on the GDR’s residential housing projects of the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to launch a more general critique of GDR society.

Examples of other such films include Lothar Warneke’s Unser kurzes Leben (Our Short Life,

1981) – a screen adaptation of Brigitte Reimann’s novel Franziska Linkerhand – and Hermann

Zschoche’s Insel der Schwäne (Island of Swans, 1983) which tells the story of a family who move from an idyllic country village to the new residential area of Berlin-Marzahn.15 The plot of the Architects has much in common with those two films, for although released considerably later in 1990, its production had been held up for several years as a result of its controversial script as it formulated a clear criticism of the GDR. The fact that the film could be made at all is a reflection of a change of climate in the DEFA studios at the beginning of 1989. Shooting started in September 1989 as multitudes took to the streets throughout East Germany. By the time the film was finished, East Germany no longer existed and Peter Kahane was somewhat

15 Short reference to literary works, especially about Franziska Linkerhand. Franziska says the following: “You can’t choose to build flats without a town. You can’t have the one without the other.” She claims a quote from Marx on the notice board: “The city is civilization’s most precious invention, second only to language as a purveyor of culture” (quoted in Blunk 213).

43 worried that the locations he needed for the film will disappear by the time they need them for filming.16

Like The Story of A Young Couple and The Legend of Paul and Paula, the film tells the story of a young married couple in the GDR. It is important to note, however, that the central figure in

Kahane’s film, Daniel Brenner, is an architect in his late thirties who has not built anything in his life. Finally he is assigned the task of designing a kulturelles Zentrum (a cultural center) for a housing estate in a Berlin suburb. Working with a hand-picked team of friends who were his classmates in architecture school, he comes up with a design that incorporates rooftop gardens and modern sculptures and that has architectural variety and generous breathing space.

However, despite the young architects’ willingness to accept the compromises demanded of them by party functionaries, nothing comes of the project. In the process Daniel’s devotion to his work leads to a deterioration in his relationship with his wife, Wanda. Already frustrated by her life in the GDR, she divorces Daniel and leaves the GDR together with their daughter,

Johanna, to start a new life in Switzerland. By the end of the film, Daniel is a completely isolated figure.

The analysis of the featured locations reveal a similar proportion among the depictions of the city, home and workplaces with the difference that workplaces are shown more often than

16 Peter Kahane was born on May 30, 1949 in Prague; his father worked as a journalist and a foreign correspondent, and his mother was an artist. He spent his childhood in East Berlin, New Delhi, Köthen and Bad Freienwalde; by 1967 he completed secondary school in Berlin. Upon being refused entrance into the Film Academy in Babelsberg, Kahane continued his studies at Humboldt University, attaining certification to teach both French and Russian by 1971. Purely by chance, he worked on a documentary film at the suggestion of director Karlheinz Mundt. As of 1973, he worked in the DEFA Feature Film Studio, and from 1975 to 1979 he studied at the Film Academy in Babelsberg, concentrating on directing. By 1980 Kahane was an assistant at the DEFA Feature Film Studio, where he became a director.

before. Since the plot focuses on the design project of the young architects, a clear dominance of official and unofficial workplaces becomes visible from the diagram.

Featured locations in Peter Kahane’s The Architects

There are hardly any references about the fact that the film takes place in Berlin. Besides some

moments when clearly definable East Berlin landmarks (the Stalin Allee, the Nikolai Church, the

Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall) appear on the scene, only long shots of the monotonous

facades of the East Berlin Plattenbauten (East German term for buildings made with precast

concrete slabs) are shown to the viewer. The only reference to the exact location is revealed through a traffic sign whose arrow points towards “Berlin Zentrum.” The long panning shots of

the city’s ugly, factory like public housing filmed from moving cars show views of block after

block of anonymous rectangular buildings. Berlin is presented as a joyless environment in which

the imagination is systematically stifled.

The leitmotif of The Architects: Monotonous, repetitive East Berlin cityscapes

Berlin landmarks (Nikolai Church) and the traffic sign “Berlin Zentrum” in The Architects

As in Carow’s film, the juxtaposition of old and new buildings highlight the destruction of the

old parts of Berlin as the prize of the zealous high-rise building constructions. As opposed to

Carow’s film, however they are not well integrated into Kahane’s film but are presented as still

images. At the end of the film, the pictures are shown in an art gallery implying that they do not

exist anymore – like Paula’s portrait, they become a frozen image of the past. In the aesthetic

depiction of old and new architecture, curvy and irregular lines are juxtaposed with linear and

painstakingly rectangular facades. This motif unfolds already in the opening scene of the film,

when the young architect Daniel Brenner is seen painting minerals and fossils with his daughter

Johanna. The painting of organic minerals displays a repetitious structure, which is mirrored in

the repetitious structure of Berlin’s satellite cities; however it is a radically different repetition.

A clear tension between nature and culture is set up with these corresponding yet contradictory

images that shape the depiction of other built environments in the film as the screen prints below

also show. In one scene, for instance, Daniel goes for a short bicycle ride with his family in

order to visit the site where he can design the cultural center. On the site in a muddy meadow,

the only empty place we see in the film, he is dreaming of buildings that are “curvy and swervy,”

diverse, triangular and pentagonal, not monotonously the same as in the present environment.

His dream is to create a pleasant place rather than an elaborate façade, malls, shops and

restaurants custom-made to human proportions. Daniel’s goal is to design a place where “people

meet instead of getting lost.” Daniel tells his family about his design and his definition of human scaled architecture, which evokes the language of postmodernism. Daniel’s aim is to replace the functional and formalized shapes and spaces by diverse aesthetics. His goal is to adopt form for its own sake and to apply non-orthogonal angles and unusual surfaces.

Old and new buildings as still images

Nature and culture in the GDR

The main polarization in the depicted built environment takes place in the representation of the architects’ workplaces. On the one hand they meet to discuss to project or just simply get together for parties in an old eclectic building. The old buildings from the 19th century harbor

lively and passionate discussions about creative projects and are filled with similar dreams and

life experiences as Paula’s old building. Music and dancing takes place in the atriums of the

turn-of-the-century houses, whereas in their official workplace they are controlled by the city authority and become less and less productive with their design projects. The workplace is used for unproductive criticism and for rejection of the plans and ideas of the young architects.

There are no functioning home places in the film as only uniform apartments in the prefabricated panel buildings are shown to the viewer in which families cannot have a happy life. Like The

Story of a Young Coupe and The Legend of Paul and Paula, there is a love relationship in the film between Daniel and his wife Wanda. Unlike the other films, in which the focus is on the courtship, Kahane shows a married couple who is getting divorced in the end of the film. Wanda

and Daniel’s life starts where in Maetzig’s film the protagonists’ story end. One of the reasons

they end up with divorce is the dull, monotonous environment in which they are living.17 As the same repetitive facades are shown over and over to the viewer, Wanda is presented doing the same things all over again: shopping at the grocery store and sitting in front of the television in their Plattenbau apartment.

17 Wanda summarizes her decision for filing divorce with the following words: “I am now thirty-five, I have lived half of my life already; what have I experienced? Nothing. There is more to life that what we have here, more than this endless everyday routine. Our love has been destroyed and you haven’t even noticed. … It’s not about sex, it’s not about physical things, about food, sleep, drink, none of that is a problem here. It’s about other things. Call it surprise or variety. There is nothing I can feel pleasantly surprised about anymore.”

The only time Daniel leaves Berlin and goes to the countryside takes place when he visits his former peer students. None of them work as architects. One former peer student, Benno, the

most talented back then, is a disillusioned waiter who sat in a prison because he wanted to save a

church. Daniel’s other peer is a depressed single mom; others emigrated to the West or work as

bureaucrats at construction sites. Finally he manages to collect a group of seven young architects

for the ambitious project. The individual stories of the failed architects do not only offer short

glimpses into the architectural history of the GDR but also shed light on the fact that in East

Germany there is no need for creative architects. As in The Legend of Paul and Paula, living

outside of the city is depicted as a demanding compromise, as all of Daniel’s friends are

disillusioned and hopeless in regard to their professional future as architects. The hopeless

journey prefigures the outcome of the enterprise.

The design projects, drawing and models of the seven young architects can be regarded as

“fictional featured locations” in the film. The discussions and the design ideas of the young

architects reveal the shortcomings of the unadorned concrete-and-steel apartment blocks that

were erected from the 1960s. As opposed to the Stalin Allee, which gave place to restaurants,

stores and other commercial buildings, these new developments were fully devoted to residential

purposes. As a result, the inhabitants of the apartment buildings did not have a chance to

participate in cultural events and go out in the evenings, which also manifests in Wanda’s

complaining about her dull life. Daniel and his colleagues aim to correct this mistake and design

a movie theater, a cultural house, a Vietnamese restaurant, a grocery story with natural

ventilation to save costs, a gallery, a bowling alley and an innovative landscape design with

built-in-art. Thematically and structurally the young architects’ design offers an alternative to the

asinine stereotypes and monotonous environment of the East German residential neighborhoods.

Architectural drawings of the young architects: two alternatives

The project wins the first prize on a competition but when it comes to a discussion about how to realize the plan, the architects have to face the state’s criticism of their design. Most of their ideas are simply cancelled (such as the gallery and the bowling alley) and instead of the

Vietnamese restaurant they have to come up with a new design for a sports bar and a snack stand. They also have to get rid of the multipurpose Kulturhaus and their built-in-art projects

(three sculptures: “The Stressed Family,” “The Construction Worker” who remains unnoticed as he is in a ditch and the “Soviet Soldier” who is lying in mud) as they are condemned as

unacceptable. The architects are ready to show some flexibility after the first defeat, however

due to problems in the steel and glass industry, the unique forms of the design are rejected in the

second round. They are forced to use prefabricated modular panels for the buildings. For a

while all designing is suspended and the architects are forced to conform to conventional

systems. The main message from the state is that “Construction is built on compromise” but as

they try to fulfill the requirements of the state their postmodern architectural project is doomed to

look like as the rest of East Berlin.

The only specific image of Berlin, the Stalin Allee, appears during a conversation between an

older architect and Daniel. As they are looking down onto the first socialist street of Europe,

they talk about the necessity of compromise. While staring at the monumental architecture of the

boulevard an old architect gives Daniel the following advice: “No architect worthy of the name

can say that one cannot build with compromise. It starts with the materials. Compared to

materials in the nature, our supplies are compromises. We have to live with them. And they

aren’t the only challenges. Building is political [camera shows the Stalin Alle exclusively]. We

project power. Each building reflects status, like it or not. Prosperity and austerity. Dreams and despair. Economics and technology. They also display clients’ tastes [camera shows the

Stalinalle exclusively]. Architects have to fight for their rights. But they also have to make compromise […] The only way to resolve conflicts is making a compromise.” While the conversation has the goal to convince Daniel that it is possible to realize his projects while taking some compromise, the depicted architecture of the Stalin Allee undermines the message completely. The architecture of the Stalin Allee reflects a true expression of political power and the impossibility of resistance from the architects’ side. The architecture serves as a bitter irony and offers a clear answer to the architects’ pondering about how much agency an architect has in their design projects.

Architects’ conversation about compromise while looking down onto the Stalin Allee

Throughout the film the viewer experiences Berlin as a city of neighborhoods without a center.

The only instances when we see the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate happen when Daniel

is waving to his grown-up daughter Johanna who is standing on the other side of the wall. Also,

after it has been made clear that the project is doomed, the camera takes the viewer on an extended tour of East Berlin’s architectural carbuncles, whilst on the soundtrack we hear the

words of a GDR pioneer song: “Unsre Heimat, das sind nicht nur die Städte und Dörfer, unsre

Heimat sind auch all die Bäume im Wald.”18 The song functions as a bitter, ironic commentary

on the visual montage, in the same manner as the above-mentioned conversation and the Stalin

Allee, that shows desolate, tree-less streets and decaying old buildings.

The Wall and Berlin’s center become visible only in the last scenes of The Architects

Kahane’s The Architects introduces a vigorous attack on the absurd inflexibility of the party

functionaries in charge of the GDR’s Baupolitik. The film depicts the frustration experienced by

a group of idealistic men and women in their thirties, who are loyal to the GDR and determined

to improve the quality of their lives in a socialist state, but who have been denied any

opportunity to put their ideas into practice. Despite of his willingness to cooperate with party

officials and his understanding that it is often necessary to accept compromise and despite of his

loyalty to the GDR, Daniel is let down ultimately by the state he wishes to build for. The harsh

criticism of the GDR is intensified by the use of repetitive architectural images that undermine

18 “Our Heimat is not just towns and villages, our Heimat is all the trees in the wood. Our Heimat is the grass in the meadow, the corn in the field, and the birds in the air and the animals in the earth, and the fish in the river are our Heimat. And we love our beautiful Heimat and we protect it because it belongs to the people, because it belongs to our people” (Translated from the German by Margaret Vallance).

52 the ideals expressed in conversation or in the aforementioned GDR pioneer song. Architecture adds to the criticism in a powerful way especially while directly contradicting the film script.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

The three selected films stand for three representational stages of the development of the

aesthetic of residential apartment blocks in the GDR. The East German propaganda film, The

Story of A Young Couple, uses prevailing images of the Stalin-Baroque architecture of the 1950s

in order to convince the Berliners about the superiority of the Eastern block. As an answer to the

currency reform in the West that stabilized the economy of the British, French and American

zones, the Soviets used art and architecture in their propaganda to construct a humane, anti-

Fascist East and a materialistic, heartless West. Carow’s film sheds light on the shortcomings of the sheer functionalism, which becomes strengthened and more explicit in the bitter tone of

Kahane’s film about the satellite cities in the late 1980s. All three films deal explicitly with urban planning issues and raise questions about the building activities in Berlin’s satellite cities and shed light on the consequences of the demolition of old buildings.

One motif that appears in each film is the construction site: in Maetzig’s film the erection of the

Stalin Allee, in Carow’s film the construction sites near Paul’s and Paula’s street and in

Kahane’s film the closing shots that depict Daniel at the building site. In Maetzig’s propaganda

film the construction site becomes a stage and an artwork that unites the inhabitants of the East.

It is represented as a place that aims to correct social injustices and that is to function as a new

beginning in the Soviet zone. The construction site is shown during the daylight and is a clean,

transparent, magnificent place where each class of the society is represented. Builders become inhabitants and art is performed for everyone. In Carow’s account the construction site is the

stage for an uncommon, passionate love relationship that can only take place and function

provisionally in fantasy and in transitory places such as the construction site. In Kahane’s film

these transitory places have disappeared from Berlin and the monotonous built-up city is a

dominating force. The construction site is the only green space shown in the city and the green

meadow becomes by the end of the film another grey spot on which buildings like the rest of

Berlin will be erected. Nothing is left of the original scheme of the young architects and after

having been presented with an award by the state, Daniel is shown vomiting on the construction

site at the very spot on which his cherished project was to be built. The construction site is first a

place of celebration, then a transitory place giving room to a brief extraordinary encounter,

finally a place symbolizing a failed vision. In each three cases it becomes politicized and is used

for promoting, questioning and finally harshly criticizing the GDR.

CHAPTER THREE – RUINS, REBELS UND RESTRICTIONS: CINEMATIC IMAGES OF WEST BERLIN

“West Berlin had 2.2. million people, 70,000 dogs, 7,000 beehives, 7,000 eating and drinking establishments, hundred of zoo animals […] all crammed into an area about the size of Andorra.” ”The Glittering Thing” Der Spiegel, 1966

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

The third chapter will explore three depictions of West Berlin from three specific historical contexts. The first film Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair was filmed before the foundations of the

two Germanies. Because of the luck of rubble films that would offer a West Berlin perspective

from this time period, Wilder’s insider/outsider view of Berlin has been chosen to as the first

film of the West Berlin chapter. References to the United States appear in the third film, Rudolf

Thome’s Berlin, Chamissoplatz (1984), as well, which creates a connection between the two

selections. The second film, a documentary about the life of the teenage drug user Christiane F.,

Uli Edel’s Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981), is used to analyze the modernist architecture of the Gropius-Stadt as well as the depictions of West Berlin’s showcase architecture around the legendary Ku’Damm. As in Carow’s East German The Legend of Paul and Paula, in this film

too, the monotonous structures of West Berlin’s satellite cities are criticized while telling the story of one of the outsider inhabitants. “Drug dreams” about alternative places to the current living situations are further connections between the East German Paul and Paula and the West

German Christiane F. In the last film, Thome’s Berlin Chamissoplatz compared to the East

German The Architects one can not only learn about the housing debates in a unique Berlin

neighborhood, Kreuzberg, but also about the restrictions of West Berlin architects. The housing turmoil and public debates around the Chamissoplatz and a love relationship with opposing views on an urban remodeling scheme between an architect and a student offer multiple perspectives about the architectural public debates in West Berlin of the 1980s. This film will be also compared to Kahane’s depiction of architect and their encounter with postmodernism.

Methodologically, as in the previous chapter featured locations of the individual films will be analyzed followed with a short comparison with the corresponding East German films.

RUBBLES AND RECONSTRUCTION: A FOREIGN AFFAIR (1948)

The Austrian-born, Jewish-American journalist, screenwriter and film director, Billy Wilder

(1906-2002), is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood’s golden age. To advance his career Wilder moved to Berlin from Vienna and wrote first crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers. After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder first left for Paris and then the United States. The Austrian-Jewish immigrant and filmmaker who had

become successful in Hollywood returned to Berlin in the summer of 1945 as part of a visiting crew of Hollywood officials. The trip was supposedly intended to seek out ways in which the industry could assist the military government. In reality, the team sought ways for the Americans to establish a monopoly in Germany (Shandley 5).

The other major political, military and cultural force was that of the Soviets in the Eastern zone who contributed to the first Berlin rubble film The Murderers Are among Us (1946). The

Russian impulse was to find ways in which the Germans could begin reeducating themselves about their history and tested the medium’s capacity in re-establishing moral codes in the chaotic city. While Wilder was serving with the U.S. Army in Germany, he was promised government cooperation if he made a film about the objectives and the progress of the occupation (Chandler

137). The shooting of backgrounds took place in August 1947, much of it in the Russian zone,

which was not yet sealed-off, Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, presented a different model from the

Soviet influenced first German rubble film and showed his Hollywood colors.19 Wilder pitched

his own idea for film that would serve as the ideal re-education film: a romantic comedy between

an American woman and an American G.I. Rather than the information films from the 1940s with which the Germans were being deluged, Wilder felt that entertainment films dealing with

the German-American relations would be the ideal propaganda.

In A Foreign Affair’s postwar Berlin Jean Arthur stars as a visiting U.S. congresswoman Phoebe

Frost who arrives in bombed-out Berlin in 1947 as part of a congressional delegation assigned to

19 Erich Pommer, one of the most influential producers of the silent film era, one of the most influential creators of the German Expressionism movement and the head of production at UFA from 1924 to 1926, helped facilitate Wilder’s shooting on location in occupied Berlin. Pommer had returned to Berlin after the war as the chief of the Informal Control Division, and was in charge of rebuilding the German film industry. Whatever was left of UFA, or had been rebuilt since Pommer’s day there, war put at Paramount’s disposal (Chandler 139-40).

investigate the moral behavior of the American occupying troops. As part of her mission, she

delivers a cake baked by his fiancée to Capt. John Pringle (John Lund), who immediately trades it on the black market for a mattress, which he takes to the apartment of his current girlfriend,

Erika von Schlütow (Marlene Dietrich),20 an alluring German nightclub singer. While touring

the city and researching the G.I.s appetite for blond German women and alcohol, Phoebe,

mistaken for a German, is picked up by some of the soldiers and taken to a club, which features the singing of Erika. When she sees a familiar cake being served, she becomes suspicious and orders John to watch the woman’s apartment to identify her American lover.

After seeing some newsreel footage of Erika with Hitler, Phoebe asks John to show her the woman’s file, but he distracts her from further investigation by coming on to the congresswoman, who responds with surprising passion. As Phoebe starts to fall for Pringle, she abandons her natural reserve in a wild night at the cabaret, and is arrested in a raid. Erika uses her influence to help Phoebe save her reputation. Phoebe then finds out about Pringle’s affair with Erika, not realizing that he has been ordered to draw her jealous Gestapo ex-lover out of hiding. As she is about to leave Berlin heartbroken, Phoebe learns the truth and rushes back to the cabaret, where the Gestapo fugitive has been shot, and she and Pringle are reunited.

As mentioned before, Billy Wilder had strong connections to Berlin and wanted to see the city right after the end of the war. A flight over Berlin while filming an army documentary stunned

Wilder particularly during this visit: “I had wanted to see Berlin again. It wasn’t there. It looked like the world had come to an end. Kaput. I had mixed feelings. I wanted to see the Nazis

20 Wilder based the character of Erika on a woman he saw clearing away rubble on the Berlin streets. “The woman was grateful the Allies had come to fix the gas. I thought it was she could have a hot meal, but she said it was so she could commit suicide” (Chandler 137-38).

destroyed, but to see the city destroyed…” (quoted in Chandler 114). Endless ruins had replaced

the city he had once remembered and thought of as home. His memories of the ruined Berlin

reveal the chaotic postwar circumstances in the Germany capital: “The summer of ’45 was hot.

It was the hottest summer in Berlin anyone can remember. There was an unbearable smell.

Thousands of corpses were buried under the rubble. The stench and the heat were intolerable.

The dead were floating in the Landwehrkanal. In the vegetable gardens, there were no

vegetables growing, just corpses rotting” (quoted in Chandler 128). As opposed to the written

notes of Wilder, the city images of his first Berlin film do not focus explicitly on the horror of

the war but on “life that fills the ruins” as one of the American captains says during a sight-

seeing tour in the film.

The most memorable ruin scenes in A Foreign Affair take place in the opening shots. Out of the

clouds an airplane before landing appears on the screen. Looking down on the devastated city of

Berlin a Texas congressman drawls: “Looks like rats been gnawing at a hunk of old Roquefort

cheese.” On the board is an America congressional delegation and one of them is filming the city

with a camera in order to use it as a propaganda during the upcoming elections. The image of

Berlin from a bird’s eye view and the conversation of the delegate evoke the first scene of Leni

Riefenstahl’s well-known Nazi propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will from 1934, in which

Hitler’s airplane and its shadow in the build environment become visible out of the clouds over

Nuremberg in a strikingly similar manner. Whereas in Riefenstahl’s opening shots the

landmarks of medieval Nuremberg and its church towers with German and Nazi flags become

visible, the Berlin images of Wilder show ruthlessly the bombed out, empty shells of Berlin.

Nuremberg’s curvy medieval streets are populated with organized and linear marching troops

and people rushing to the Nazi Party Rally as opposed to the empty Berlin streets in which only

some cars can be followed from above. A grid of a destroyed city with its filigree buildings and

a less organized line of the welcome group are the only, rather irregular geometrical forms in

destroyed Berlin as opposed to the endless marching lines in Riefenstahl’s stylized opening shots. Thus Wilder does not shy away from appropriating the powerful propaganda images of the Nazi party to draw its viewers’ attention to a radically different cityscape with the same technique. The first scene of A Foreign Affair can be described as a parody of the influential

visuals of Nazi cinema. Furthermore, the first dialogues of the film, in which congress woman

Phoebe Frost describes her aim to “disinfect” the “moral malaria” in the American troops, thus

uses a Nazi vocabulary, reveal Wilder’s attempt to criticize Nazi Germany as well as the

occupying Americans in postwar Berlin.

Parody of Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will

The ruins of Berlin as in other rubble films serve as an uncanny picturesque background but also

as documentary footages for most of the scenes. The protagonists are driving through “canyons

of ruins” and people live from a “few ruins” far from each other.21 The film contains a

sightseeing tour of the American zone, which starts on the Pariser Platz in front of the

21 This idea is Shandley’s analysis who argues very convincingly that Staudte’s film can be in many levels compared to early American Western films.

Brandenburg Gate.22 Instead of the architectural styles of the individual buildings or their role in

Berlin’s history only their connections to the Nazi party and their fate during the carpet bombing of the city are mentioned. The sightseeing narrative is well adjusted to its audience as they pass by the Hotel Adlon, Unter den Linden, the Chancellery, Berlin’s Central Park (Tiergarten Park), the biggest department store of Berlin and a residential area with turn-of-the-century architecture. Phoebe Frost, who is busy at taking notes, is less interested in the public and residential architecture of Berlin than she is in womanizing American soldiers and multicultural couples in the Berlin-streets. She indeed sees that “the ruins are filled with life” as G.I.s are walking with flowers in their hands and a German woman is pushing a stroller with an American flag on it. She is shocked and also feels encouraged to complete her mission and fight against the “moral malaria” that is threatening the U.S. troops. The conquered city of Berlin, in which

American G.I.s are taking erotic adventures can be regarded as a political metaphor to display the power of the occupying forces.

Tour through bombed-out Berlin

Besides the buildings visited during the sightseeing driving tour, the central landmark of Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate appears on the screen three times. It indicates the center of the city and its

22 The historian Large describes a tour of an eyewitness; the route is amazingly the same!

Black Market depicts postwar Berlin pars pro toto. Here, many languages are spoken as Soviets,

Germans and Americans are trading goods, nylons, cigarettes, chocolate and watches. The Black

Market scene and its short dialogues shed light not only on cultural differences but also on the

lack of food and jobs in occupied Berlin. The Black Market appears also in one of the songs of

the ex-Berliner Marlene Dietrich who is singing in a shady bar called Lorelei.23 The Black

Market scenes, the actual Black Market at the Brandenburg Gate and the different “goods” connoted in Erika von Schlütow’s song capture the social realities and the general mood of postwar Berlin. A city that just a few years before had touted itself as the power center of

Europe, becomes now reduced to a pile of rubble and is ruled by foreign powers. In Wilder’s

“rubble film” no attempt is shown for clearing the ruins away as in most of the German films of

the time (e.g. the rubble women appear in The Story of A Young Couple as discussed in chapter

2) as the focus is on present life and power relations in this environment not on the future of the

city.

Black Market and the destroyed Tiergarten

23 Loreley is also the name of one of the beautiful Rhine Maidens who lured navigators of this river to their dooms with their alluring singing, much as the ancient Greek Sirens did. It was also a real location in Berlin in the interwar period, thus it’s again a reference to earlier German films (here specifically The Blue Angel).

Other public places in the film are offices of the American army, the Denazification councils and

the German police station. As opposed to the first German rubble film, The Murderers Are

among Us (1946), in which no legal authority is represented, in some scenes of Wilder’s Berlin

film endless file cabinets and document folders fill the screen. The court plays an important role

in The Story of A Young Couple, as well, where with the Harlan case an unsuccessful

Denazification attempt in the Western sectors is used to argue for the superiority of the East. In A

Foreign Affair the most remarkable office scene takes place in a file cabinet room, in which

Captain Pringle seduces Congresswoman Phoebe Frost in order to avoid her putting hands on

Erika von Schlütow’s file. The geometrically regular cabinets which contain information on the

Berliners loose their function as Captain Pringle kisses Phoebe Frost stuck in the corner between two drawers. The offices, where justice should be delivered, are thus depicted as places where personal relationships alter legal rules and people with the right connections can easily get away.

File cabinets and office spaces of the American troops

The only private home shown in Wilder’s film is Erika’s apartment. As in other rubble films of

the 1940s, the ill-furnished apartment is in a bad condition with broken window glasses and

ruined stair case. The first camera shot of this apartment shows its window and a hand throwing

a key out for John Pringle who arrives there with a mattress from the Black Market. Later a

65 destroyed interior is shown in great detail, broken glass and furniture, before the viewer meets

Erika in the apartment. In a subtle way, Wilder uses this place as well, to tell about the power relations in the occupied city. Berlin was a city of rape during the Soviet occupation24 and the apartment’s broken windows and its undomesticated appearance make it into a place where one survives rather than lives.25

Bombed out apartments and American soldiers taking erotic advantages

Erika’s love relationship with Pringle has some violent elements that implicitly refer to the atrocities that women of postwar Berlin had to go through in these years. Some of the comic dialogues shed light on the sad-masochistic qualities of their relationship as for instance the following sentence by Pringle: “Why don’t I choke you a little, break you into two, build a fire under you, you blond witch!” Furthermore in a dialogue between Phoebe and Erika while they are walking in dark Berlin to Erika’s apartment she describes briefly what it meant to be a woman in Berlin in the last days of the war: “Bombed out a dozen times, everything caved in and

24 Though the precise statistics will never be known, existing estimates are breathtaking: 2 million women were raped in Germany, many of them more than once. In Berlin alone, hospital statistics indicate between 95,000 and 130,000 rape victims. Many women killed themselves rather than “concede” -- as some women put it -- to the Soviets; some men killed themselves and their wives rather than suffer the indignity of rape. A Woman in Berlin. 25 As opposed to the interior of the apartment in Staudte’s The Murderers Are among Us, in which the female protagonist clears the apartment and makes it very domestic.

66 pulled out from under me. My country, my possessions, my beliefs... yet somehow I kept going.

Months and months in air raid shelters, crammed in with five thousand other people. I kept going. What do you think it was like to be a woman in this town when the Russians first swept in? I kept going.” The private home as the conquered city of Berlin is used on the large scale to display gender and military politics in occupied Berlin.

The two main female characters, the asexual, meticulous and machinelike congress woman

Phoebe Frost and the overly sexual and spur-of-the-moment Erika von Schlütow appear first on the screen as opposite figures. While the plot is unfolding, the two women are soon shown at the same table in the night club Lorelei. As much as Phoebe Frost is despising Erika von Schlütow first, she is longing after the same attention from men and the same qualities Erika displays at the bar. As she loses her sexual repression throughout the film, she sings at the Lorelei her Iowa campaign song, starts wearing dresses with low décolletage and using make-up, the power relationship between the two women becomes reversed. Erika leaves the scene as an arrested person and Phoebe is left with Captain Pringle, whom she decides to marry. The reversal of power between the German and American female protagonists can be interpreted as a unique punishment for the past crimes of Nazi Germany.

The female protagonists: Erika von Schluetow and Phoebe Frost

The use of architecture in Wilder’s film reveals an ordinary place in an unordinary condition, a

fascination with and yet anxiety for the destroyed and bombed out German capital. Furthermore,

Wilder focuses on life in the empty shells and does not raise any questions about the future and

the reconstruction of the city. The analysis of the featured locations in Wilder’s A Foreign Affair

shows that many scenes, the cityscape on the large scale and Erika’s apartment on the small scale, function as documentary footage but also as a depiction of the power relationships in postwar, occupied Berlin. A Foreign Affair is a black comedy that does not shy away from criticizing the legal authorities, the occupying forces, German and Americans at the same time.

In the vein of the rubble films of the 1940s Wilder’s film is also an educative piece, however

does not tell the viewer what is right and wrong with the index finger. With a number of references to films in the interwar and even in the Nazi period, Wilder’s A Foreign Affair offers a

never-before-seen alternative for telling a multi-layered fictional story and documenting the realities of postwar Berlin at the same time. Wilder’s Berlin is less concerned with regulation than with negotiation and sheds light on the complexities of occupier and occupied as they

encounter each other in a Berlin dominated by the Black market and ruins.

BERLIN FROM A WORM’S-EYE-VIEW: CHRISTIANE F. (1981)

Featured locations in Christiane F.

Christiane F.’s (Vera Christiane Felscherinow) story from the 1970s Berlin drug scene is well known in Germany because two journalists from the news magazine Stern, Kai Herrmann and

Horst Rieck, ran a series of articles about her life and her addiction which eventually led to the

successful book Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. The report chronicles her life

from 1975 to 1978, when she was aged 12-15. Christiane was born in Hamburg and her family

moved to West Berlin when she was a child. With 12, she first smoked hashish and by the time

she was 14 she was a prostitute in the Bahnhof Zoo scene, a group of teenaged drug-users and

prostitutes in Berlin. Christiane tried numerous times to overcome her addiction, but did not

70 become totally clean until the birth of her son in 1996. As of 2007, she remains clean and lives with her son in a small city in Brandenburg. In 1981, the story was made into a film directed by

Uli Edel.

The statistics of the featured locations in Christiane F. reveals that there are almost no private home places shown in the movie and the public spaces of West-Berlin dominate the screen. The limited scenes, in which Cristiane’s apartment and her bedroom in the Gropius-Stadt appear, are, however, crucial to understand why she chose to become a drug user. In order to fill this gap in the film, descriptions of the Gropius-Stadt from the book will serve as a starting point for this analysis. The first pages in the book version of Christiane’s story describe the Berlin-Neukölln neighborhood, the Gropius-Stadt, in great detail. In the 1960s and 1970s two new housing projects took place in West Berlin in order to accommodate the workers brought to the city. The

Gropius-Stadt on the southern edge of the city and the Märkische Viertel in the north looked according to the historian David Clay Large “as if they had been dropped on the Brandenburg plain by helicopter” (473). Although more solidly built than their East German equivalent in

Marzahn, they functioned better as statement of architectural hubris than as lodgings for human beings.26 Only in the end of the 1980s, when the city spent additional millions to upgrade these structures and to alter their monolithic appearance, did they become more livable.

26 Visiting one of these complexes in 1963, the British writer Ian Fleming spoke of a system that “treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells” (quoted in Large 473).

The Gropiusstadt Christiane’s room in the film

The Gropiusstadt

The book starts with Christiane’s memories of a moving: “Es war wahnsinnig aufregend. Meine

Mutter packte tagelang Koffer und Kisten. Ich begriff, dass für uns ein neues Leben anfing”

(15). While her mother is packing and they are on their way to move to Berlin from Schleswig-

Holstein, the six-year old Christiane has big expectations of their new place. The whole family is dreaming, the mother and the father about a big, sunny apartment and of new furniture and the two girls are fantasizing about their future bedroom. The reality of the Gropius-Stadt does not meet their expectations, though, and especially the two girls who are sharing a half room feel lost in Berlin. Christiane describes the Gropius-Stadt in the following way: „Gropiusstadt, das sind

Hochhäuser für 45000 Menschen, dazwischen Rasen und Einkaufzentren. Von weitem sah alles neu und sehr gepflegt aus. Doch wenn man zwischen den Hochhäusern war, stank es überall

72 nach Pisse und Kacke. Das kam von den vielen Hunden und den vielen Kindern, die in

Gropiusstadt leben. Am meisten stank es im Treppenhaus“ (16). As opposed to the constructors

Christiane finds the place perfect before its completion. She and her sister are eagerly exploring the green spots around the Gropius-Stadt and experience it as a giant playground. They especially enjoy a narrow strip with trees close to the Berlin Wall as their own private “No- man’s-land.” However, soon signs appear everywhere, which prohibit children entering the grass and playing on the construction sites.27 As the Gropius-Stadt becomes architecturally a perfect ensemble, fewer opportunities for spontaneous explorations remain for its children inhabitants (33).28

In the film the Gropius-Stadt is shown as a dark and dreary place and only small rooms,

Christiane’s bedroom or a narrow kitchen and bathroom appear on the screen. All the scenes that take place in the home are linked to bad events: Christiane’s sister leaving, overdosing or unsuccessful conversations with the mother. The limited role of the Gropius-Stadt in the film is

27 “Es wurde eben alles immer perfekter mit der Zeit in Gropiusstadt. Als wie hinzogen, war die großartige Modellsiedlung noch nicht fertig. Vor allem außerhalb des Hochhausviertels war vieles noch nicht perfekt. In kleinen Ausflügen, die auch wir jüngeren Kinder schon alleine machen konnten, erreichte man richtig paradiesische Spielplätze. Der schönste war an der Mauer, die ja nicht weit von Gropiusstadt ist. Da gab es einen Streifen, den nannten wir Wäldchen oder Niemandsland. Der war kaum 20 Meter breit und wenigstens anderthalb Kilometer lang. Bäume, Büsche, Gras so hoch wie wir, alte Bretter, Wasserlöcher” [...] „Irgendwann haben sie dann gemerkt, dass da Kinder aus Gropiusstadt spielten und Spaß hatten. Da sind wieder die Trupps angerückt und haben Ordnung gemacht“ (33). 28 According to Christiane children of the Gropius-Stadt only learned about their limits and restrictions: „Man lernte in Gropiusstadt einfach automatisch zu tun, was verboten war. Verboten zum Beispiel war, irgend etwas zu spielen, was Spaß machte“ [...] Die sogenannten Parkanlagen zwischen den Hochhäusern, das sind Schilderparks. Die meisten Schilder verbieten natürlich Kindern irgend etwas. [...] Im Treppenhaus und in der Umgebung unseres Hochhauses durften Kinder eigentlich nur auf Zehenspitzen rumschleifen. Spielen, toben, Rollschuh- oder Fahrradfahren – verboten (23). Their childhood suddenly becomes interrupted and Christiane and her sister do not find the same places in the new environment where they used to have fun in their old village in West Germany. Additionally, the apartments in the high-rise buildings harbor domestic abuse and Christiane’s family is no exemption: „Bei anderen Kindern in der Gropiusstadt war es zu Hause nicht anders. Die hatten sogen manchmal richtige Veilchen im Gesicht und ihre Mütter auch. Es gab Väter, die lagen betrunken auf der Strasse oder auf dem Spielplatz rum“ (20). Thus, the Gropius-Stadt appears as a dull environment, which does not have anything interesting and inspiring to offer its teenager inhabitants.

to provide an explanation for Christiane’s decision for hard drug use. Despite having an address

in Berlin and her own room, her family is destroyed, and the place does not function as a home.

The apartment is a fragmented, limited, emotionless place, and does not offer any protection for

Christiane. The realities of the Gropius-Stadt that are also depicted even if marginally in the film

can be juxtaposed with Christiane’s drug dreams about her ideal home. In the book as a drug

addict she is dreaming of a place that is located in a blue-collar neighborhood with two or three

small rooms, low ceilings, small windows and with well-worn wooden steps to the stairwell. She

describes the sensory feelings of this place in great detail, as it ideally “smells a little bit like

food” (95).29

Christiane’s ideal house is described as synthesis of her childhood provincial location and Berlin.

In her drug dream the house is surrounded by green parks and has many plants inside. Nothing

is pre-fabricated and inside Christiane had a corner “like they have in Arabia or India.” There

would be no doors in the building, only curtains because when doors open and shut that makes

noise and disharmony. On the walls would be shelves full of books by people who had also

found peace and knew about animals and nature. The hanging bookshelves would have been

made by Christiane herself out of boards and ropes. Christiane’s drug dream about an ideal

home shows that she does not have a real home, and again it displays the shortcomings of the pre-fabricated apartments of the Gropius-Stadt. This dream creates a “no-place,” a fantasy place where she can be happy and live a meaningful life. As in Carow’s The Legend of Paul and

Paula, Christiane’s story sheds light on the shortcomings of prefabricated buildings, whose

29 She addresses details as well and the general mood of the environment: “The steps would be so narrow that you’d have to stand aside for your neighbor when he came through. Everybody would work hard, but they would all be very satisfied. They would not be into accumulating things; they were not envious, they would help each other out; they would be completely different from the rich and also quite different from the workers in the high-rises from Gropiusstadt. No pandemonium would break out in this house“ (96).

forlorn inhabitants are dreaming of alternative places. The two dreams from East and West from the 1970s, however also reveal significant differences between drug scenes on the two sides of the Wall. Whereas the underground stations in the central West Berlin were filled with drug

addicts, the East protected by the cordon sanitaire did not have drug problems until the fall of

the Wall.

As opposed to the limited number of scenes shot in Christiane’s home, the center of West Berlin,

which has been mainly established after the division of Berlin, dominates the screen. The early

commercial reconstruction of West Berlin took place in the area around the Zoo Station and the

Kurfürstendamm, whose revival, was hoped, would help fuel the local economy and create a

center for the Western part of the divided city. In 1950 the luxurious KaDeWe department store

reopened its doors to the West Berlin citizens. This area of West Berlin became one of the

world’s most famous shopping centers under the reigning symbol of the revolving Mercedes star

atop the high-rise Mercedes Benz Zentrale building. The central transport facility in West Berlin

during the division of the city, and thereafter for the western central area of Berlin until opening

of the new central station on 28 May 2006 was the station named Berlin Zoologischer Garten

(German for Berlin Zoological Garden, short form Berlin Zoo or colloquially Bahnhof Zoo). In

the 1970s and 1980s when the rear of the station was facing Jebensstraße it became a meeting

point for prostitutes, teen runaways and drug addicts. Along with the upscale shopping district,

this station is the most important filming location in Christiane F.

The center of West-Berlin, underground station and underground shopping area

The Mercendes Benz Zentrale and the Zoo Station in West Berlin

Exact street names and locations of the West Berlin center, which are also recognizable for an

outsider, appear only in the first scenes while telling about Christiane’s downfall. The first

scenes take place in the SOUND, a new disco with most modern equipment that Christiane is

fascinated with. Before Christiane starts taking drugs, the viewer sees her sitting at the station

under the sign “Kurfürstendamm” after a night destroying shopping windows in the

undergrounds and watching police cars from the top of the Mercedes Zentrale building. By

showing the outsiders of West Berlin society in the fanciest places of the city during the night,

the use of architecture functions as a criticism of consumer society. Shopping windows that

display expensive furniture and clothes are constantly recurring backgrounds throughout the

film. The bustling shopping district is shown from the perspectives of those who cannot enter

these stores as consumers and are located on the periphery of West Berlin’s society.

As Christiane gets step by step drawn deeper into the scene the specificity of locations

disappears and places of an underworld are shown to the audience that could be anytime,

anywhere. These nonspecific places are underground tunnels and the typical interiors of heroin

addicts. In a long and slow downward spiral, Berlin appears from worm’s-eye-view and

according to Christiane’s emotional state as a desolated, dark and depressing city. Most of the

scenes were filmed during the night; however slow long shots of empty streets that only portray

the street level, the bottom of bus stop and garbage cans fill the screen. Needle and prostitution

scenes add to the documentary character of the film and the back of the Zoo station, where

Christiane sells herself to get money to support her addiction remains the only recognizable place

throughout the rest of the film.

Whereas the first scenes of the film with its specific locations and the music of David Bowie

display some fascination with the lost teenagers’ sorrows in Berlin, in the second part of

Christiane F. the film’s mood changes radically in order to avoid glamorizing hard drug use.

The 138-minute long uncut film becomes steadily darker and seedier towards its end and paints a

bleak picture of Berlin and the world as the film’s characters move in a decadent world steeped

in despair, pain, and anguish. The dark public places of the city center loses its specificity and changes into a hostile organism that has Christiane and her friends under its spell. Christiane fails, the city wins. A short redemption is offered with the last architectural image of the film, which is a lonely snow-covered house in the great plain of Northern Germany, where Christiane is recovering.

Berlin from a worm's-eye-view The Zoo Station

Underground images

The featured locations in the film and book show that the planning of high-rise buildings was a central theme in West as much as it was in East Berlin. In the center of West Berlin they became the focal points of commercial and consumer society but they have also appeared in the peripheries of West Berlin. The Gropius-Stadt was supposed to serve as a synthesis of modern, effective architectural technology and sensitivity to social concerns. The standardization of architectural production in both arenas is criticized in the book and film about Christiane’s teenage life in Berlin. As Paul and Paula’s story in East Berlin, her life in the Gropius-Stadt shows that these satellite cities did not bring urban recovery as it was expected from its creators.

Berlin films from the 1970s and early 1980s reveal that despite of the different ideologies, East and West had some common problems in urban planning. In their “drug dreams,” not only

Christiane but also Paul and Paula are dreaming of alternative places that are “no-places” in their

societies while living in characterless, monotone and indistinguishable buildings. The modern

postwar urban places promoted in The Story of A Young Couple become targets of criticism and

the stories narrate a loss caused by reckless urban modernization. Christiane F. shows a built up

city that does not fulfill the expectations of the restoration neither in the city center nor in the periphery of West Berlin. Whereas the criticism of urban restoration in The Legend of Paul and

Paula cannot take place explicitly, the director of Christiane F. does not shy away from exposing the darkest corners of the showcase architecture of West Berlin to his viewers.

ARCHITECTS AND REBELS: BERLIN, CHAMISSOPLATZ (1984)

Rudolf Thome’s film entitled after an exact location in Kreuzberg, West Berlin, Berlin,

Chamissoplatz from 1984 introduces a critique of building codes through the housing turmoil and public debates around the Chamissoplatz and a love relationship with opposing views on an urban reconstruction. The neighborhood Kreuzberg (Bezirk Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg) maintained an alternative flair in the West Berlin cityscape. In divided Berlin, Kreuzberg was the city’s most densely populated district and after WWII it became transformed into a melting pot of foreigners, fringe groups and members of the alternative scene. The Wilhelminian façades along Chamissoplatz from the 19th century were one of the most important centers of this neighborhood and also the filming location for Thome’s Berlin, Chamissoplatz.

Chamissoplatz is named after the French-born botanist and poet Adelbert von Chamisso, and is located, as also the street signs in Thome’s film orient the viewer, between the Willibald-Alexis-

Straße and the Arndtstraße. The Chamissoplatz is an oasis in the middle of the concrete jungle and one of the few squares in Berlin which survived the wartime bombing raids completely intact. Cobbled streets and nineteenth century town houses surround a small park and playground. The place is called Chamissokiez by its inhabitants and serves today as a public open-air-museum of “Berlin 100 years ago.“ Most of the buildings on this square were erected in the 19th century. Very small living spaces were forced beyond ordinary looking facades in the

Wilhelminian area that were not visible from the outside. In the 1970s and 1980s heated debates

about the possibilities between tabula rasa planning and historical reconstruction took place on

this square and the inhabitants contributed to a large degree to saving the place from a complete

demolition.

It is important to note that the neighborhood Kreuzberg and the surrounding area were among the

favorite terrains of the West German Hausbesetzer (squatters) scene of the 1970s and 1980s.

They occupied a number of vacant standing houses that were in line for demolition or renovation. Many of these structures were owned by speculators who had evicted the tenants

and were holding the properties as tax write-offs. The buildings were generally derelict and

squalid, which made them all the more attractive to the squatters. The squatters’ movement

constituted the hard core of West Berlin’s alternative scenes in the 1970s and 1980s and its soft

core consisted primarily of artists, intellectuals, students, teachers, architects, and gallery owners

who descended on the city for the high salaries, low rents, and feeling of self-importance they

got from living in the “hippest place in Germany” (Large 495). In each case the alternative scene

was always ready to fight against city authorities and local entrepreneurs who wanted to set up

new business in their area as they feared that their beloved Kiez could end up looking

Charlottenburg with its rich private homes and lose its authenticity. A group of this alternative

scene appears in Thome’s film with the aim to save the architecture of and their own or shared

apartments at the Chamissoplatz.

The architecture of the Chamissoplatz as a background was often used in films if directors

wanted to show an old piece of Berlin. Two films from the 1980s used the place for more than a

pure backdrop but rather as a substance of their plot developments. Thome’s narrative feature

film contrasts with the documentary on the housing crisis embodied by Chamissoplatz entitled

Und Wenn Wir Nicht Wollen (And If We Don’t Want To) and directed by Udo Radek (1981).

Thome, however also uses realistic meetings between tenants and city officials, and spin-off

activities from the housing issue, to provide ample venues for the two protagonists, an older

architect and a younger student, to fall in love. The architect Martin wants to demolish the

buildings and redevelop the area whereas the student Anna is fighting against demolition. The

Chamissoplatz sector is portrayed as one of the hot spots of the housing turmoil in the city,

which was eventually getting worse as this film was released in 1984.

Featured locations in Rudolf Thome’s Berlin, Chamissoplatz

The statistics of the featured scenes in the film show that Berlin, Chamissoplatz uses similar places as most of the films analyzed in this thesis. 29% of the film uses Berlin as a background and in most cases the Chamissoplatz. The film starts with a crane shot and a long and slow camera movement coming down from above to the square. The long shots are focusing on the architecture of the square and show its turn-of-the-century houses from to top till the ground

level. It is a sunny afternoon and the square is populated with many different age groups,

children are playing on the playground and teenagers and youngsters are standing around a stage

on which a band is playing. The camera continues towards the ground level and stops while

showing a bank on which Anna Bach and Martin Berger are sitting and discussing the future of

the place. Anna is holding a camera in her hand and this way the film has a documentary effect

as it is showing a place that might be gone if city officials decide to demolish the buildings. The

first sentence of the film informs the audience that the Chamissoplatz is the last district in Berlin

whose buildings remained intact. From the interview Anna is conducting with the architect, it

becomes clear that there are basically two choices for the future of the square: to tumble down its

“dark holes” or to repair the buildings and make them livable. From the interview we learn that

the Senate most likely does not want to save these buildings and is against cheap flats with low

rent.

The opening shots of Berlin, Chamissoplatz

Public discussions on a public space

It is difficult to draw a clear line between private and public places shown in the film as the community living on the square uses private homes and public places simultaneously for their meetings while discussing their strategies of protest against the city authorities. One of the favorite meeting places is the so called Chamissoladen (Chamisso Get-Together), which is a small shop where the young inhabitants of the square, students and artists meet and discuss the future of their environment. The shots on location reveal the density of the population who are gathering together at the weekly market and also know and greet each other in the staircases.

The student Anna invites the architect Martin to one of their meeting in the Chamisso Get-

Together where the inhabitants of the square try to find out whether or not the houses on the square are going to be demolished.

Martin is not allowed to share any information about the future of the Chamissoplatz with them, however after some hesitation he tells about the different options that tenants might have to face in the future. He says that renovation cannot be done against people’s will, therefore the owners

will most likely offer alternatives for the tenants and they will have to move out. The Senate will

conduct an examination on the square and nothing has been decided yet but there are different

categories (1. maintenance, 2. modernization desirable, 3. modernization problematic) and one of

them will be applied in this case. One of the students records Martin’s words while he is sharing

confidential information with the group. Later, they quote him in a newspaper without asking

him for permission, which is going to lead to a break-up between Anna and Martin. The

architect Martin is portrayed as an expert who, like the protagonist of Kahane’s film, is

dependent on city authorities and limited in his profession. Unlike the GDR’s young architects,

however he is able to contribute to the needs and desires of a local community and the

Chamissoplatz soon becomes his new home and unofficial workplace.

Discussions about the future of the Chamissoplatz

The love relationship unfolds basically on the square: one night Martin sleeps there in his car and

paints “I love you” on the fire wall that Anna can see from her apartment window on the 4th floor. For their first breakfast they are bringing food from the local farmer’s market and they confess their love in the hallways in the old buildings. Martin, however cannot integrate fully into Anna’s life and into the community of the square. He is not regarded as a full member of the community while they are discussing their strategies against the Senate. When the couple is invited for dinner at a living collectivity (WG or Wohngemeinschaft) Anna has to prevent her friends talking about the architectural future of the place as they would hurt Martin. When the

conversation, however is reduced to general small talk, silence soon becomes longer than the intense discussions.

The home places of the couple could not be more different. Martin lives in a private house with large windows and spaces, light and many rooms. His home is one of the typical West Berlin

Eigenheime (own home with a lawn) that was “politically fostered as a bulwark against communism” (Krieger 200). Anna lives in one of the “dark holes” in an old building of the

Chamissoplatz. While Anna lives with a roommate, who is earning some money as a prostitute while going to the university, Martin lives with his wife and they also have a maid. In the big house of Martin’s, however, there are no real conversations taking place, whereas in Anna’s buildings the neighbors know each other’s lives in great detail and spend their evenings and dinners with each other. The basic differences between the philosophy student Anna and the architect Martin – age, social status, ideas on urban development – are visually expressed through the radically different environments, in which they are living.

Martin’s own house Anna’s apartment on the Chamissoplatz

There are a number of workplaces depicted in the film, of which contribute to the

characterization of the main figures. Anna works as an assistant in a lawyer’s office in the

vicinity of the Chamissoplatz whereas Martin works in a modern architect’s office. Whereas

Anna is topographically restricted to her beloved Kiez, Martin is depicted in different parts of

Berlin. He is also shown on the construction site once but is mainly surrounded with thick files

and paperwork in his clean and light office. As an architect he is not satisfied with the buildings

he is designing. While Anna visits him at his office they are standing in front of a photograph.

Laconically, Martin says “We cannot build according to the American style in Berlin” while they

are staring at the façade of a white building. Thome does not offer anything more specific about

this statement, all we know is the Martin adores the building and he took the photo himself. As

in Kahane’s film, the protagonist architect feel restricted in his profession and even through,

unlike the East German colleague, Martin is able to build real buildings they do not reflect his

preferences.

Martin’s workplace with Richard Meier’s Saltzman House on the wall

The image on the wall is the Saltzman house in East Hampton (N.Y.) from the American

architect Richard Meier. Martin’s enthusiasm for Meier’s new modern architecture reflects on

the reception of American postmodern criticism in Germany. One of the most influential

postmodern architectural ideologies by Robert Venturi’s manifesto for “complexity and

contradiction” was written in the 1960s, but had its strongest impact in the 1980s as a

postmodern tract. Venturi asked for a contradictory approach toward architectural planning. His

book, translated into German was enthusiastically welcomed in West Germany as it attacked

modern international style architecture. With the help of Venturi, many German architects from

the 1980s advocated changes in architectural ideology (Krieger 202). But instead of intellectual

complexity, only profitable density and uniformity was achieved when the modern postwar

urban spaces in West German cities were remodeled according to postmodern dogma. In his

analysis on the German-American architectural relationships in West Germany, Peter Krieger

writes that “instead of contradiction, one-dimensional clichés of regionalism gained influence in the urban debates” (202). In this context, the image of Meier’s typically white, unique spatial system symbolizes Martin’s desire to build complex, contradictory and original buildings,

however he is not allowed to carry out his ideas in West Berlin.

Martin at the construction site Ideas about saving the apartments of the Square

When on the construction site, Martin is shown among the buildings that he is allowed to design

in West Berlin. They are built according to the international style lacking “complexity and contradiction” and Martin is not portrayed as a person who is satisfied with his job. On the other hand, Martin starts collecting building material samples on the Chamissoplatz that becomes his unofficial workplace, in order to be able to judge the condition of the buildings better. While

sitting at the window in Anna’s apartment, he comes up with ground floor plans in which he

combines the small units, “dark holes” into comfortable spaces with a private bathroom. Little

by little, after his initial doubts, he joins the group of students and artists mentally and

practically, however no conversation between the community and the architect Martin takes

place. As a result, the community publishes Martin’s information about the future of the square

during a street festival. Martin and Anna have just arrived from the spontaneous trip to Italy and

Anna is pregnant. Martin finally feels “at home” on the square when he suddenly realizes that

they published his secret information in the pamphlet without his permission. He leaves the

square and the last scenes show Anna running after him leaving the audience ponder about the

future of the relationship and the architecture of the Chamissoplatz.

Berlin, Chamissoplatz as the title of the film deals with a very specific part of Berlin. The main square of Berlin’s alternative scene raises questions about urban recovery, the importance of preserving a piece of old Berlin in the middle of the divided and mainly rebuilt city and sheds light on local and global architectural trends and solutions. While the film portrays through the love relationship both the dreams of an architect and an inhabitant alike, the latter is clearly favored by the director as Anna’s friends and neighbors also receive a major role. A gap between the architect Martin and the group of protesters cannot be overcome in the film as a real dialogue does not become feasible among them. The open ending of the film makes the

audience raise questions about their acute living environment as the possible continuity or break

up of the love relationship is highly dependent on the architectural future of the square. In the

last shots of the film the unfinished discussions around the future of a piece of old Berlin wins

making the city a true protagonist of the film.

CHAPTER CONCLUSION

The film analyses of the previous chapters argue that architecture in Berlin films made during the

Cold War was used for many different purposes. Maetzig’s East German propaganda film uses

Berlin’s built environment and the building of the Stalin Allee mainly to construct a decadent,

money-hungry West Berlin as opposed to a human, artistic East Berlin, where a true new begin is

possible for everyone in the society. Depicting life in the rubbles of Berlin instead of showing the future of the city, Billy Wilder’s insider/outsider perspective depicts public and private places

in Berlin to display contemporary gender, political and economic relationships. He is also using

a number of images from Nazi films and in juxtaposing them with the ruins of postwar Berlin

appropriates them according to his message. Both directors take their audience to a sight seeing

tour: Wilder depicts a ruined yet alive Berlin whereas Maetzig uses the ruins of the city to

highlight the splendor of the new architecture of the East.

In the second pair of films by Carow and Edel, satellite cities of both East and West Berlin are

criticized and reveal that the opposing sides were often dealing with similar problems in urban

planning. A shared criticism of the international style characterizes these two Berlin films

regardless of whether they were filmed in the East or in the West. Whereas in Christiane F. the

criticism of consumer culture, capitalism and the monotony of the Gropius-Stadt through the

architectural images of the film become explicit, Carow’s criticism is rather subtle in The Legend

of Paul and Paula and architecture appears on the screen most powerfully when words and dialogues cannot be used to get his message across. Showing the ruthlessness of urban renewal

through the blown-up images of the old houses, morning the loss of Paula’s apartment and

displaying the unfitting heritage of Paula in Paul’s small bedroom are all parts of this strategy.

The juxtaposition of old and new houses is a leitmotif that appears in East and West Berlin films

simultaneously. Whereas in the East they are mercilessly blown up or become still images to be

displayed at galleries in Kahane’s The Architects, in the West tenants are powerfully present on

the movie screen and are also eagerly participating in architectural debates that have an effect on

their lives. The last pair of films (Thome and Kahane) portrays architects as protagonists, who

are both trying to position themselves in their profession but feel restricted and are forced to find

compromises. Both Kahane’s East German architect and Thome’s West German architect from

the 1980s are shown as isolated with their ideas in the end of the film, however the remaining

forces are radically different: in the East the city authorities, in the West the inhabitants of the

Chamissoplatz, who in reality managed to achieve their goal and saved the old buildings of the

square. The use of architecture in these films sheds light on a wide range of political, economic and cultural power relationships of specific time periods and in each film contribute to the plot and position the protagonists with a powerful visual language.

CHAPTER FOUR – EAST, WEST: THE BERLIN REPUBLIC IN FILM

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

The last chapter of this thesis offers an insight into the architectural representations of East and

West Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Films about Berlin made during the Cold War

focused on the neighborhoods of Berlin and did not portray the Wall and the centers of their

respective halves in most cases. Whereas in Berlin-films before the Wende (reunification) urban

planning problems in the East and the West are often similar, in the movies of the Berlin

Republic East and West show rather striking divergences. The spatial analysis of the filmed

locations shows that a distinct East and West are created in the films of the Berlin Republic, and

despite the fact that in all three cases (von Trotta’s The Promise, Stöhr’s Berlin is in Germany

and Becker’s Goodbye Lenin) the film narrative and the plot makes this distinction more

ambiguous and multi-layered an East-West dichotomy dominates the screen. In the upcoming

interpretations special attention will be given to some of the landmark architecture that appears

on the screen such as the Berlin Wall and the West Berlin center in The Promise, the TV Tower in Berlin is in Germany, and the showcase architecture of the East and the Lenin statue that were

used in Goodbye Lenin!

THE BORDER BECOMES VISIBLE: THE PROMISE (1994)

The director Margarethe von Trotta made many attempts to confront the years of the divided

Berlin and German reunification. In many of her films, Trotta used documentary footage and fictional story simultaneously. In The Promise directed in 1994, Berlin is the setting for the tale of two lovers who are separated by the Berlin Wall. Trotta sees history and politics through the eyes of the two people but also tells a number of subplots to offer a number of perspectives about living in Berlin during the Cold War. The film begins with some black and white footage of the construction of the Berlin Wall in the summer of 1961, the Cold War’s most visible symbol - the

Iron Curtain. The voice-over narrator reminds us that soon the Wall remained the only thing that kept up the illusion that all that divided Germany was a wall.

In the first scenes of the film, a group of young people in East Berlin, shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, decide to make their way to the West through the sewer system. One member of the group, Konrad, trips and falls on the street as the others descend into a manhole. He urges the others to go on without him and promises his girlfriend, Sophie, that he will come later. It is never made clear whether Konrad, left behind during the escape when the group was surprised by a truck of soldiers patrolling the streets, deliberately chose to stay behind. In the next 28 years, they meet only three times. One of those times is in Prague in 1968 where Konrad, who becomes an astrophysicist, is sent to deliver a scientific presentation.

Nothing has changed in the lovers’ feelings for one another. During their reunion, interrupted by the Soviet invasion, Sophie becomes pregnant. During another brief encounter, in East Berlin,

Konrad insists that Sophie, who wants to stay with him, remain in the West. He is under the impression that he will be allowed to join her. When the plan falls through and their son is born,

Sophie decides she can no longer tolerate the uncertainty and breaks off relations with him.

Twelve years later Konrad gets the opportunity to travel to West Berlin and meets his son for the first time, as well as Sophie’s new husband. Konrad also has a wife and a daughter. His desire to see his child leads him to make various compromises with the Communist regime. In the end he strikes a Stasi (East German secret police) official and loses his position, as well as his new family. In November 1989, the night the Berlin Wall comes down, Konrad and Sophie are reunited on a bridge between East and West. Whether any feeling is left between the man and woman, whether they can even understand each other, remains uncertain.

Featured location in The Promise

The featured locations in Trotta’s film can be grouped similarly to the locations in the previous

chapters: the public spaces in Berlin, home places and workplaces. The Wall appears as the most

powerful image, it is shown as it is being built in 1961 and later a visual narrative tells about the

development of its physical appearance. The separation of the couple is a planned narrative

advice to create a tension through which the city is presented. The Wall becomes the central architectural piece but also the central character in the film and everything revolves around it.

After the unsuccessful escape Konrad conscripted into the army work on the Wall and watches

Sophie with a binocular waving at him from a window in the West. Physically separating the

once unified couple is a direct reference to the division of Berlin by the Wall. Trotta is so explicit

in her metaphors that she places Konrad and Sophie at the center of almost every major cultural

event between East and West.

Divided Berlin

Konrad in the East and Sophie in the West

The Wall is a recurring leitmotif in the film and has multiple functions. First, its physical body orients the viewer chronologically in a film that tells a story from 1961 until 1989. Second, the most powerful images of the Berlin Wall appear in documentary footages used in the opening and closing shots of the film and each character is positioned with the aid of the Wall: Konrad working on it, Sophie touching its graffiti covered West side, their son throwing a ball over the

Wall from the West to the East but also the personality of the protagonists of the subplots are shaped with the help of the Wall (Konrad’s brother-in-law is shot in the No’ man’s land on the

East side of the Wall after being forced by authorities to leave the East for the West part of the city).

The mixture of fiction and reality in the depiction of the Berlin Wall

The Wall from the West and from the East

One of the most powerful wall scenes depicts Konrad and his son Alex walking at the West side

of the Berlin Wall. The son grown up in the West has an extremely different view from his father

on what the wall is. Whereas Konrad looks at the wall as a detriment to his life, it is a playground

for the son. The film shows Alex throwing a ball over the Wall, and at the father’s disbelief

shortly the ball is returned. The scene reveals a generation gap between father and son but also

the different extent their lives were affected by the Cold War.

Throwing a ball over the Wall, Konrad and his son during a walk

The Wall functions to depict the border, which becomes in many scenes a concrete place. When

Sophie’s and Konrad’s son crosses the border a no-man’s-land becomes visible on the screen,

while he is sitting and waiting on a chair, which is neither in West Berlin, nor in East Berlin.

Images of the crossing points such as Berlin-Friedrichstrasse Station are used to intensify the

presence of the Wall. Von Trotta does not only show the physical development of the Berlin

Wall but also how people separated by it are keeping in touch with each other, others crossing

the Wall underneath or while risking their lives during the night and finally also those who

including Konrad are working at and on the Wall to keep it functioning.

Border crossings: Konrad as member of the research group and Sophie’s and Konrad’s son

Famous crossing point, legal crossing Illegal border crossing

The images of the wall also add to the creation of a psychological wall and are used to portray

how Sophie and Konrad become physically, mentally and emotionally separated from each other.

When on November 9, 1989 the Wall begins to crumble, Konrad is shown as an aged,

impoverished and barely surviving person. People in the streets yell, “The Wall is open!” and

his reply, “Which wall?” reveals the extent to which he has been separated from the political

reality. Sophie and her son leave their apartment to cross the border but the final reunion is

anticlimactic. The Wall may be gone, but the reality reflects the division of the two solitudes

represented by Konrad and Sophie - Germany may be reunited, but the two solitudes remain.

The fall of the Wall and the ending of the Cold War symbolically bring peace; however, the last

Wall scenes imply that social and psychological issues remain unresolved.

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Separated by the Wall the once united couple becomes more and more divided. Konrad becomes

the East German academic, well-respected, yet numbingly dispassionate. Sophie becomes the

West, flashy, sexy yet unhappy. Both characters are over-saturated metaphors of the society on

their side of the Wall. The conflict of their separation is the tracing of the Wall as urban division.

Both stories have exaggerated qualities (Konrad as a border guard, then scientist and coal worker

and Sophie as a fashion model, later a tour guide fluent in English) but they are important in

presenting Berlin as a divided city.

There are not too many home places shown in the film and the scenes in this regard support the

above mentioned dichotomy. In the East Berlin scenes Konrad is mainly depicted at his

workplace in Potsdam at the Astrophysics Institute and many of the images imply that while he

is “in prison,” he still has his scientific work and belongs to a small number of privileged

members of the East German society who can travel as one of the firsts to a West Berlin

convention to present his research. As opposed to the Plattenbau home places discussed in the

East Berlin chapter, von Trotta’s film shows a successful citizen of East Germany, who owns a

private house with his new family. Konrad becomes a passive man who tries everything to be

content with his work and life.

Konrad’s workplace in Potsdam, the East German scientist

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Sophie is employed by her aunt in the West who runs a thriving fashion business. Despite her freedom and success in the capitalist West, she longs for Konrad and for the East. It is Sophie who continues to attempt to reach Konrad, arranging an escape opportunity (missed), their meeting in Prague, and a later one in East Berlin. Sophie marries a French artist and they have a spacious and colorful private home in Charlottenburg. The private and professional lives of

Konrad and Sophie become fully separated and this is also represented in the interiors and workplaces that are typical images of East and West Berlin.

The analysis of featured locations in von Trotta’s The Promise shows that Berlin’s and its inhabitants’ division by the Wall are the main concerns of the director. Von Trotta remains an observer and she also tries to create a distance from the events when she uses documentary footage from the time in her fictional story. Von Trotta observes and explores the dimensions of the social and emotional realms, the political and personal that were changed with the erection of the Wall.

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LOST AND FOUND: BERLIN IS IN GERMANY (2001)

“This book reports the story of Franz Biberkopf, an erstwhile cement- and transport-worker in

Berlin. He has just been discharged from prison where he has been doing time because of former

incidents, and is now back in Berlin, determined to lead a decent life.” This is the first sentence

of Alfred Döblin’s famous Berlin-novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) from the Weimar

Republic, whose text is often regarded as the first modern German account to be concerned with the representation of the metropolis. In his novel Döblin tells the story of the petty bourgeois

criminal and former transport worker Franz Biberkopf and his repeatedly frustrated efforts to

become a “decent man,” after his release from Berlin’s Tegel prison where he had been confined

for the “accidental” murder of his girlfriend. Biberkopf tries to integrate back to society while

taking on jobs as salesman, vendor of newspapers, and pimp, and the novel describes this

struggle against the constant backdrop of the life of the city.

Set in post-Wende Germany in the year 2001, Hannes Stöhr’s Berlin is in Germany starts with

the very same set-up: Martin Schulz imprisoned because of the “accidental murder” of a person

is released from jail in Brandenburg. As a former citizen of the German Democratic Republic,

he experienced the fall of the wall from his prison cell. Upon release, he receives the items in his

possession at the time of his arrest: a blue East German identification card, an East German

driver’s license, and a wallet full of East German money. Martin is full of hope when he returns

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home, but hardly recognizes East Berlin again. The “New Berlin” has already taken over and the

“Old East Berlin” clings desperately to its last remaining traits. The eleven-year absence is like a time machine and Martin runs into one difficulty after another while finding his place in this new world. Martin meets his ex-wife Manuela after 11 years and his son Rokko for the first time.

While searching for a job and home in a changed Berlin, Martin becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

Featured locations in Berlin is in Germany

Berlin appears in the film as a place of construction and becomes visible in the first scenes of the

film, while Martin is taking a train from the prison to the city. The train approaches Berlin from

the West, just like in Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Big City from 1922, and after the

Brandenburg landscape the governmental area is shown to the viewer. This scene shows that the legacy of the interwar period is not reflected only in the story but also in the camera movement and film aesthetics. Berlin is depicted as the biggest construction site of Europe and the first buildings Martin sees from the train window are the new governmental buildings, thus

105 constructions of the Berlin Republic. His trip ends at the Alexanderplatz, the center of the former East Berlin. This location shows that the former East Berlin, as the title of the film, is also the protagonist of the film.

Berlin as the biggest construction site in Europe The Chancellery building under construction

Berlin, Alexanderplatz Sensory overload in the city, e.g. mobile phones

The center of the former East Berlin becomes an important role in the film and also the showcase architecture of the GDR, the Alexanderplatz and the TV Tower appear on the screen. The TV

Tower, the strongest and most visible physical symbol of the progress in the East plays an especially significant role throughout the film. This is a symbol that Martin knew very well, and as he attempts to regain his life, the tower becomes clearer and bigger in the background as he moves through the plot. It is shown as he meets another friend who also turns out to be a cab driver that he knew in prison. It is shown out the window of the office of the registrar who is

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filing him his new papers for jobs, a bank account, a new passport, and job training programs. In

the pivotal scene of the film, Martin and Manuela are both sitting inside the tower itself

discussing his taxi job and his future. This symbolizes a strong move in Martin’s life toward

become a better man for his son as well as his wife, but mostly for himself. This could also be

read as him actually becoming just what some the things the TV Tower stood for are, such as

power, progress, a strong prospect for the future, and financial independence. The tower seems to

follow in his footsteps throughout the film, and even though Martin may not have initially gotten

his cab driver job, by the end the truth prevailed and he is able to reunite with his wife, get the

job he had worked extremely hard for, and begin his new life with his family. In the short film

this movie is based on, the TV Tower is shown almost once every minute for the entire fifteen

minute length of the film, strongly establishing this icon’s part in describing the main character’s

push toward building a new and better life.

TV Tower and Martin in the short film Suicide attempt and the TV Tower

In the central scene of the film, the bird’s eye view of Berlin that the protagonist shares with his

wife Manuela, can be interpreted as Martin’s endeavor to regain his control over the city while

memorizing the new topography of the changed Berlin but also his masculinity in his family

while earning his wife’s applause when showing off his knowledge about the city’s street names.

“The process of naming brings order and meaning, but it also brings power, as has been clear

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since Adam” writes Ladd in his opening passage on the politics of street names. After the Wende

names became the objects of power struggle in Berlin. Street names are among the most obvious

elements of the city’s historical identity. The can be changed easily which makes them

“tempting targets for politicians eager to make a symbolic gesture” (Ladd 208). The GDR used

the power of naming many ways, renaming schools, squares, streets and even entire cities

throughout the country. Unification of the two Germanies brought demands to remove all traces

of the Communist state. By 1991, the Christian Democrats hoped to put through a long list of

name changes all at once but East Berliners blocked many of the changes (Ladd 209-10). After

hot debates the matter has been handed over to independent commissions and as a final result

several Communist names were removed from the Berlin city map. Martin does not understand

all the name changes and finds the street names of West Berlin (thus a completely new territory)

easier to learn than the changed street names of the East (a once well known but radically

changed environment).

Learning the new topography of Berlin from the TV Tower and on the tram

While Martin is learning the new street names of Berlin, he slowly regains control over the city

and also over his own life. Learning the street names of Berlin means a real job for him as

passing a topography test is needed for him to become a taxi driver. Names changes appear in

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the film in other scenes, as well. One of Martin’s coworkers in the night club is Natascha

because it “sells better” than her real name, which is Ludmilla. Her difficult family history

(Russian father, Ukrainian mother, childhood in the former Yugoslavia, and teenager years in

Vienna) sheds light on the effects of the Wende on people’s life in a larger Eastern European

context. Names changes of the streets, but characters in the film, show that the former East

Berlin is a place with an identity shift and in transition.

Plattenbauten in the East, TV Tower in the background Martin’s new home

Besides the images of the center of the former East Berlin, Plattenbauten of the GDR’s satellite

cities fill the screen. The portrayal of the architecture of the East sets up a typical image of the stark, plain, repetitious panel buildings of dense residential blocks. Martin, as many protagonists of the Berlin films, who arrive in the city moves into a hotel. This hotel is located in one of the prefabricated panel buildings on the periphery of Berlin. While looking out of his window,

Martin sees the repetitive facades of the same buildings. Early on in the film, Martin is passing

by an apartment block after being released from prison. As he walks by, he notices a man on top

of a typical panel façade residential block building, threatening to jump and take his own life.

Eventually, Martin gets onto the top of the building and talks the man out of jumping, to find that he is actually an old friend. The metaphor here is painfully obvious, the man who wants to take

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his life is standing atop the ‘lifeless’ building he had been living in. Then, as the two men stand together on the roof, a panning shot stops on them with the TV Tower positioned directly

between the two off in the distance; faint, but immediately recognizable. Behind and on the top

of the monotonous facades unemployed and disillusioned citizens of the former GDR and living

and similarly to Martin they are struggling for jobs and homes in the unified capital of Germany.

The social and physical portrayal of these buildings shed light on the “most substantial bequests”

(Ladd 191) of the new Berlin. As several conditions disappeared after the Wende in the East, such as full employment and a broad range of state-provided social services (such as child care and youth activities), these satellite cities turned into neighborhoods of unemployed adults and disaffected youth. All of Martin’s unemployed friends are living here and crime and vandalism are also part of these living environments.

Martin in the East and Manuela in the West

As in the other two films of the present chapter, very distinct East and West images are presented in regard to home places. Whereas Martin lives in a hotel room in a Plattenbau in the former

East, his ex-wife Manuela lives in a private house that seems to be located in Wannsee or in

Charlottenburg. She and her new partner from Bavaria live however in a fully Westernized house

in Pankow, thus in the former East. Their lives are depicted as fatally irreconcilable because of

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the rapid changes that occurred while Martin spent eleven years in prison. Early on in the film,

as Martin joins society again in the lower bowels of the less respected occupations, the physical

structure around him is very dark and dirty. When he is home in his apartment, the interior is

shown as stark white, without much furniture or any personal items. Both environments become

the setting for a depressing way of life that has little prospect or much of a future of any kind.

The Westernized apartment of his wife, on the other hand, is shown in a much different light.

Much more color and depiction of family and a close sense of kinship is shown initially in

respect to the West. Manuela and her partner from the West live in a more upscale and modern

home, which is full of color and art.

Manuela’s private home in Pankow

When Martin finally meets with them, he finds his wife with her new friends at dinner, with

plenty of food and drink on the table. Manuela’s house and her international friends have nothing common with Martin’s living conditions and unemployed acquaintances. Two separated

“worlds” are depicted during the dinner scenes at Manuela’s house in the West and on Martin’s

balcony in the East, where he plays cards with his unemployed friends in a monotonous

environment.

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Martin’s friends in the East Manuela’s friends in the West

Martin does not have a job and his integration to the post-Wende society proceeds very slowly.

He is unable to find a legal job and soon the police are looking for him. By the end of the film,

Martin is still unemployed but he is given the opportunity to take the test needed for becoming a

taxi driver. In the closing shots, the viewer sees him walking on a desolated street and

disappearing among the formalist high-rise buildings of the East. As Margarethe von Trotta,

Hanner Stöhr does not provide an answer about whether or not Martin succeeds in his endeavor to live a decent life after spending eleven years in prison.

The closing shots of the film

Berlin is in Germany offers a view into a number of physical and social transformations that took place in Berlin after the Wende. Harkening back to a well-known story and film aesthetics of the

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Weimar Republic, Stöhr constructs a Berlin that is in a transitory phase and that is on its way to

define itself. Architecture is used to highlight the changes in the former East Berlin and also to show the effects that this transitory place with its new names and changing environments have

on people’s lives. The former East Berlin in the early 1990s is shown to be searching for its own

identity as much as the main character in the film. These direct or indirect comparisons between

man and architecture and the ways in which they parallel each other shown in this rich context,

reveal Martin’s struggle for a new identity and new life as well as the whole of Berlin is doing so. As the final scene closes with him leaving the prison for the last time, we see large cranes in

the distance, still working and continuing to construct a new way of life for all of Berlin.

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‘OSTALGIE’: FICTION AND REALITY IN GOODBYE, LENIN! (2003)

On January 13, 2004, the New York Times published an article on the phenomenon of Ostalgie, a

neologism that indicates nostalgia for the Communist past, which is epitomized in a small

museum in the town of Eisenhüttenstadt that has gotten a boost from the popularity of the film

Goodbye Lenin!. The description of the museum evokes the protagonist’s mother’s bedroom

from the film: “The museum is just a few rooms, mostly on the second floor of a former day-care

center, but it holds 70,000 to 80,000 objects from the former East Germany. About 10,000

people a year come to look at Mikki transistor radios, jars of Bulgarian plums, schoolbooks, plastic water glasses that never seemed to come in the right colors. Seeing these familiar objects clearly stirs warm feelings about the vanished and unrecapturable past.” Set in the year leading up to German unification, Goodbye Lenin! offers a highly differentiated understanding of

Ostalgie.

Wolfgang Becker’s film is set in the East Berlin of 1989. Alexander Kerner’s mother, Christiane

Kerner, a passionate supporter of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, suffers a heart attack when she sees Alex on her way to the Palace of the Republic being arrested in an anti-

government demonstration and falls into a coma shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. After

eight months she awakes, but is severely weakened both physically and mentally, and doctors

say that any shock may cause another, possibly fatal, attack. Alex realizes that her discovery of

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recent events would be too much for her to bear and so sets out to maintain the illusion that

things have not changed in the GDR. To this end, he and his family revert the apartment to its

previous drab decor, dress in their old clothes, and feed the bed-ridden Christiane new, Western produce from old labeled jars and showing her faked news on videotapes. For a time the deception works, but gradually becomes increasingly complicated and elaborate. Christiane relapses, and is once again taken to the hospital. Under pressure to reveal the truth about the fall of the East, Alexander creates a final fake film segment. Alexander convinces a taxi driver to identify himself as his childhood hero Sigmund Jähn, who in the segment becomes the new leader of East Germany, and gives a speech promising to make a better future by opening the borders to the West. Christiane is very impressed by the “broadcast,” but in fact already knows the truth, as Alex’s girlfriend revealed everything to her. The tables are turned completely, and it is Alex who is being protected from reality. Christiane dies soon afterwards, and Alex never knows that she did, in the end, know the truth.

Featured locations in Goodbye, Lenin!

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The film starts with super-8 footage images of an idyllic childhood from the GDR. During the

opening credits montages of East Berlin’s showcase architecture is shown to the viewer such as

the Alexanderplatz, the Palace of the Republic, the Stalin Allee, the Lenin statue and the

Weltzeituhr. One of the first images of the voice-over narrator Alex is a childhood photo taken

on the Alexanderplatz with the TW Tower in the background. Thus, the showcase architecture of

East Berlin is presented in a nostalgic tone and connections of these buildings to the main characters are established. Soon, the viewer is transferred to East Berlin of 1989 and images of the city show the preparations for the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the German

Democratic Republic. Berlin’s buildings are covered into red and national flags and are used to

display the state’s extravagant celebration. Military parades and street demonstrations are

juxtaposed with each other before the camera introduces the main protagonist, Alex. Alex is first shown sitting in front of a propaganda poster showing the message “Socialism revolves around the individual” next to the images of Honecker and Gorbachev, and then trying to sleep in his bedroom whose window is covered with one of the red flags of the military parade in the streets.

Dressed in red like her city, Alex’s mother is on her way to the Palace of the Republic, where only few of Berlin’s citizens are invited. East Berlin is depicted as the capital of the GDR and the footage functions like a documentary film implying that the portrayed reality will be soon part of the past. The personal narrator, Alex comments these images with his cynical voice:

“There was a wind of change in the air, whilst right in front of our house a shooting club with an inflated sense of its own importance was performing for the last time.” This remark positions

Alex as a critical yet relatively passive citizen of the GDR who sees through the state’s display of military power.

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The 40th Anniversary of the GDR: Extravagant celebration of the state

The 40th Anniversary of the GDR: Personal and collective history

The fall of the Wall is also presented with contemporary documentary footage and well-known

images. While Christiane is in coma the former East Berlin experiences a rapid change, which is

mainly depicted through workplaces and recurring images of the World Time Clock on the

Alexanderplatz. First of all, in the hospital itself, Alex notices that every day another GDR-

trained doctor has left for the West because of the better pay. Second, Alex’s new boss in the

satellite TV business pairs up each of his Wessi (West German) employee with an Ossi (East

German) and is profiting from the success of the (West) German soccer team during the World

Cup. Soon, they add a number of satellite dished to the monotonous Plattenbau facades of East

Berlin. Third, Alex’s sister Ariane abandons her university studies and becomes employed at a

McDonalds where she falls in love with her West German boss, Rainer. Former East Berlin

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workplaces are all in transition and rapidly appearing Western businesses change the urban landscape after reunification.

Unification at the workplace Berlin in change

The Weltzeituhr on the Alexanderplatz30 and images of the discothèque, where Alex and the

hospital nurse, later girlfriend Lara go out show that East Berlin experienced a rapid change and

the city is in transition. Escaping the noisy club and sitting with Lara on the destroyed balcony

on the upper floor of a neglected nineteenth century building show Alex’s strive for

understanding and coping with the changes. As in Berlin is in Germany, a view on to the

changing Berlin from the top of a high-rise building appears several times throughout the movie.

First, Alex and Lara are watching the firework from the rooftop of the hospital and later Alex

throws away their old East German Marks from the top of another building while the city

celebrates the German soccer team’s victory at the World Cup with more fireworks. The last

“firework,” also takes place on the top of a high-rise building: Alex scatters his mother’s ashes

across both East and West using one of the model space rockets of his childhood. These

moments are “moments of transition” in which “the personal and political merge” (Allan 122).

At the personal level, Alex manages his emotional attachment from his mother to his girlfriend

30 Sean Allan offers an insightful analysis of this image: “As the time-delayed images of the frantically revolving clock – the famous Weltzeituhr at the Alexanderplatz – remind us, the more rapidly change occurs, the stronger the desire becomes to cling to the memories of the past” (121).

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Lara, and at the political level Alex is shown to be able to cope with the end of the GDR and embrace a new future.

Moments of transition: watching Berlin from the rooftop and celebrating the World Cup

Most of the scenes were shot at the Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin, and around Plattenbauten near

Alexanderplatz. Unlike the East-Berlin films of the second chapter, Becker shows a piece of

relatively central East Berlin, where the Kerner family owns a typical East German apartment.

In this apartment Alex creates a piece of fictional GDR for her mother after eliminating the

‘Westernizing’ changes implied by his sister Ariane. Alex and his West German co-worker and

new friend Denis refurnish Christiane’s bedroom completely and they are so successful in their

endeavor that not only Christiane feels herself at home in the apartment but also Alex finds

himself increasingly at home there: “There, far away from the hectic pace of life of the new era,

was a place for quiet reflection.” In the construction of a fictional GDR, this small interior space

has an important function in the film: it gives the opportunity for Alex to prepare himself for the

loss of his mother and it also gives him some “extra time” from the GDR that allows him to

make a transition from the divided into a unified Germany. The interior of the apartment

functions as an island in the rapidly changing cityscape, the organized space with its brown and

yellow colors and dim lights are in strong contrast with the turbulent outside images of Berlin.

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The fictional GDR interior in the former East

Despite Alex’s attempts, the static appearance of the apartment cannot remain fully isolated from

the outside. Christiane occasionally witnesses strange occurrences, such as a gigantic Coca-Cola

advertisement unfurling on a building outside the apartment. The juxtaposition of the enormous

Coca-Cola banner with the GDR curtain of Christiane’s private bedroom creates a powerful

image while showing the rapid changes outside and “time standing still” inside.

Outside changes and inside still life

Furthermore, in one surreal scene, Christiane wanders outside the apartment while Alex is

asleep, and sees all her neighbors’ old furniture piled up in the street for garbage collection, a car dealer selling BMWs instead of Trabants. Then, a huge military helicopter flies past carrying the upper half of an enormous statue of Lenin towards the West, which at an angle appears to be offering Christiane his hand. The statue dominates the screen and the viewer does not see

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Christiane’s face. It remains ambiguous whether Lenin is saluting or saying goodbye to

Christiane. The mother’s relationship to the GDR remains unexplained. Is the statue reaching out to one of its last supporters? Or is the statue welcoming her to the united capital? Are her illusions swept away as the propagandistic statue flies away? The scene symbolizes all: a wave goodbye and a presentation of the new Berlin.

With regard to this pivotal scene one of Berlin’s architectural debates from the 1990s are of special importance. The best-known Lenin statue in Berlin was the sixty-three-foot-tall statue fashioned from blocks of Ukrainian red granite and was dedicated by Walter Ulbricht on Lenin’s hundredth birthday in 1970 (Ladd 196). In late 1990, when Becker’s film is taking place in

Berlin, the city had cleaned the statue after vandals splashed it with paint. Mayor Eberhard

Diepgen declared that it was unacceptable for Berlin to honor this “despot and murderer” (quoted in Ladd 197). An opposition to the removal from the inhabitants of the Leninplatz (Lenin

Square, later United Nations Square) appeared soon and the demolition of the statue has become the symbol of GDR history. The furor over the Lenin statue revealed the extent to which former

East Germans were choosing between assimilation into West German society and insistence on separate identity. The usage of the Lenin statue in the film thus refers to a real controversy about the GDR’s monuments.

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The changing cityscape of Berlin Goodbye, Lenin!

Images about the former West Berlin appear only marginally. A subplot involves the earlier

defection to the West of Alex’s father when he was a child, an event which apparently drove his

mother temporarily insane, and which prompted her ardent support of the party. Later it is

revealed that the defection was planned by them both, but she bailed out to protect her children.

In a Burger King drive-through, Ariane one day sees her father with a new family. Christiane

later admits the deception and Alexander goes to find his father, partly for himself and his sister,

and partly to honor Christiane’s dying wish that she see him one last time. In this scene the

private house of Alex’s father is shown, which like in Alex’s dream has a big garden and a pool.

Alex’s fantasy of the West becomes real when he enters his father’s home where a birthday party is celebrated. The two very different homes, East and West become hopelessly separate from each other indicating that the real family relations cannot be restored. Like in von Trotta’s The

Promise, East and West are shown as diverging places where wounds caused by the Wall cannot be easily healed. Despite of the differences the bedroom, where Alex watches the East German children’s film the Sandmännchen with his little brother and sister, becomes a place of bonding where the East and West division ceases to exist for a moment.

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Alex’s father’s home in the former West

The film is a commentary about truth and deception, but is also a comedy and an exercise in

nostalgia. Just as Alex is deluding his mother, she has been deluding the children all her life

about their father, and in the end is the one deluding Alex that she is still in the dark about his

deception. The film suggests that, in hindsight, the fall of the Wall and the reunification of

Germany was carried out with undue haste, and doing so did not permit the East German state to

die with dignity. Alex’s deceptions at least allow his mother to die with dignity, and each of

them is a metaphor for different aspects of the East German state, with its routine deceptions, but

overly fast downfall. The same dignity is given to the city, the showcase architecture of the East,

the private rooms of its inhabitants but even to even the controversial departing Lenin Statue.

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CHAPTER CONCLUSION

Berlin films present a visual, social and political landscape for many of the architectural aspirations and shortcomings of the unifying Berlin. The East- and West Berlin images in contemporary cinema became distinctly different after the fall of the Wall. These differences are often depicted as irreconcilable and the lives of the couples become fatally separated from each other. Each of the films makes an attempt to understand the unification of the two half cities and shed light on the rapid changes that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The centers of the former East and West are used in all three cases and the elevated view over the united city of

Berlin is another component that characterizes each account while their characters try to come terms with the changing cityscape. All three films make an attempt to overcome the stereotypical

East-West dichotomy and with the aid of subplots (Konrad’s family member in The Promise,

Martin’s friends in Berlin is in Germany and Ariane, Denis and Rainer in Goodbye Lenin!) offer a number of stories about the Wende. The main division, however, dominates the spatial organizations of each film as they all depict a vibrant, colorful West (or Westernized East in

Berlin is in Germany) and a sterile and colorless East. Besides the East-West dichotomy, films made in the Berlin Republic portray Berlin as the biggest construction site of Europe in the

1990s. The German capital appears as a transitory place where current architectural and city planning debates, changing interior and exterior places add substantially to the stories to be told about the acute changes that both former East and West Berliners need to face.

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THESIS CONCLUSION

Berlin films represent two aspects of reality uniquely accessible in the cinema: the fantasy life of

a culture (represented in the plots in form of love stories) and the everyday texture of life in the city as people experience and remember it (represented mainly in the depicted architecture of the films). The introductory chapter of this thesis argues that the investigation of the filmic representations of architecture is a particularly productive endeavor in the case of Berlin, a city

whose architecture is strongly connected with politics and power, and a city, which has been an

important center of film production from the birth of this medium. As this thesis has shown

through various examples, the presence of the built environment plays an important role not only

in the films of the interwar period, when in many cases architecture and film are almost

organically united, but has a significant legacy in the films of the postwar period – regardless of

the political environment in which they were made. The presence of the Berlin Wall, the

competing showcase architectures of East and West and the encounter of the divided halves after the Wende make the German capital a unique site for filmmaking.

One motif that unites all of the selected films is the open ending. We never learn what happens to

Kurt Maetzig’s young couple in The Story of A Young Couple, whether or not their life in the

newly constructed Stalin Allee harbors happiness and the freshly ‘converted’ Jochen will feel

home in the East. The last shots of Heiner Carow’s Paul and Paula show the changed Paul

127 sleeping in Paula’s bed with their children subversively during the day and bound in memory expressed by the picture in the window. We don’t learn whether or not Paul is still a successful member of the GDR’s society. In Peter Kahane’s film, The Architects, the audience never finds out what happens to Daniel Brenner after the simultaneously failed and successful project. One can only imagine that the first architectural project is the last in his life. Billy Wilder leaves many questions open in A Foreign Affair and gives only some hints to answer them: Is Erika von

Schlütow going to be arrested or released? Will John Pringle and Phoebe Frost become a couple or not? Christiane F.’s future also remains closed and a short redemption about her recovery is symbolized with a lonely house in a winter landscape. The viewer never learns what happens to

Martin and Anna in Berlin, Chamissoplatz, when she is running after him or to Konrad and

Sophie in The Promise after the closing gaze. In the last scene of Berlin is in Germany, Martin disappears in the city and the viewer is left to ponder about the success of his integration. Apart from the last film, Johannes Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin, none of the films have a clear closure and the ending can be interpreted as a new beginning.

In many cases the open ending shows that the plot is more than a story of a couple (unlike the innocent-looking title of Maetzig’s propaganda film The Story of A Young Couple) but is a tale about the city in which they are living. In this sense the stories told in Berlin are also narrations that are told to control the complexity of this architecturally and politically unique city of

Europe. Some of the films make Berlin more explicitly a protagonist (e.g. The Promise as discussed in the fourth chapter), while others use it as a backdrop and a supporting feature (e.g.

Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair or Uli Edel’s Christiane F.). Architecture is used mainly in three different ways in the selected films:

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1. In regard to modern architecture most of the selected films reveal opposing views on

urban reconstruction (e.g. Berlin Chamissoplatz and The Architects) or use specific sites

of Berlin to shed light on the complexities of urban renewal (e.g. The Legend of Paul

and Paula, Christiane F.). In this case characters in the narrative stories become

representatives of one of opposing sites: for instance in Berlin, Chamissoplatz Martin

stands for modern urban renewal whereas Anna and her friends stand for historic

preservation. Representing opposing urban planning ideas through a couple are employed

to control the complexity of these debates on the large scale. Similarly, promoting versus

opposing new architectural ideas and ways of building (such as the Stalin-Baroque

masonry in The Story of A Young Couple) and criticizing the shortcomings of urban

reconstruction (the prefabricated panel buildings in The Legend of Paul and Paula and

The Architects) are told in the same manner. As an example, Paula represents old,

eclectic, passionate Berlin and Paul stands for the modern, functional prefabricated panel

buildings in the East Berlin satellite cities.

2. Architecture and contemporary debates about city planning, street naming and

monuments play important roles in the selected films and go hand in hand with the story

told on the screen. The first depictions of Berlin after WWII show the city in ruins,

rubble and dust but very soon also construction pathos and propaganda. The same

changes can be explored in the lives of the characters: for instance, Agnes Sailer becomes

sick in the destroyed city but turns into a star actress at the construction site of the Stalin

Allee where she is promoting a new beginning through architecture to the citizens of the

GDR. Berlin films from the 1970s and 1980s focus on the peripheries of the city and

reveal that despite of the different ideologies, East and West had to deal with similar

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architectural debates. Whereas the limitations of the architects and the will of power of

the inhabitants in East and West are different from each other, the criticism of the

International Style in films of East and West Berlin becomes often strikingly converging.

Urban debates on street names and monuments become important actors especially in

films of the Berlin Republic, for instance, Martin Schulz’s friends in Berlin is in

Germany change their names and identities as rapidly as the street names and locations of

Berlin after the Wende are transforming.

3. Berlin films are important media in constructing the divided and then united city: the

physical Wall plays an important role in the films of the 1980s, whereas in the later films

the differences between the living and working conditions of the former East and West

become more dominant. In Margarethe von Trotta’s The Promise, Sophie and Konrad are

created to tell the story of an initially united and then painfully separated Berlin, in which

a complete reunification becomes impossible. The characters are highly controlled to tell

the complex story of Cold War Berlin. The last two films, Stöhr’s Berlin is in Germany

and Becker’s Goodbye Lenin shed light on the rapid transformations in the cityscape that

did not allow Berliners, especially citizens of the East, to reflect upon the changes and

face their own past. When exposing a different East and West in the movie theater, Berlin

films make the viewer understand the differences between the two halves of the German

capital. In this regard films of the last chapter are important contributions to the East-

West normalization in Berlin.

Berlin films about the divided and unifying city are unique cultural artifacts as they tell stories in a city that serves as a semantic field condensing opposing cultural, social and economic

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achievements. Therefore, films about the divided city in the heart of Europe from the Cold War

era and films from the 1990s, when Berlin became the biggest construction site of Europe, offer

the most for a research project that aims to explore the use of architecture in film. The strong

legacy of architecture in city films from the interwar period can be connected with the division of

Berlin, whose most powerful visual expressions are widely known images of the Berlin Wall and

the showcase architectures of the two sites. This division, as this thesis argues, is less apparent in

most of the films from the Cold War unlike the representations of Berlin in the 1990s. Films

from the Cold War era are looking forward and are almost consistently set in a contemporary

Berlin. On the other hand, films made in the Berlin Republic apply complete or partial historical

looks back to divided and uniting Berlin. In each of the selected films, the construction site

becomes a symbolic place portraying political power, social order and changes in the aesthetic perception of Berlin’s architecture. As most of the architectural projects of contemporary Berlin become completed by the beginning of the 21st century and the German capital settles down, it

remains open what the next chapter in the relationship between Berlin, architecture and film is

going to be like. One of the most frequently cited statement about the German capital is Karl

Scheffler’s from 1910: “Berlin is condemned always to become and never to be” (10). Whether or not this description will be applied to characterize Berlin of the 21st century remains an

intriguing question.31

31Similar to Scheffler’s statement the contemporary critic Brian Ladd says that Berlin is “a city not defined but always seeking a definition.” (13)

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APPENDIX – TEACHING AND LEARNING – SYLLABUS ABOUT THE THESIS

“THE CINEMA BELONGS TO THE CITY”: ARCHITECTURE, FILM AND BERLIN

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course explores the cinematic images of Berlin’s architecture and the interaction of the city’s inhabitants with their built environment after WWII. The course will analyze film aesthetics and narratives in regard to architecture and students will learn about the history of

Berlin and the most important architectural developments in the German capital after WWII.

SYLLABUS

WEEK 1: Introduction

3/27 Introduction to the Course Film: Berlin Journey of a City 1.

3/29 Historical Background: The History of the Two Germanies, 1945-1990 Text: Mary Fulbrook, “The Two Germanies 1945-1990.” 204-248. Chronology of Berlin’s History Film: Berlin Journey of a City 2.

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WEEK 2: The Film Industry in Berlin in the 1950s

4/3 Film: Wolfgang Staudte, The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) Text: Robert R. Shandley, “Coming Home through Rubble Canyons”: The Murderers Are among Us and Generic Convention 25-46.

4/5 Film: Billy Wilder, A Foreign Affair (1948) Text: A Woman in Berlin. Eight Weeks in the Conquered City, 1945 (excerpts)

WEEK 3: Communism Pursues Grandeur: The First Socialist Street of Berlin

4/10 Film: Kurt Maetzig, The Story of a Young Couple (1952) Text: David Clay Large, “Coming into the Cold” 368-382.

4/12 Film: Kurt Maetzig, The Story of a Young Couple (1952) Text: Brian Ladd, “Divided Berlin” 175-188. Text: Michael Wise, “East Berlin: Communism Pursues Grandeur” 39-54.

WEEK 4: “Ideals and reality never coincide”: East Berlin in the 1970s

4/17 Film: Heiner Carow, The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973) Text: Brian Ladd, “Divided Berlin” 188-192.

4/19 Film: The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973) Text: Doelling, Irene. “’We All Love Paula but Paul Is More Important to Us’: Constructing a ‘Socialist Person’ Using the ‘Femininity’ of a Working Woman.”

WEEK 5: “Construction is built upon compromise”: Architects in East Berlin

4/25 Film: Peter Kahane, The Architects (1989) Text: Harry Blunk, “The Concept of ‘Heimat-GDR’ in DEFA Feature Films” 204-221.

4/27 Film: Peter Kahane, The Architects (1989)

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WEEK 6: The Border Becomes Visible 1: The Berlin Wall in Film

5/1 Film: Wim Wenders: The Wings of Desire (1987) Text: David Clay Large, “Operation Chinese Wall” 446-462.

5/3 Film: Wim Wenders: The Wings of Desire (1987) Text: Robert Phillip Kolker, “Wings of Desire: Between Heaven and Earth” 138-161. Text: David Clarke, “In Search of Home: Filming Post-Unification Berlin” 154-158.

WEEK 7: The Border Becomes Visible 2: The Berlin Wall in Film

5/8 Film: Jürgen Böttcher, The Wall (1990) Text: Uwe Johnson, Two Views (1966, excerpts)

5/10 Film: Margarethe von Trotta, The Promise (1994) Text: Brian Ladd, “Berlin Walls” 7-39

WEEK 8: New East and West after the Fall of the Berlin Wall

5/15 Film: Hannes Stöhr, Berlin is in Germany (2001) Text: Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (excerpts)

5/17 Films: Hannes Stöhr, Berlin is in Germany (2001) Text: Brian Ladd, “The Politics of Street Names” 208-215.

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WEEK 9: The GDR’s Monuments after Unification

5/22 Film: Wolfgang Becker, Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) Text: Sean Allan: “Ostalgie, Fantasy and the Normalization of East-West Relations in Post- Unification Comedy” 117-123.

5/24 Film: Wolfgang Becker, Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) Text: Ladd, “The GDR’s Monuments” 192-208. Text: Michael Wise: “Communist Relics” 109- 120

WEEK 10: 1984 in East Berlin

5/29 Film: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others (2006) Text: TBA

5/31 Wrap-up: Berlin Metamorphoses Four worksheets (#5-8) from Blackboard are due in class today.

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REFERENCES

IMAGES:

All of the images in this thesis all stills from the corresponding films.

FILMS:

A Foreign Affair. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount Pictures, 1948.

Berlin, Chamissoplatz. Dir. Rudolf Thome. 1984.

Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt.. Dir. Walter Ruttmann. Deutsche Verein-Films, 1927.

Berlin is in Germany. Dir. Hanner Stöhr. Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB), 2001.

Christiane F. - Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Dir. Uli Edel. Solaris Film, 1981.

Das Versprechen. Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. Bioskop Film, 1995.

Die Architekten. Dir. Peter Kahane. DEFA, 1990.

Die Legende von Paul und Paula. Dir. Heiner Carow. DEFA, 1973.

Die Mörder sind unter uns. Dir. Wolfgang Staudte. DEFA, 1946.

Goodbye Lenin! Dir. Wolfgang Becker. X Filme, 2002.

Roman einer jungen Ehe. Dir. Kurt Maetzig. DEFA, 1952.

The Man with the Movie Camera. (Chelovek s kino-apparatom) Dir. Dziga Vertov. VUFKU, 1929.

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SECONDARY SOURCES:

Allan, Seán. „1989 and the Wende in East German Cinema: Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (1990), Egon Günther’s Stein (1991) and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der Da Da eR (1990).“ 1949/1989: Cultural Perspectives on Division and Unity in East and West. Ed. Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2000. 231-44.

---. “DEFA: An Historical Overview.” DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992. Eds. Seán Allan and John Sanford. New York: Berghahn, 1999.

---. “Ostalgie, Fantasy and the Normalization of East-West Relations in Post-Unification Comedy.” German Cinema Since Unification. Ed. David Clarke. New York, London: U of Birmingham P, 2006. 105-127.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217-242.

Berghahn, Daniel. Hollywood behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

Brady, Martin and Ann Pearce. “Discussion with Kurt Maetzig.” DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992. Eds. Seán Allan and John Sandford. New York, NY: Berghahn; 2003.

Brosig, Maria. „Das ‚Haus des Sozialismus’: Ästhetische Stellungnahmen im literarischen Feld der DDR anhand von Architektur und Städtebau.“ Literarisches Feld DDR: Bedingungen und Formen literarischer Produktion in der DDR. Ed. Ute Wölfel. Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann; 2005.

Clarke, David. “In Search of Home: Filming Post-unification Berlin.” German Cinema Since Unification. Ed. David Clarke. New York, London: U of Birmingham P, 2006. 151-181.

Chandler, Charlotte. Nobody’s Perfect. Billy Wilder. A Personal Biography. New York et al.: Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Crowe, Cameron. Conversations with Wilder. New York, Random House, 1999.

Döblin, Alfred. Berlin Alexanderplatz. The Story of Franz Biberkopf. Trans. Eugene Jolas. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1958. (I assume there is a better translation??)

Dölling, Irene. “’We All Love Paula but Paul Is More Important to Us’: Constructing a ‘Socialist Person’ Using the ‘Femininity’ of a Working Woman.” New German Critique: An Interdisciplinary Journal of German Studies 2001 (Winter) 82: 77-90.

Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Hake, Sabine. German National Cinema. New York. Routledge. 2002.

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Kersten, Heinz. „GDR Film after the Wende.“ The End of the GDR and the Problems of Integration. Ed. Margy Gerber and Roger Woods. Lanham, MD: UP of America, 1993.

Krieger, Peter. “Learning from America: Postwar Urban Recovery in West Germany.” Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations. American Culture in Western Europe and Japan. Ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000. 187-208.

Kruth, Patricia. “The Color of New York: Places and Spaces in the Films of Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen” Cinema & Architecture. Ed. Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 70-84.

Kirchhoff, Gerhard. Views of Berlin. Boston: Birkhaeuser, 1988.

Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1997.

Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York: Perseus, 2000.

Mückenberger, Christiane. “The Anti-Fascist Past in DEFA Films.” DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946-1992. Eds. Seán Allan and John Sandford. New York: Berghahn, 1999. 58- 76.

Neue Architektur. Ed. Deutsches Architektur Centrum. 1990-2000. Berlin: jovis, 2000.

Pflaum, Hans Günther and Hans Helmut Prinzler. Cinema in the Federal Republic of Germany. Bonn: Inter Nationes. 1993.

Reimann, Brigitte. Franziska Linkerhand. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1998.

Scheffler, Karl. Berlin, ein Stadtschicksal. Berlin: E Reiss, 1910.

Shandley, Robert R. Rubble Films. German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001.

Simmel, George. “Metropolis and Mental Life.” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. Neil Leach. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. 69-79.

Sieg, Katrin. “Introduction.” The Story of a Young Couple (Kurt Maetzig). VHS cover. Ice Storm International, 1999.

Weihsmann, Helmut. “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900-1930” Cinema & Architecture Ed. Francois Penz and Maureen Thomas. London: British Film Institute, 1997. 28-34.

Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. Nach Tonbandprotokollen aufgeschrieben von Kai Hermann und Horst Rieck. Hamburg: GGP Media, 2001.

Wise, Michael. Capital Dilemma. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998.

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