Literature & Film - Berlin - page 566

Recent Trends
In the 1990s, a slew of novels dealt with German reunification. Many of them are set in Ber-
lin, including Thomas Brussig's tongue-in-cheek Helden wie Wir (Heroes Like Us, 1998)
and Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (2002), which reflects upon the loss of identity and the chal-
lenge of adapting to a new society.
Sven Regener, the frontman of the Berlin band Element of Crime, penned the hugely suc-
cessful Berlin Blues (2001), a boozy trawl through Kreuzberg nights at the time of the fall of
the Wall. The runaway success story, however, has been Russian-born author Wladimir
Kaminer, whose amusing, stranger-than-fiction vignettes in Russendisko (Russian Disco,
2000) established both the author and his Russian disco parties firmly on the Berlin scene.
Both Berlin Blues and Russendisko were made into feature films.
Foreign authors too continue to be inspired by Berlin. Ian McEwan's The Innocent (1990)
is an old-fashioned spy story set in the 1950s. The Berlin Noir trilogy (1989-91), by British
author Philip Kerr, features a private detective solving crimes in Nazi Germany. Berlin his-
tory unfolds in a dream-like sequence in Book of Clouds (2009) by Chloe Aridjis.
To see who gets our vote for top reads set in Berlin, see ( Click here ) .
Cool places to plug into German movie history are the Museum für Film und Fernsehen at
Potsdamer Platz, the Filmmuseum Potsdam and the Filmpark Babelsberg.
Film
Before 1945
The legendary UFA (Universum Film AG), one of the world's first film studios, began
shooting in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1912 and continues to churn out both German and in-
ternational blockbusters in its modern incarnation as the Filmstudios Babelsberg. The 1920s
and early '30s were a boom time for Berlin cinema, with the mighty UFA emerging as Ger-
many's flagship dream factory and Marlene Dietrich's bone structure and distinctive voice
seducing the world. As early as 1919, Ernst Lubitsch produced historical films and comed-
ies such as Madame Dubarry, starring Pola Negri and Emil Jannings; the latter went on to
win the Best Actor Award at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1927. The same
year saw the release of Walter Ruttmann's classic Berlin: Symphony of a City, a fascinating
silent documentary that captures a day in the life of Berlin in the '20s.
Other 1920s movies were heavily expressionistic, using stark contrast, sharp angles,
heavy shadows and other distorting elements. Well-known flicks employing these tech-