Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ern Bavarian Lindenbräu beer hall—the Sony boss wanted a
Bräuhaus
—serves traditional
food (€11-17, daily 11:00-24:30, big €8 salads, three-foot-long taster boards of eight differ-
ent beers, tel. 030/2575-1280). Across the plaza, Josty Bar is built around a surviving bit of
a venerable hotel that was a meeting place for Berlin's rich and famous before the bombs
(€10-17 meals, daily 10:00-24:00, tel. 030/2575-9702). CineStar is a rare cinema that plays
mainstream movies in their original language (
www.cinestar.de
).
▲
Deutsche Kinemathek Film and TV Museum
This exhibit is the most interesting place to visit in the Sony Center. The early pioneers
in filmmaking were German (including Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch, and
the Austrian-born Billy Wilder), and many of them also became influential in Holly-
wood—making this a fun visit for cinephiles. Your admission ticket gets you into several
floors of exhibits (including temporary exhibits on floors 1 and 4) made meaningful by the
included, essential English audioguide.
Cost and Hours:
€6, includes 1.5-hour audioguide, Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu until
20:00, closed Mon, tel. 030/2474-9888,
www.deutsche-kinemathek.de
.
Nearby:
The Kino Arsenal theater downstairs shows offbeat art-house films in their ori-
ginal language.
VisitingtheMuseum:
Fromtheticketdesk,ridetheelevatoruptothethirdfloor,where
you can turn left (into the film section, floors 3 and 2) or right (into the TV section, floors 3
and 4).
In the
film section,
you'll walk back in time through a fun mirrored entryway. The ex-
hibit starts with the German film industry's beginnings, with an emphasis on the Weimar
Republic period in the 1920s, when Berlin rivaled Hollywood. Influential films included
the early German Expressionist masterpiece
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1920) and Fritz
Lang's seminal
Metropolis
(1927). Three rooms are dedicated to Marlene Dietrich, who was
a huge star both in Germany and, later, in Hollywood. (Dietrich, who performed at USO
shows to entertain Allied troops fighting against her former homeland, once said, “I don't
hate the Germans, I hate the Nazis.”) Another section examines Nazi use of film as propa-
ganda,includingLeniRiefenstahl'smasterfuldocumentaryofthe1936BerlinOlympicsand
her earlier, chillingly propagandistic
Triumph of the Will
(1935). The postwar period was
defined by two separate East and West German film industries. The exhibit's finale reminds
us that German filmmakers are still highly influential and successful—including Wolfgang
Petersen
(Das Boot, Air Force One, The Perfect Storm)
and Werner Herzog (the document-
ary
Grizzly Man
and the drama
Rescue Dawn
). (If this visit gets you curious about German
cinema, see the recommendations in the Appendix.)
