On the night of November 9, 1989, all hell broke loose in East Germany. Politburo member Günter Schabowski, while preparing for a press conference, was handed a memo on the new travel regulations for East German citizens. The memo stated that East Germans would now be allowed to travel abroad. What the memo did not …
Category: Berlin
The Baldheaded Gang
The Baldheaded Gang (Die Glatzkopfbande) is East Germany’s only biker film, and a possible precursor to the skinhead movement. Made in 1963—a full three years before Roger Corman kick-started the biker genre with The Wild Angels—the film follows the story of a gang of bikers who cause trouble at a vacation spot on the Baltic …
The Architects
How a film fares at the box office is highly dependent on when it's released. A movie that will one day be recognized as a cinematic treasure might bomb miserably upon release simply because it wasn’t what people wanted to see at that time. A classic example of this is Billy Wilder’s Ace in the …
Sun Seekers
In 1947, the Soviets began their mining operations in the Schlema Valley in the southeastern region of Saxony. They called their mining company “Wismut,” the German word for bismuth, because they didn’t want the U.S. to know they were really mining uranium. After what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Russians wanted to make sure …
Born in ’45
When the noted East German director/cinematographer, Werner Bergmann, left the preview screening of Born in ‘45 (Jahrgang 45), he turned to Roland Gräf, the film’s cinematographer, and spat: “Eastern Bloc Italians!” He may have meant it as an insult, but Gräf took it as a compliment. Born in ‘45 was a conscious attempt to duplicate …
Berlin Schönhauser Corner
During the 1950s, Middle America was obsessed with the “problem” of juvenile delinquency. Hollywood—always ready to exploit any fear that popped out of the American psyche—latched onto this topic and ran with it. The trend started with The Blackboard Jungle, which was such a hit that in no time there were dozens of other films …
East German Cinema Blog 