BABELSBERG
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The German Hollywood
... And the column explained
December 2005
ALMOST TWO MONTHS before the more poetically-named Lumiére brothers presented their cinematographe movies in Paris, at the end of 1895, the brothers Max and Emil
Skladanowsky introduced moving pictures to Berlin. The public debut of their “Bioscop” films beat every other inventor to the punch — including Thomas Edison — and what followed over the next four decades was a rich flowering of German technical and creative genius in early film, focused around the Berlin suburb of Babelsberg.
It was Europe’s movie capital, and it should have been the world’s. During the louche wild years of the Weimar Republic, when Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre were all in Berlin, Hollywood was just a fruit-growing backwater with a few sound stages built on dusty farmland. Hollywood was nowhere, except for its money; Berlin was the center of modern Europe. Metropolis, M., The Blue Angel, Pandora’s Box, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — the whole early canon of cinema — was created in Berlin, mostly in the UFA studio at Babelsberg.When Hitler took over, Fritz Lang received a personal invitation from the Nazis to help turn German cinema into a propaganda machine. The brilliant and anti-authoritarian director of Metropolis and M. told an interviewer what happened: “Goebbels offered me de facto leadership of the German film industry,” said Lang. “I answered, ‘This is a great honor, Herr Minister’ ...” Then he went home and asked his butler to pack a suitcase for Paris. “I left Germany that evening and never went back.”
Filming The Last Laugh at Babelsberg in 1924 Lang wound up in Hollywood, and a handful of talented artists from the studios scattered around Berlin — not just Babelsberg — did the same thing. European brilliance and money migrated to California, and “Babelsberg” became an early, thumbnail example of the major change in western civilization after World War II: Europe was no longer in charge. America was.
Since then, the balance of money and talent and influence has tilted heavily toward America in almost every field — politics, pop music, finance, filmmaking, science, academics — with the major exception of cheesemaking — for the same reasons that “Babelsberg” is not a household name.
Europeans don’t like it. They have trouble accepting that American politics and culture now infiltrate their lives the way Roman roads crisscross their countrysides. Europe still had moral and intellectual authority during the Cold War, or believed it did; now Europeans are aware that they don’t matter all that much to America. At the same time, they have a longer sense of history, and sometimes they think the superpower on the western shore of the Atlantic can use a sharp reminder of where it came from. Sometimes they’re even right.
This column’s home base is Berlin, since I live in that degenerate city. People here talk and think about the U.S. all the time. The reverse isn’t true — Americans don’t need to think about Europeans, or Germans, even though millions of people (for example) have lived through the very model of “regime change” that Washington now wants to bring to Iraq. So “Babelsberg” will try to give Americans a sense of how they look from overseas, but not without noticing the shape of Europe’s lens.
Babelsberg still has a working studio, by the way. After World War II it was run by Communists, and for years it churned out ersatz westerns and Soviet propaganda for East German audiences. Not all of it was crap, and some of the films have cult followings. But after the Communists vanished, the studio needed money, so it built a “Filmpark Babelsberg,” with stunt shows, cotton candy, and corny re-creations of famous German films. Babelsberg had emerged, like the rest of Europe, from the twentieth century's most crippling madnesses into a new world of globalized finance and popular kitsch — modeled, in this case, on Universal Studios. (In California.)
Michael Scott Moore
About this Site Michael Scott Moore is a novelist from L.A. who now lives in Berlin. For a while there he lived in San Francisco and wrote pungent theater criticism for SF Weekly. Now he works for Spiegel Online and writes the "Babelsberg" column from Berlin. He had nothing to do with Fahrenheit 9/11, but he does have a few eerie things in common with the movie-pundit Michael Moore.
Our editor will post regular installments of "Babelsberg" on this page, under the big radio. In the meantime there are other things to visit: The Too Much of Nothing page gives details about Mike’s first novel; the Underground Grammarian section is a library of essays and speeches by the shamefully unknown pamphleteer and New Jersey professor Richard Mitchell; “about our editor” distinguishes Michael Moore from Michael Scott Moore; and “Politics and Prose” has pieces by Mike on everything from language, cloning, and broken-down Volkswagens to Denis Johnson, Wagner, and Henry George.
Mike also keeps a lively blog. BACK TO THE TOP
