Focus Features

In cinema, cities have identities. They add meanings to the stories set within them. Most cities are lucky to convey two or perhaps three sets of associations. Throughout the history of film, the movie city of Berlin, however, has reinvented itself over and over again as the character of its people and politics have changed. The capital city of, successively, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and then a city divided between the East and West after World War 2 and during the Cold War, Berlin has provided a visually striking, symbol-laden backdrop to tales of love and war, politics and intrigue, historical memory and ideological denial. It is a city where loving angels debate the German character while junkie youth wipe away their memories on the streets, where the East German state police are both villains as well as comforting cultural icons, and where citizens can unite against a common threat while individuals can find their own communities to love within. The following is a list of ten significant films set in — and in many ways about — the many cinematic Berlins.

One of cinema’s first visions of Berlin was, ironically, a distant one. Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis is set in a future industrialized vision of the city, where a scientist has built a robot that threatens to get rid of workers. The Berlin of Metropolis is one of giant clocks, massive factory edifices, and bursts of steam that shoot up the frame. Dismissed at the time by audiences and critics, including science fiction writer H.G. Wells who wrote that the film contained "almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress ... served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own,” the film has lived on for the strength of its design ideas as well as the harsh poetry of its take on capitalism and worker struggle. It has also become an iconic film for the Berlin Film Festival, having been shown there seven times. This year, it was shown once more—in a specially restored, “uncut” version with 30 additional minutes. Commented critic David Thomson, who curated Berlin’s retrospective section this year, “Metropolis is not an easy film to explain, but the images never get out of our head.”

One way a city becomes a character in a movie is when its entire society is brought together against a common threat. In Fritz Lang’s M, his first “talkie,” Peter Lorre stars as a violent child murderer whose crimes unite both official Berlin society, with its courts and judges, and the underworld, who also want to see Lorre’s Hans Beckert stopped. Based on real police reports, M is the quintessential “city in fear” movie, and Lang’s direction, influenced by German Expressionism, creates a psychologically charged urban space from the city’s streets, alleyways and dark shadows. Of course, the 1931’s film proximity to the rise of Nazism gives it another set of associations. As Gary Morris wrote in Bright Lights Film Journal, “The Nazis weren’t thrilled by the film’s original title, Murderers Among Us; they assumed it was about them and tried to squash the production, even going so far as issuing death threats. Of course, in a sense they were correct. M is about more than the landscape of an unbalanced mind. With its palpable air of dread and its direct indictment of mob mentality, the film draws with frightening precision the dark contours of Nazi groupthink.”

Two of Billy Wilder’s best films were set in Berlin. There was his 1948 romantic comedy A Foreign Affair and then, in 1961, his hilarious, breakneck-paced political satire, One Two Three. Set in a city divided among the Allied powers but before the erection of the Berlin Wall, the film stars James Cagney as a Coca Cola executive sent to open the German soft drink market to the U.S. fizzy stuff. Along the way he’s given the task of shepherding the boss’ daughter on her visit to the city. Political comedy and screwball farce blend when she reveals that she’s in love with an East German Communist and that they plan to decamp to Moscow. The film’s comic vision of Berlin as a melting pot of flustered company men and hapless apparatchiks was tempered upon its release by the film’s collision with real-life events. The Wall was built shortly after the film shot. When it was released, the New Yorker wrote that Wilder had built a “circus tent on grounds that threaten to become a cemetery.” But when interviewed by Playboy later about the film’s production challenges, Wilder was defiantly irreverent. He said, “We got to Berlin the day they sealed off the Eastern sector and wouldn’t let people come across the border. It was like making a picture in Pompeii with all the lava coming down. Khrushchev was even faster than me and [co-writer I.A.L.] Diamond. We had to make continuous revisions to keep up with the headlines. It seemed to me that the whole thing could have been straightened out if Oleg Cassini had sent Mrs. Khrushchev a new dress. But we weren’t afraid of creating an incident like Mr. Paar. We minded our manners and were good boys. When they told us we couldn’t use the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, we went to Munich and built our own.”

By the time of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1966 Torn Curtain, the politics of the Cold War were the new reality. Paul Newman stars as an American scientist, George Armstrong, who seems to be primed to defect to the East during a visit to East Berlin — much to the dismay of his fiancée, played by Julie Andrews. Soon, though, Armstrong confides that he’s faking his disloyalty in order to obtain secrets about a Communist anti-missile system. Interestingly, at a time in which many directors were shooting in Europe to bring an authenticity to their tales, Hitchcock used the studio backlot to double for his Berlin locations.

Shot throughout Berlin with its “hero location,” the Kit Kat Club of Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles being constructed at Munich’s Bavaria Studios, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret depicts the culture of Weimar Germany and the lead-up to Nazism through the prism of a love triangle between singer Bowles, a bisexual British academic (Michael York), and a rich German playboy. The film was partially based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, a collection of two novellas that introduced Bowles as one of several fringe characters making art and love amidst the economic collapse, cultural renaissance and political tensions of the time. In his book Razzle Dazzle: The Life and Work of Bob Fosse, Kevin Boyd Grubb described the relationship between the Berlin of the film’s 1971 shooting and the Berlin of Weimar: “If the Germans [on location in 1971] were reticent about the past, it only made [Bob] Fosse more persistent in his efforts to reclaim it. He and [Liza] Minnelli visited several places on the Reepersbahn, where they watched lesbians mud-wrestling and live pornographic sex shows. In Bavaria, they made a frightening discovery when they were told about a group of neo-Nazis. The strange juxtaposition of rampant sex and fascism was too tempting for Fosse to resist; it was, after all, the core of Cabaret."

As James Joyce’s Ulysses attempted to capture the entire fabric of Dublin life in a single novel, so too Berlin in Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Employing a literary device inspired by German artist Kurt Schwitters’ collage, Doblin, wrote Ronald Hayman in his biographical study Fassbinder, “approximated as closely as a novelist could to this technique, interpolating into his narrative scraps from sentences that might be running through the consciousness of people in the city – fragments from popular songs, advertising slogans, sports reports, stock exchange results.” The 1929 novel depicts the struggles of Franz Biberkopf, released from prison for murdering a girl he was pimping, to lead a straight life. For Fassbinder’s adaptation (the book’s second; it was first filmed in 1931), the great director focused on Biberkopf’s relationship with a treacherous friend, Reinhold, for whom he acts as a kind of relationship “fixer” by romancing Reinhold’s discarded and distraught lovers. Fassbinder, who actually wrote the script for his 15 ½ hour film during a stay in Paris, was fascinated by the ambiguous, quasi-sexual relationship between the men, and by the depth with which Doblin captured Biberkopf’s moral struggles. The film was broadcast in 14 episodes in 1980 and then played the U.S. in an innovative multi-night series of theatrical screenings. Recently the decaying 16mm camera negative was restored in a new 35mm version, which was released on DVD by Criterion Collection.

The eponymous Christianne F. of Uli Edel’s 1981 film was based on a real West German teenager who lived in the Neukoln area of the city. By the time she was 15, Christianne F. was a heroin addict and prostitute, working with other young junkies at the Bahnof Zoo train station. She was interviewed by two journalists researching an article on youth and drug addiction, and those transcripts formed the basis of an autobiographical book, Christianne F — Wir Kinder vom Bahnoff Zoo. The 1979 memoir was an unlikely international success, and Christianne F. went on to work as an advisor to the film, which parallels the book in not only chronicling drugged-out Berlin street kids but also the equally narcotics-drenched club scene of the time, a milieu mined by David Bowie and Iggy Pop for albums like, respectively, Low and The Passenger. Despite the bleakness of Edel’s film and its unflinching look at heroin withdrawal, it was a cult hit and Christianne became an unlikely role model. From a 1981 Time Magazine piece on the film’s opening: “As teen-agers packed theaters last week to see the cinematic Christiane F., played by Natja Brunckhorst, 14, experts on drug abuse feared that despite the film's realistic scenes of drug withdrawal, West German youths might be turning the former addict into a cult heroine and possibly a role model. Many teen-age girls have begun to imitate Christiane's style of dress and make pilgrimages to her former haunts. Complains Wolf Heckmann, West Berlin's drug commissioner: ‘The book and film have increased interest in drugs in this city. Kids who come to visit used to ask to see the Berlin Wall. Now they want to see the Zoo Station.’"

Also in 1981 was Frank Ripploh’s film about Berlin’s vibrant gay culture, Taxi zum Klo. Ripploh played himself in the autobiographical independent film about a high school teacher in a long-term relationship who enages in anonymous sex at night in Berlin’s bathhouses and public bathrooms. Made on a tiny budget and shot on location, Taxi Zum Klo appeared in cinemas at the same time as Hollywood’s attempt to make a gay film — the bland, studio-bound Making Love. But with its explicit sex, SM and casual LSD use, it represented the defiant response to any attempt to cinematically assimilate gay culture within the norms of mainstream representations. Along with many of the films on this list, the Berlin of Taxi Zum Klo is both a place but also an idea, a realization that New York Times critic Vincent Canby touched on when he wrote about the film after seeing it at the New York Film Festival. “It's not only about a character named Frank Ripploh but about one small section of the Western world in which he lives, where old values relating to love, sex, fidelity, the sanctity of privacy and even politics no longer hold, and where, as yet, no new values have taken their place,” he commented. “At the end of the film we know that Frank Ripploh, dressed in drag as a hilariously burly houri for the annual West Berlin 'queens'’ ball, is going off into the sunrise to make this very film, which may be the strangest happy ending any film ever had.”

Perhaps the quintessential post-Cold War film about Berlin is Wim Wender’s 1987 elegiac city symphony Wings of Desire. It’s the story of two angels, trench-coated lost souls, who drift in and out Berliners’ lives as they go about their day-to-day business. The first half of the movie is a deeply melancholic affair, with Henri Alekan’s swooping camera delving into apartments, trams, and the giant Staatsbibliothek library, where angels Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander stroll through the stacks, meditating through Peter Handke’s dialogue on friendship, philosophy, and Germany’s historical meanings. In the second half, the film becomes a story about love, and one angel’s desire to experience it in its corporeal form. Wrote Wenders in his original 1986 treatment for the film, reprinted as part of Criterion’s recent DVD reissue, “The thing I wished for was a film in and about Berlin. A film that might convey something of the history of the city since 1945. A film that might succeed in capturing what I miss in so many films that are set here, something that seems to be so palpably there when you are in Berlin: a feeling in the air and under your fee and in people’s faces that makes life in this city so different from life in other cities…. Of course, I didn’t want to make a film about the place, Berlin. What I wanted to make was a film about people — people where in Berlin — that considered the one perennial question: how to live? And so I have ‘BERLIN’ representing ‘THE WORLD.’ I know of no place with a stronger claim. Berlin is a ‘historical truth.’”

The last film on our list is Wolfang Becker’s 2003 film, Good Bye, Lenin!, which, appropriately, takes us if not quite full circle then back to the Cold War scheming of films like Torn Curtain. This time, however, the subterfuge is both comedic and familial. Set just before and just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Good Bye Lenin! details a son’s attempts to maintain the illusion of a Communist East Germany for his stridently pro-Socialist Unity Party mother, who suffered a stroke during those fateful days. Her doctor tells the son that news of Germany’s reunification will surely hasten her demise, so he constructs a series of elaborate fictions to keep all traces of Western consumer culture, capitalism, and democratic politics away from her sickbed. The film is a witty meditation on historical memory, one in which the repression, state-controlled media, and scarcity are recast as comforting cultural mementoes. Indeed, the film was a hit in Germany where, wrote J. Hoberman of the Village Voice, “it seemed to reflect the current mood of ostalgie for the old DDR.” He continued, “Had it been directed by Billy Wilder, Good Bye, Lenin! could have been a sensational farce—the reverse of One, Two, Three, in which Berlin-based Coca-colonizer James Cagney has 24 hours to transform a bellicose East German beatnik into a model capitalist son-in-law…. Good Bye, Lenin! is overlong and a bit tiresome but it's actually about something—not so much ostalgie as the conditions that create it. That Communism itself was a fake facade makes Alex's imaginary motherland the simulation of a simulation. There's a haunting quality to his bittersweet realization that "the DDR I created for her became the one I would have wished for."