Babelsberg Explained

It coulda been Hollywood.

November 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. “Few people realize that Hollywood, as a world center of the movie art, was the chance by-product of two wars,” writes Anita Loos in her autobiography A Girl Like I — a memoir of early Hollywood, from when it was just a fruit-growing backwater with a few sound stages built on dusty farmland. “Before World War I, the best films were made by such artists as Max Linder in France and Asta Nielsen in Sweden; in Italy scenarios were being written by the poet D’Annunzio. European production, however, was abruptly curtailed by the war, and Hollywood, in its isolation, enjoyed full freedom to experiment with the new art form. After World War I, Europe was a long time developing the wealth necessary for the most costly form of art expression ever devised—even more expensive than the cathedrals of the Middle Ages.”

The Nazis delivered the coup de grâce. Before 1933, during the louche wild years of the Weimar Republic, when Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre were still in Europe, Berlin was still glamorous and modern and alive. Metropolis, M., The Blue Angel, Pandora’s Box, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — nearly the whole canon of early cinema — was produced in Berlin, mostly in the UFA studios 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 antifascist 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.”

Lang wound up in Hollywood, like a number of other talented actors and writers from Berlin. 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, for all its pretension, 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