IN OCTOBER 2013, excavators entered the backlot of the film studios in Babelsberg near Berlin, at the precise location of one of its most famous movie sets. The so-called Berlin Street, first built for Leander Hausmann's post-GDR comedy Sonnenallee (English title, Sun Alley, Germany, 1999) had since served as the set for approximately 350 feature and television films, video clips, and commercials. But this time the construction vehicles were serving neither as props for another film nor to prepare the site for a new international production. On the contrary, this time the excavators and welding torches were there to finally pull down the set that had become so integral to the international success of the Babelsberg studios as a globally accepted production ground, one especially suited to hosting historical films and equipping them with period props. In particular, the Berlin Street set had itself become a visual icon in the cinematic reconstruction of the Nazi past, in large part because of how many internationally successful and influential films were shot there. These include The Pianist (UK, Germany, Poland, France, 2002, dir. Roman Polanski), The Reader (USA, Germany 2008, dir. Steven Daldry), and Inglourious Basterds (USA, Germany, 2009, dir. Quentin Tarantino). It was also home to such popular German television movies as Nacht über Berlin (Night over Berlin, Germany 2013, dir. Friedemann Fromm) and Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter (English title, Generation War, Germany 2013, dir. Philipp Kadelbach). In this essay I investigate the correlations of set design, the specific heritage and legacy of film production in Babelsberg, and the ongoing popularity of historical films concerning the Nazi past that were and still are produced in Babelsberg. In doing so I intend to combine the fields of German history, film production studies, and Holocaust memory studies in order to delineate a new perspective on contemporary German historical films as they are relevant for German, Holocaust, and memory studies.

The Changing Faces of Babelsberg

Film sets have a peculiar nature. As Bergfelder, Harris, and Street say in their book Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination, on the one hand they “provide a film with its inimitable look, its geographical, historical, social and cultural context” Thus they serve as an intensifying element of the mood and atmosphere as well as for the social and historical background of the story.

FILM FOOTAGE MADE IN THE THIRD REICH and since found in the archive has recently provoked new forms of cinematic engagement with the incriminating images that often emphasize the perpetrator's perspective on historic events. Georges Didi-Huberman calls these visual remnants of the Nazi past “ill seen images”; “ill seen” because they have been “poorly described, poorly captioned, poorly classed, poorly reproduced, poorly used” by historians as well as filmmakers. In the case of archive films that remain from the Nazi period we are left with footage that is, for the most part, fragmentary and that has sometimes been edited in only rudimentary ways. Yet, even these fragments are significant beyond their status as documents or iconic images: their particular perspectives, framing, and production context mean they have certain cinematic qualities. In order to understand them properly, then, we need to “read” them as cinematic remnants, especially where they have been used in subsequent film projects precisely for their cinematic qualities.

In his study on the sources of Holocaust research, Raul Hilberg addresses photographs and films only in passing, but nonetheless points out the particular value of visual materials, which he describes as “‘action’ films and photographs.” Referring to well known archive films from the Third Reich, he notes the important information they reveal: “a ghetto from the entrances guarded by police to bodies on the sidewalk inside, or … a group of Jews boarding a deportation train.” Photography and film are ambivalent sources, however. They have the potential to reveal marginal and sometimes even accidental details that would not otherwise be shown or perceived. But just as they present things that happened in front of the camera, they also exclude other things that were not depicted. Even if the material was not edited and presented to the public, the perspective and framing of the shots taken still produce a particular meaning. Indeed every photographic or cinematic source can be “read” and will “tell” us something about the context in which it was made, even though there are often manifold and contradictory ways to interpret these visual remnants.

Jens schanze’s winterkinder (Children of Winter, 2005) opens with a long shot filmed from a moving car gazing onto the snow-capped landscape along a German freeway. This movement initiates us into the film’s bleak atmosphere as we travel on a road to the dark side of history. The disembodied voice of Adolf Hitler on the soundtrack orients us as to the direction of this journey into the past, excerpting a speech from 1938 in which the führer exhorts German youth to become a lifelong part of the Nazi system, amid frenetic applause and collective shouting of the phrase “Sieg heil.” This opening sequence establishes the dominant mood for the ensuing narrative: bleakness, silence, and an inhospitable atmosphere permeate the (inner) landscape of the filmmaker’s familial past.

By contrast, Malte Ludin’s autobiographical film 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (Two or Three Things I Know about Him, 2005), which also examines the ways his family attends to its own history, opens by inserting the viewer into the midst of a heated argument taking place in a tightly framed domestic interior. In this footage, captured with a handheld camera, the filmmaker’s sister is obviously upset as she argues nervously with her brother, located just beyond the frame. “It’s my right to see my father the way I want to see him… . You can’t take that from me.” From its very opening, this film is structured like a rhetorical argument about conflicting memories of the familial past. Just prior to the appearance of the opening credits on a black screen, his sister, Barbel, defiantly states that if her brother thought he could change her views on her father with his film he won’t be successful. Her assertion foregrounds the manner in which Ludin’s use of autobiographical filmmaking undertakes a form of individual memory work on his own family that also intervenes in a wider political discourse about personal and public opinions about the past. In the process of revealing repressed truths about the family and its past, the film constantly oscillates between therapeutic process and moral indictment.

The contrasting openings to each of these films clearly demarcate distinct personal and cinematic approaches to reviewing family history, and more specifically, the history of the two families whose ancestors were publicly and actively implicated in national socialism.