Berliner Chic by Ingram Susan;Sark Katrina;Ingram Susan;

Author:Ingram, Susan;Sark, Katrina;Ingram, Susan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intellect Books
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

After the War is Before the War?

Two of the main tendencies of Nazi Berlin fashion – its valorization of American film and the increasing necessity for creative cost-saving measures – made the war’s end after the decisive Battle of Berlin and the surrender by German troops to the Soviets on 2 May 1945 seem less of a caesura than it is usually treated as by historians. That both the film and fashion industries were able to so quickly raise themselves up from the ashes (the relevant section of Aschke’s text bears the heading “Phoenix”) still tends to astonish those who have not experienced a war and its hardships and are not thinking of what Aschke poignantly describes as “the human need for alternate realities (Gegenwirklickeiten), which veil the visible or offer visions of marvellous transformations” (260). Twenty-two of the city’s sixty UFA cinemas remained intact enough for screenings, at first of only foreign films in the original and then with makeshift subtitles (260). The first film studio to begin production again was DEFA (Deutsche Film AG), which was founded on 17 May 1946 after the Soviets licensed its first project, The Murderers Are Among Us (Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns, directed by Wolfgang Staudte). The Western Allies were keen to prevent the kind of vertical integration that had allowed UFA its monopolistic success and so bound their licenses to involvement in only one sector of the industry (production, distribution or exhibition) (Hickethier 195). By the late 1940s distribution companies were able to establish market dominance by “showing old Hollywood films, including many B pictures, as well as a large number of UFA films reclassified as harmless entertainment” (Hake 2008, 89). Film production started up in the new Federal Republic in an equally decentralized and localized manner with close to two hundred film production companies founded in the early postwar years (Hickethier 195). While many of the most important and productive companies were in Hamburg, such as Helmut Käutner’s Camera-Film Produktion, Rolf Meyer’s Junge Film-Union and Gyula Trebitsche and Walter Koppel’s Real-Film (Hickethier 195), production resumed in the American sector in the Bavaria studios in Munich-Geiselgasteig and the Neue Deutsche Filmgesellschaft (NDF) (also in Munich), while “in the British zone, Rolf Thiele and Hans Abich established a small centre of film-making in Göttingen with Filmaufbau AG, a studio that became known for its controversial subject matter” (Hake 2008, 90). In Berlin, there were also a number of startups in the western sectors. Taking advantage of the concentration of talent in the former capital, among the most prominent were “Kurt Ulrich’s Berolina-Film, which launched the successful Heimatfilm wave of the 1950s, and Horst Wendtland’s Rialto-Film, which started the popular Edgar Wallace and Karl May series in the early 1960s. The most successful Berlin-based company was Artur Brauner’s CCC (Central Cinema Company) studio, whose mixture of literary adaptions, social dramas, and lifestyle comedies embodied best the postwar compromise between cultural ambition and economic growth” (Hake 2008, 89–90; cf. Dillmann-Kühn 1990).

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