Film series “Jewish filmmakers in exile”: With Marlene Dietrich in the Kellerklub

Billy Wilder’s comedy “A Foreign Affair” begins with this scene, which follows genre conventions but does not ignore the horrors of Nazi rule. It marked the start of the film series “From Berlin to Hollywood”, with which Urania and the Centrum Judaicum are celebrating Wilder’s 120th birthday.

Berlin is in ruins

“A Foreign Affair” came out in 1948. Wilder was inspired by his impressions from the fall of 1945. Twelve years after he had to leave Germany, the director was deeply shocked: “We flew over Berlin and I saw the desert wasteland. It looked like the end of the world.”

Marlene Dietrich’s appearances in the basement club “Lorelei” are particularly glamorous. She sings the ballads “Black Market”, “Illusions” and “The Ruins of Berlin”. Her role name is Erika von Schlütow, it is an open secret that Hitler and Goebbels were fans of her.

Her accompanying pianist is played by Friedrich Hollaender, who wrote the music for Dietrich’s last Ufa film “The Blue Angel” in 1930, including the hit “I am prepared for love from head to toe”.

The diva didn’t know the script when she said yes to ‘A Foreign Affair’. “She said: ‘Only a villain like you can give me a role like that,’” says Volker Schlöndorff in a panel discussion after the film screening. Dietrich found it unreasonable to play a Nazi sympathizer. She made the film anyway.

Wilder came to Germany in 1945 to make his only documentary film on behalf of the US Army. He compiled “The Death Mills” from material that Allied camera teams recorded after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

German viewers were confronted with it during test screenings. “They couldn’t stand the film, left the cinema, some collapsed,” said Schlöndorff.

Plans to make a longer film using the material fell through. But in “Foreign Affair” Wilder cut in documentary scenes, from a black market at the Tiergarten to the chase through the Brandenburg Gate – as was later the case in his Cold War film “One, Two, Three”.

Billy Wilder was considered box office poison

Schlöndorff became friends with Wilder when he and Helmuth Karasek made the television documentary “Billy Wilder, How Did You Do It?” in 1988. turned. Afterwards, he often visited him in his office in Beverly Hills, where Wilder worked on scripts every day. She didn’t want to produce in a studio. After several flops, the six-time Oscar winner was considered box office poison.

After each performance, radio presenter Knut Elstermann talks to filmmakers, actresses and film critics. Curated by Jess Earle, deputy director of the New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation, the retrospective is also intended to draw attention to lesser-known emigrants who found work in the dream factory.

Ernst Lubitsch, Wilder’s role model, had already moved from Berlin to California in 1922. He made his breakthrough with screwball comedies like “Trouble in Paradise” or “Ninotchka” – the first film in which Greta Garbo laughed.

While Peter Lorre, who became famous in Berlin as a murderer in the thriller “M – A City is Looking for a Murderer”, rose to become a film noir star, while Helene Weigel, Alexander Granach and Felix Bressert only got small roles.

Vicki Baum escapes to LA

Vicki Baum had lived in LA since 1932. Her novels were global successes and were burned by the Nazis as “Jewish asphalt literature”. The film series ends with two of her best books filmed in Hollywood. “People in the Hotel”, starring stars such as Garbo, Joan Crawford, John and Lionel Barrymore, tells of people who stay in a luxury resort in Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic.

The sequel “Hotel Berlin” takes place in the same accommodation at the end of the Second World War. There is no sense of luxury anymore, everyone is fighting for survival. The Vienna-born actor Helmut Dantine can be seen as a resistance fighter, Lorre as a co-conspirator.

Baum’s novel was based on the Hotel Bristol Unter den Linden. It was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1944. The Russian Embassy now stands on the property.