Somewhere in Berlin
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Somewhere in Berlin |
| Country of production | Germany (East) |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1946 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 6 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Gerhard Lamprecht |
| script | Gerhard Lamprecht |
| production | DEFA |
| music | Erich Eingg |
| camera | Werner Krien |
| cut | Lena Neumann |
| occupation | |
| |
Somewhere in Berlin is a German DEFA children's film by Gerhard Lamprecht from 1946. The debris film was the third DEFA film after The Murderers Are Among Us and Free Land .
action
Berlin , shortly after the end of the Second World War : the city is in ruins. The children use the rubble landscape as a large adventure playground where they can play hide and seek. They play war with fireworks, which they exchange for groceries stolen at home from black marketeers Birke. Among the children are eleven-year-old Gustav Iller, who is waiting with his mother for his father to return, and Willi, who is the same age and who lost both parents in the war. The boys are friends, even if Gustav's mother sees this critically, Willi supports the unscrupulous bogus Birke in his business.
Gustav and his mother hope that when their father returns, the large, destroyed garage owned by the family can be rebuilt and a new beginning can be created. When father Iller returns from captivity , however, he is a mental wreck that is neither able nor ready for a new beginning. Father Iller becomes the mockery of neighbors, acquaintances and the children under the leader “Captain”. Gustav wants to mess with him and is supported by Willi. He wants to help the family and brings them a grocery package. When Birke learns that Willi has stolen from his inventory, he reacts angrily. Willi then flees to the understanding painter Eckmann. When the group around Captain Willi called a coward, he wanted to prove his courage and climbed a ruined house. He crashes and dies shortly afterwards. The children react in dismay and the adults are also torn from their lethargy. Together they are now starting to rebuild the large garage.
production
Gerhard Lamprecht had already completed a rough version of the screenplay under the title New Life in February 1946 , which he presented to the then film activists of the Soviet Zone . This accepted the completed script under the final title Somewhere in Berlin in March 1946. It was not until May that the film company DEFA emerged from the active film industry.
The interior shots were shot in the Berlin-Johannisthal studio. The scenes around the destroyed large garage were created on Krummen Strasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg . The film structures were created by Wilhelm Vorwerg and Otto Erdmann . The production management was in the hands of Georg Kiaup .
On December 18, 1946, Somewhere in Berlin had its premiere in the State Opera Unter den Linden .
The film was the screen debut of the then eleven-year-old Charles Knetschke, who later became known as Charles Brauer, among other things as a crime scene inspector.
criticism
Contemporary critics praised the film and Lamprecht's director: "We [...] note that this picture poet looked deep into the hearts of our ruined youth, shaped by Hitler's barbarism and bombing war, and read in them that it is not a hopelessly lost generation." Other critics found that Lamprecht "was less about a consistently well-composed story than about stringing together a maximum of observations and references."
On the occasion of the West German premiere in 1975, critics in the FRG accused the director of having “had his head full of remnants from the twenties [. He] meant nothing else than that things would start again in the old style, ”as Lamprecht had worked on numerous silent film productions in the 1920s. Even Frank-Burkhard Habel was that one, "came in narrative and visual culture [...] in Lamprecht and Krien champion whose standards from the silent film era [recognized]."
The film-dienst called Irgendwo in Berlin “one of the first German debris films that realistically portrayed the conditions of the time in the midst of desolate ruins. Worth seeing as a historical document. "
For Cinema , the film was a “document of contemporary history”.
literature
- F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , pp. 273-274.
- Somewhere in Berlin . In: Ingelore König, Dieter Wiedemann, Lothar Wolf (eds.): Between Marx and Muck. DEFA films for children . Henschel, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-89487-234-9 , pp. 71-73.
Web links
- Somewhere in Berlin in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Somewhere in Berlin at filmportal.de
- Accompanying materials for Somewhere in Berlin (PDF file; 1.51 MB) from the Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum for Film and Television
- Somewhere in Berlin at the DEFA Foundation
Individual evidence
- ^ Deutsche Kinemathek (Ed.): Somewhere in Berlin by Gerhard Lamprecht. Material accompanying the permanent film and television exhibitions . Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation, Berlin 2009, p. 7.
- ^ Alfred Bauer: German feature film Almanach. Volume 2: 1946-1955 , pp. 1 f.
- ^ Peter Kast in: Vorwärts , December 20, 1946.
- ↑ Walter Lenning in: Berliner Zeitung , December 20, 1946th
- ^ Sybille Wirsing in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 22, 1975.
- ↑ F.-B. Habel : The great lexicon of DEFA feature films. The complete documentation of all DEFA feature films from 1946 to 1993. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-89602-349-7 , p. 274.
- ↑ Somewhere in Berlin. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ See cinema.de