Because Berlin’s once-famed film industry seemed threatened with oblivion, at least in the western part of the city, the Senate created the Berlin Film Academy in 1966. Soon the academy’s students could be seen prowling the city with their super-8 cameras, making movies about whores, junkies, Gastarbeiter, and lonely GIs. Some of these student films were shown at art houses like the Arsenal Kino. As it did with writers, the DAAD financed sojourns for foreign filmmakers in the city. In an effort to compete with Cannes and Venice, the Senate established the Berlin Film Festival. The city’s cultural authorities also transformed UFA’s former post-production facility at Tempelhof into a full-scale studio for the shooting of feature films. By the mid-1980s the Berliner Arbeitskreis Film counted over one hundred active filmmakers. Nonetheless, among West Germany’s most prominent filmmakers—Alexander Kluge, Völker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Peterson, and Wim Wenders—only Wenders had his headquarters in West Berlin (and later he moved to Hollywood). On the other hand, with its Wall and highly visible scars of war, the city made a perfect setting for movies, and some of the more notable postwar German films were shot there. They include von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, Fassbinder’s monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on Döblin’s novel), Wim Wenders’s Himmel über Berlin, Herbert Ballmann’s Einmal Ku’Damm und Zurück, Rudolf Thome’s Berlin Chamissoplatz, and Reinhard Hauff’s Der Mann auf der Mauer. While Wenders’s film deals brilliantly with isolation in West Berlin, Hauff’s Mann auf der Mauer, which is based on Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspinger, features a young man who is trapped in a kind of no-man’s-land between the two halves of Berlin: longing, when living in the East, to escape to the West; nostalgic, once deported over the Wall, for life in the East. Influential as such films undoubtedly were in shaping our image of Germany in the modern era, they could not make up for the fact that, when it came to making movies, Berlin had been surpassed by Munich as West Germany’s new “film capital.”
West Berlin was also distinctly second class in the domains of broadcast and print journalism. West Germany’s national television station, the ZDF, was headquartered in Mainz, not West Berlin. The two federally funded radio stations, Deutschlandfunk and Deutsche Welle, operated out of Cologne. Given Berlin’s former preeminence as a newspaper town, the absence of a paper of national or international importance was striking. None of the daily journals published in West Berlin was on a par with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. West Germany’s dominant weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, was published in Hamburg, as was its most influential weekly paper, Die Zeit. In an era when harboring the principal shapers of mass opinion was crucial to defining a locality’s clout, West Berlin’s lack of a major hand on this lever surely cast doubt on its status as a Weltstadt.
