Has no other city than Berlin “so publicly and consistentlyrelied on film to narrate and picture its contested pasts,” as Brigitta B.Wagner asserts in Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the PostwallEra? Well, maybe, and then too, that “postwall” in the title is a wordAmericans seldom hear. Wagner’s monograph reflects on the peculiar concerns ofpost-unification Germany, particularly the nation’s capital—a city that seemsfrom our distant U.S. perspective to have thrown off the burden of Nazism andthe Iron Curtain to become Europe’s party town.
Wagner documents Germany’s trouble in knowing what to dowith the eastern half of its postwar (much less its postwall) history, witharguments extending to the films produced in the so-called Democratic Republic.The most interesting chapter in Berlin Replayed, however, shows the continuity foundin 1950s youth films from both West and East Berlin. The spirit of RebelWithout a Cause and The Wild Ones was in the air, penetrating even theCommunist East Zone.
Aside from Hollywood and rock’n’roll, Italian neo-realisminfluenced directors on both sides of the divided city, whose war damagedsetting provided stark backdrops for urban drama. Remarkable for most Americans,who always imagined West Berlin as a besieged enclave, the movies show muchmovement back and forth between the city’s two sides—until the Berlin Wallsealed off the East Zone in 1961. Youth gangs are depicted in films from bothsides of the line as kids grappled with the uncertainty of growing up inunsettled times and under the shadow of a destructive war unimaginable to theirAmerican generational peers.
