Two years before Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin. The Symphony of the City (1927), Ufa published The City of the Millions. A Life Picture of Berlin by Adolf Trotz. The film documents life in Berlin in the mid-1920s, taking the viewer on a tour of the city, from fashionable shopping streets such as the Friedrichstrasse and the Kurfürstendamm to the film studios in Tempelhof and Babelsberg and petit-bourgeois quarters of the city.
With 85 minutes of runtime, it is the first full-length city portrait of Berlin and shows everyday life after the economic crisis of the early 1920s. When it was published in 1925, the film magazine Der Kinematograph criticized the film for “lacking the big picture (grosse Linie)” and focusing too much on monuments of the past. But for historians of today, it is a truly fascinating source!
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Jochen Hung (December 26, 2017). Daily Life in Berlin, 1925. Weimar Studies Network. Retrieved January 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vboq