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Studio Babelsberg
  PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

A History of Ufa and Babelsberg

There is a supreme irony in the fact that for more than a decade Germany’s Studio Babelsberg has been the location for the filming of many “Hollywood” motion pictures – ranging from Roman Polanski’s Pianist (2002) to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). Up until the late 1930s, the Ufa film production company located at Babelsberg was Hollywood’s biggest competitor. In February 2012 the German studio celebrates its 100th birthday.

glass studio
Ufa's first glass studio at Babelsberg. PHOTO: Studio Babelsberg AG
The first film made (by Deutsche Bioscop) at Babelsberg, the world’s oldest film studio, was Der Totentanz (US title: The Dance to the Death), starring Asta Nielsen. (The Danish actress made most of her films in Germany, and was already an international star by 1912.) Danish director Urban Gad – later the first of Nielsen’s three husbands – filmed that silent picture in a new glass studio in just a few days in February 1912. The first German sound stage in Babelsberg, the Tonkreuz, was built in 1929. One of the first sound films made there was Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) with Marlene Dietrich. Director Josef von Sternberg made two versions of the film, one in German and one in English, with Dietrich starring in both versions.

Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine
Brad Pitt as Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds, filmed in Germany and at Studio Babelsberg near Berlin. PHOTO: Studio Babelsberg AG

From 1912 until 1920, the Babelsberg studios were operated by Deutsche Bioscop. In 1911, after the Berlin fire department had declared their existing film studios unsafe, Berliner Bioscop GmbH moved to nearby Babelsberg (next to Potsdam) and took over an abandoned factory and its surrounding land. For their first production, featuring Asta Nielsen, they built a glass-enclosed studio next to the factory building. A year later, a second glass building is added, but with the outbreak of war in 1914, Bioscop runs into financial difficulties. After a brief merger with Decla in 1920, Decla-Bioscop is absorbed by Ufa in 1921.

    Also see:
  • An Ufa Chronology (1891-pres.) - A historical timeline that includes world cinema and other German studios.
  • The Berlinale - The Berlin International Film Festial

Universum Film AG, or Ufa (OOH-fa) for short, was a creation of the German army for World War I propaganda purposes. After ignoring the nation’s infant film industry, the German Imperial Army began to see its great potential for influencing public opinion. To achieve this purpose, the army had formed a Picture and Film Office (BUFA, Bild- und Film-Amt) early in 1917, the third year of the Great War. On the 4th of July 1917, General Erich Ludendorff wrote a letter, considered to be Ufa’s official founding document, in which he called for an even greater “consolidation of the German film industry” for the purpose of better coordinating programs and the more effective “influencing of the great masses in the interests of the state.” Ufa was officially registered as a government-owned corporation on December 18, 1917.

Marlene-Dietrich-Halle
In 1929, near the Tonkreuz sound film studio (1927), a new Mittelhalle ("middle studio") was constructed to allow Ufa to make a greater number of sound films. This studio hall was given landmark protection and named after Marlene Dietrich in 1995, following the 1990 collapse of East Germany and the privatization of the former DEFA film studios. (Ironically, Dietrich probably never worked in that particular building during the filming of The Blue Angel.) With its total floor space of 60,000 sq. ft. and an almost 50-foot ceiling, Marlene Dietrich Hall is still one of Europe’s largest sound stages. The complex is now divided into three stages.

Ufa, with its Babelsberg and other studios, soon became the country’s most powerful film production and distribution firm, incorporating most (but not all) of Germany’s former commercial, civilian film companies, even the Danish Nordisk studios. Another studio absorbed by Ufa was Decla, the company founded by Erich Pommer. He soon became the film producer in Germany. It would be Pommer who would produce the expressionistic horror classic Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) and other landmark films in cinema history.

Unknown
Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger and Bruno Ganz in Berlin during the shooting of Unknown (2011). Set entirely in Berlin, the film used about 40 locations in and around the German capital city. PHOTO: Studio Babelsberg AG

Not long after the war, in 1921, Ufa was privatized and taken out of government ownership, if not really totally out of government control. Just a year earlier, on January 24, 1920, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (NSDAP, “Nazi” party) had been founded in a Munich beer tavern. This event would have serious future ramifications, not only for Germany, but also for Ufa and the German film industry. Later, after Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazis would again bring Ufa under state control.

During the Weimar Republic, between the two world wars, Ufa had greater freedom to be creative and produce films for the movie-going public. Although not entirely free of state and political influence, the privatized Ufa, under Erich Pommer’s leadership, was soon once again in direct competition with Hollywood. By 1919, as Germany’s largest film studio, Ufa was contributing the major portion of the some 500 movies a year produced in Germany.

Ufa’s films were shown in its 3,000 cinemas all across the German Reich. A million people filled those theaters each day. Ufa that year employed 2,500 workers. On September 18, 1919 Germany’s grandest film theater, Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo, had its opening ceremony. Living up to the luxury suggested by its name, the Ufa-Palast was truly a film palace. Ernst Lubitsch’s Madame Dubarry was the premiere feature. After that, almost every big German movie would open at the Ufa-Palast.

Berlin’s Many Film Studios
Although it was Germany’s main cinema center, Babelsberg was not the only studio complex in Berlin. By the early 1920s there were some 15 film studios operated by various film production firms scattered across Berlin and its suburbs. Fritz Lang’s Die Spinnen (1919) was filmed at Weißensee. Ernst Lubitsch (before he went to Hollywood) was working at Efa’s studios near the Berlin zoo and in Tempelhof. Joe May shot Das indische Grabmal (1921) and other pictures in the “film city” at Woltersdorf, southeast of Berlin. In the south, Emelka (later Bavaria Film) established a studio at Geiselgasteig near Munich in 1919. During the divided-Germany years, Geiselgasteig was the main West German film studio. (Also see the studio links below.)

German directors and the Ufa studio began to develop an international reputation. With films like Madame Dubarry (called Passion for its U.S. release in December 1920), Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and other directors exported Ufa films to the U.S. in great numbers between 1919 and 1922. Ufa and Germany, after the war, soon became a major force in world cinema, both in quantity and quality. Only Hollywood exceeded German film production, and for a while only Germany offered any real challenge to America’s film industry. (Ironically, Lubitsch, May, Lang, Murnau and many other talented Ufa people would all later end up in Hollywood.) It is difficult today for us to appreciate the immense body of work that Ufa and other studios produced in the Weimar years. Despite preservation efforts in both the eastern and western halves of Germany (especially by Enno Patalas at the Film Museum in Munich), an estimated ten percent is all that survives today – distorting our picture of German cinema in those years. Few people today know who Asta Nielsen, Henny Porten, or Pola Negri were, but in 1920s Germany they were all famous household words. (Nielsen and Negri’s careers ended with the sound era – the Danish Nielsen’s voice was unsuitable and Negri had a thick Polish accent. Other silent era stars would flourish in the sound era: Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings among them.) Film then was also much more international than today. With no real language barrier, the films of the silent era could easily cross borders using English, French, German, Italian, or Russian intertitles.

While German film production was strong, many in Europe admired American films such as those of Charlie Chaplin (whose films, because of the war, were not seen in Germany until 1921). But to protect the German film industry, laws were passed that required one German film to be produced and exported for every imported film. The film laws were, however, counterproductive – insuring quantity but not quality. German films, rightly or wrongly, developed a general reputation in America for being heavy and too intellectual (a stigma that endures to this day). While Ufa was producing and exporting many films, especially to eastern Europe, it was not always making a lot of money on them. Several factors – hyperinflation, talent flight, poor management, and increased competition – all came together to bring Ufa to the verge of bankruptcy by 1925.

NEXT > Ufa and Babelsberg - Part 2

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