“Kampf dem Kampf”: Aesthetic Experimentation and Social Satire in The Ballad of Berlin

Abstract

According to Manfred Barthel’s filmhistorical memoir So war es wirklich, Robert A. Stemmle’s Berliner Ballade was a “milestone” event in the German postwar film landscape.¹ Based on a highly successful Berlin cabaret performance by Günter Neumann, who also wrote the screenplay, the film outdid almost all other rubble films at the box office.² Despite some irritation with the cabaret-inspired form, the contemporary critical response was overall positive as well, and Berliner Ballade was awarded a special prize “for the brilliant [geistvolle] depiction of German postwar circumstances” at the 1949 Biennale Film Festival in Venice.³ This contemporary acclaim contrasts starkly with the dominantly negative terms in which the film has been discussed in more recent film scholarship. Berliner Ballade is, of course, not the only immediate postwar film to meet with such critical dismissal. But even in the context of general rubble film reception “as a kind of miscarriage, both in terms of film and intellectual history,”⁴ Berliner Ballade has scored particularly badly. Seldom discussed at any length, the film tends to be summarily criticized as politically reactionary, alternatively as an example for emerging anticommunism under Allied censorship,⁵ as exemplifying contemporary longings for the return of state order,⁶ or as a “power fantasy” and “narrative redemption of the Reichshauptstadt” at the end of the rubble period.⁷