A film about Berlin in 1934

 Link youtube:      Berlin 1934

The film was shot in 1934, probably during the summer. The Weimar Republic had ceased to exist a year ago. The proof: the swastikas that we see here and there, the people gathered around a stage to listen to the speech of a character who could be a Hitler double (if it is not the mass murderer himself, Chancellor of the Reich since one year before...) whom they greet with the usual Heil, a newsstand with an issue of the Illustrierte Zeitung with the Führer on its front page. We also learn that it was (still) possible to buy the New York Times or the London Daily Mail, among other foreign publications.

In addition, the photographer takes us to the main thoroughfares: the Friedrichstrasse, the Unter den Linden, the Kurfürstendamm, as well as the most famous monuments, including the Memorial Church (Gedächtniskirche), eleven years before its destruction by allied bombs.

At 3'40 min, a facade of modernist architecture reminiscent of the Bauhaus, a style that the Nazis hated (“degenerate architecture”) t. But in 1934 the ideological battle had not yet been definitively lost for the artistic avant-garde and it was still possible to show such images in this film, no doubt thought of as a tourist promotion.

Towards the end of the film, a gymnastics exhibition at the Olympic Stadium (?) Which was to host two years later the Olympic Games, filmed by Leni Riefenstahl and where the black athlete Jesse Owens publicly humiliated the Nazis, snatching the medal of gold from the German champion.