My father is nearing the end of his life. So many things I have seen or read this year have, by chance, lead me back to the start of his life. Post-war Germany, specifically Berlin. We are losing the last of the generations that experienced a time when Europe was reduced to rubble. When armies marched across its broad plains. Perhaps it is because the holders of these memories are leaving us that the fear of war on European soil seems to be receding on the part of the North Americans, and growing on the part of those who inhabit the territories that suffered so much in the twentieth century.
The Fall of Berlin is a Soviet propaganda piece about the events leading to the Russian advance on Berlin, culminating in the Hammer and Sickle flying over the destroyed Reichstag. As a film it goes for a kind of docu-drama, following the fates of two lovers from the Ukraine, who will meet in Berlin after being separated for so long. Stalin features heavily, as the wise leader who oversees triumph. There's no subtlety to the movie and it was clearly made to stir Soviet pride in the difficult years after the war. The budget would appear to have been substantial: the battles scenes are extensive, and an imitation of the Reichstag was apparently constructed for the closing scenes.
It's not the greatest film ever made, but it does hark back to a past which feels all but unthinkable when one walks the multicultural streets of Berlin today. Was that all some kind of terrible fever dream? As events fall back into folk memory, as the real memories of great grandparents, grandparents and parents are lost, only art can hope to retain an idea of what happened, once upon a time, on the thriving streets of Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain and Charlottenburg.
(nb My great grandparents home, where my father spent the first years of his life, was out in Spandau, on the leafy border with the East.)
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