Next time you watch a rocket launch and hear somebody count backward from ten, remember where that comes from. Not from NASA. From a German silent movie.
Fritz Lang shot Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) in 1929 at the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, just outside Potsdam. He needed the audience to feel the launch coming, and counting up told them nothing. So he counted down to zero. Nobody had done that before, and the people who later built real rockets kept it.
That is the sort of thing you keep running into once you start digging.
The Years When Berlin Set the Standard
Studio Babelsberg opened in 1912 and is still the oldest large-scale film studio on the planet. Through the Weimar years it was where the medium got figured out: camera movement, lighting, set design, the whole grammar of how a story looks on a screen.
Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) arrived in 1920 with painted shadows and walls that lean the wrong way. Horror movies have been borrowing from it ever since.
Two years later came Murnau’s Nosferatu, shot partly in Wismar and Lübeck. The producers had adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula without asking anyone: new names, an invented German port, and a hope that nobody would notice.
Florence Stoker, the widow of the Irish author, noticed immediately. She sued, she won, and in 1925 a court ordered every copy destroyed. Copies had already left the country—which is the only reason the most influential vampire film ever made still exists.
Metropolis followed in 1927, Lang again. The premiere version flopped, got cut down hard, and for eight decades everybody assumed the missing half hour was gone. Then in 2008 a battered 16 mm print surfaced in a Buenos Aires film museum with nearly all of it intact, and the restoration premiered at the Berlinale in 2010. If you ever wondered why archivists keep scratched old reels nobody has looked at since the war, that is why.
Sound arrived, and with it Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) in 1930, which made Marlene Dietrich a world star. Dubbing barely existed yet, so the crew shot the whole picture twice, in German and in English, with the same cast, and the English version opened in London that July. One young Englishman had already passed through those studios: Alfred Hitchcock came in 1924 for a British-German co-production, watched Murnau direct, and took the lesson home.
What 1933 Cost Us
Then it stopped. The Third Reich emptied the industry of the people who had built it, and most were on a ship within months. Lang left. Billy Wilder left. Dietrich took American citizenship, refused every offer to come home, and spent the war years singing for Allied troops.
Hollywood’s golden age was staffed, to a remarkable degree, by people our own government had chased out. What stayed behind was propaganda, some of it technically accomplished and all of it serving a regime that murdered millions. Leni Riefenstahl’s films are still studied for their camerawork and still inseparable from what they were made for. Both things are true.
The first German feature made afterward came out of Babelsberg in 1946: Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us), shot in a city still full of rubble, asking the obvious question about the neighbors.
Two Countries, Two Film Industries
Babelsberg ended up in East Germany, where the state studio DEFA turned out hundreds of films over four decades. Some were the obedient sort you would expect. Others were not. Jakob der Lügner (Jacob the Liar) from 1974 remains the only DDR production ever nominated for an Oscar.
The West spent the 1950s making cheerful pictures about mountains and true love, and by 1962 a group of young filmmakers had run out of patience. At the Oberhausen short film festival, twenty-six of them signed a manifesto declaring the old cinema dead. Sounds like posturing. It worked.
What followed was the strongest run German film has ever had: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta. The peak came in 1979, when Schlöndorff’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) shared the Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now and then took the Academy Award for best foreign language film. First German picture ever to manage it.
The Films That Made It Out
If you know one German film, it is probably Das Boot from 1981, which locked Jürgen Prochnow in a submarine for three hours and made half the audience claustrophobic. Then Tom Tykwer’s Lola rennt (Run Lola Run) in 1998, sending Franka Potente sprinting through Berlin and straight into the Bourne films. Good Bye, Lenin! made Daniel Brühl famous, and Fatih Akin’s Gegen die Wand (Head-On) took the Golden Bear in 2004.
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) won the foreign language Oscar in 2007 and is still the one I hand people who want to understand what surveillance does to a person.
The recent stretch has been something else. Edward Berger’s Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) took four Academy Awards in 2023 and seven BAFTAs, best film included—no non-English-language picture had ever won that many in London. İlker Çatak’s Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teachers’ Lounge) was Oscar-nominated the year after. Mascha Schilinski took the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2025 with In die Sonne schauen (Sound of Falling), the first German woman to win a main prize there. And in 2026 Çatak returned to win the Golden Bear with Gelbe Briefe (Yellow Letters), the first German film to do it in over twenty years.
Four German films have won the international feature Oscar. All four are worth your evening.
What We Actually Buy Tickets For
Now for the honest part. The films that win the prizes are not the films we go see.
The biggest German movie in our box office history is Der Schuh des Manitu (Manitou’s Shoe), a 2001 western spoof by Michael “Bully” Herbig that sold roughly 11.7 million tickets. Count the DDR audiences into the older numbers and Otto—Der Film from 1985 edges past it. When Herbig finally made a sequel in 2025, it cleared five million admissions, which no German film had managed since 2019. Both Manitu films parody the Karl May westerns our parents grew up on. We are not a nation of arthouse purists, whatever the festival coverage suggests :-)
Sitting Down in a German Movie Theater
Here is the part that catches visitors out, so read it twice. We dub almost everything. Foreign films arrive with German voices over them, spoken by actors who have often voiced the same Hollywood star for twenty years, and for most of the country that is what going to the movies means.
So you have to read the listing. OV stands for Originalversion, the original soundtrack with no subtitles. OmU is Original mit Untertiteln, original audio with German subtitles. OmeU gives you English subtitles instead. DF is Deutsche Fassung, the dubbed one. And a showtime with no marking at all is dubbed—that is the trap.
In Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, or Cologne you have several original-language options most nights. In a town of fifteen thousand you have none. Animated features are hardest of all to find undubbed, since the target audience is six and cannot read subtitles yet.
Two more local habits. Seats are assigned rather than first-come, so you pick your row when you buy. And plenty of theaters still drop an intermission into a long film, lights up and all, which guests from the US, the UK, or Australia find either charming or maddening depending on the scene it interrupts.
In summer, watch for open-air screenings in parks, courtyards, and castle grounds. And every February, Berlin hosts the Berlinale, not a closed industry affair but the largest public film festival anywhere: ordinary people buy tickets and sit in the same theaters as the juries.
Where the History Is Still Standing
Potsdam is the pilgrimage, and UNESCO named it a Creative City of Film in 2019. Studio Babelsberg is a working studio, so you cannot wander in, but two places nearby will fill a day.
The Filmmuseum Potsdam sits in the Marstall, the old royal stable block and the oldest building in town. It is also the oldest film museum in Germany, and its cinema still shows silent films with live organ accompaniment. Go there first. Then walk into Filmpark Babelsberg, open spring through fall, the theme park version with stunt shows and standing sets—far more fun once you know what you are looking at.
Down south, the Bavaria Filmstadt in Grünwald outside Munich keeps the actual submarine model from Das Boot, plus sets from Die unendliche Geschichte (The NeverEnding Story) and from the new Manitu film. Give the tour two hours.
If you want the wider context, my pages on German culture, German music, and German history pick up the other threads.
Start with Das Leben der Anderen. Watch it subtitled rather than dubbed, because half the performance is in how people talk when they know somebody is listening.