Menschen am Sonntag

In episode three of season one of the TV series Babylon Berlin, while Trotskyites are being hunted by Soviet agents, young would-be detective Charlotte Ritter goes to the cinema. To see which film ?

Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a silent movie directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer from a screenplay by Billy Wilder, who would later make a great career in Hollywood. The film follows a group of young Berliners on a summer's day at the end of the 1920s. It is « a film without actors », as the credits put it. There are indeed actors, five of them, but their names are unknown to us. « They have never been in front of a camera before, and today they have gone back to their professions ». 

The roles they play are : Brigitte Borchert, who works in a music-shop and has sold 150 records of « In einer kleinen Konditorei » in just a month, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, a wine seller, Christl Ehlers, a girl with acting ambitions, Annie Schreyer, a model and Erwin Splettstösser, a taxi-driver.

If one is fussy, Charlotte could never have seen that film in May 1929, as it didn’t have its premiere until February 1930. I guess the makers of the series wanted to show a well known film. They could have chosen Pabst’s Threepenny Opera, from 1928, or Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, from 1927, a documentary by Walther Ruttmann (by the way, the animations playing behind the credits of each episode are taken from Lichtspiel: Opus II, a series of abstract films made by Ruttmann in 1921). But Charlotte Ritter being a working-class girl, maybe those films would seem too highbrow for her.

They could also have chosen some other of the films with premiere in 1929 : Morgenröte, starring Paul Henckels, Werner Fuetterer and Carl de Vogt. Or § 173 St.G.B. Blutschande, a film about incest, with Walter Rilla, Erna Morena and Olga Tschechowa. But those films are almost forgotten today, whereas the scene from Menschen, with the young girls Christl and Brigitte having a picnic by the Wannsee Lake, may still be recognized in our days by film fans. Besides, that scene could also be seen as a reference to episode 6, where Charlotte, Greta and two boys are seen hanging out by the same lake in Berlin outskirts. 

Seeing this film, one thinks of "City love", written in 1933 by the young Berlin poet Mascha Kaléko: 

You kiss each other on park benches,

Erotics, yes, but only on Sunday,

On other days, who thinks of it?