Berlin, Divided Heaven: From the Ice Age to the Thaw
Touring Film Series

Crime in the Divided City

"Crime in the Divided City" features Frank Beyer's 1988 DEFA comedy, The Break, a brilliantly crafted gangster story about a band of quirky crooks who learn that honesty is not always the best policy. The film's comic tension between East and West anticipates the vanishing of the GDR by recalling a brief post-war era when German division seemed anything but rigid. Other films recall the era's grim conditions and the fragility of "law and order" as historian Uta Poiger has described them in relating the true story of the ruthless Gladow Gang. Thomas Brasch's Iron Angels, set during the time of the Berlin Airlift, fictionalizes three such characters with distinctively different interpretations of the division of Berlin, who exploit the city's chaos to advance their own interests. Other urban crime films complement these examples, such as the Carol Reed's classic The Third Man, set in the divided Vienna, and his less successful German version, The Man Between.

The Break (Der Bruch)
Iron Angels (Engel aus Eisen)
Berlin – Schönhauser Corner (Berlin – Ecke Schönhauser)
 

Suggested further viewing: 

The Third Man
1949, United Kingdom, b/w, 93 min.
Dir.:  Carol Reed.
Script:  Graham Greene, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, Orson Welles.
Camera:  Robert Krasker.
Editing:  Oswald Hafenrichter.
Music:  Anton Karas.
Cast:  Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard.   
35mm, New Yorker Films

The Third Man is a movie that looks and feels not like a movie of the 40’s, rather neo-noir of the late 60’s / early 70’s.  This wonderful example of classic noir style is one of the all-time greatest films.  It combines gripping visuals, sound, dialogue and acting to tell a thrilling story and comment about the atmosphere after World War II. 

The crisp black and white images of a bombed out Vienna are breathtaking - the use of shadow and light both cinematographically and narratively - adding a measure of disorientation to the plot - evoke the German Expressionist style.  The camera work is backed by strong performances by Welles, Cotten and the Italian actress Valli.  One can witness Greene’s plot twisting around Cotten tightly.  But what makes The Third Man so great is its historical presence; on one level, it is a story of betrayal and corruption in a post war, occupied Vienna; on the other it is giving the audience a glimpse of the mood of Europe after the war.  The uncertainty that the Cold War was bringing is evident throughout the film; Cotten is constantly trying to figure out who to trust.  Vienna is on the frontier of the new communist bloc (we even see the communists infiltrating Vienna trying to bring Valli back to her native Czechoslovakia).  The zither music score combined with the stark images of bombed out Vienna are reminiscent of the frontier towns of American Westerns.  So The Third Man is not only a wonderful noir, but a unique look at the brief time between World War II and the Cold War.

Winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes 1949.

Related reading: 

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus.  Politics and Crime.  A Continuum Book.  New York:  Seabury Press, 1974.

Kriminalität in den DDR-Medien.  Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung:  Bonn, 1998.

Poiger, Uta G.  “Taming the Wild West:  American Popular Culture and the Cold War Battles Over East and West German Identities, 1949-1961.”  Diss.  Brown University, 1995.

Zimmermann, Carl Wilhelm.  Die Diebe in Berlin, oder, Darstellung Ihres Entstehens, Ihrer Organisation, Ihrer Verbindungen, Ihrer Taktik, Ihrer Gewohnheiten und Ihrer Sprache. Berlin:  Arani, 1979.

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