Fascination for the present and for the past

Glienicker Brücke, Kastanienallee, Brunnenstrasse, Gendarmenmarkt, Stauffenbergstrasse – anybody looking around Berlin over the next few days and weeks may just run into a couple of spies. Or into Claire Danes, the actor, who, as an ex-CIA agent, is living by her wits in the German capital – for the fifth season of the American TV series “Homeland”. The series’ fourth season played out in the Middle East, but now Berlin is the scene of the war against terror, even if Carrie Mathison no longer works for the CIA but for a private security firm. According to the producer, Alex Gansa, in the new “Homeland” the aim is to include German foreign policy and current political events, for example, both those in Ukraine and those in Syria.

This is the first time that an entire season of 
an American series has been produced in Germany. The cost: €40 million. Further evidence of the fact that, with its history and its present, the German capital and its surroundings create a fascinating backdrop for fictional narratives. People’s captivation cuts across the board, ranging from films about the Second World War, through film adaptations of novels, to contemporary thrillers. In 2008, Quentin Tarantino shot “Inglourious Basterds”, the film where cinema conquers the Nazis, at Studio Babelsberg. And last winter Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks trudged across Glienicker Brücke in the snow for the director’s cold-war thriller “Bridge of Spies”. Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar 
Gabriel has announced a funding program for the film industry to be launched in 2015. This program is also scheduled to include high-­calibre TV series formats. The ballpark figure mentioned is in the double-digit millions. In the industry, there is talk of other projects involving international series of the calibre of “Homeland” being shot in Berlin.

Berlin was the capital of the Cold War; in no other city did the East and the West encounter each other directly face to face in such a fashion. This is why, for a long time, Berlin was also the world’s spy capital. Glienicker Brücke, a bridge connecting former West Berlin with Potsdam (previously in East Germany), which was, as of July 1953, only accessible to people in possession of a special permit, was where thrice agents were exchanged between 1962 and 1986. It was the most spectacular such episode that Steven Spielberg has now made into a film with Tom Hanks – entitled “Bridge of Spies” – at the original location. It was here on Glienicker Brücke, that, in November 1989, one day 
after the Berlin Wall came down, the people of Berlin and the people of Potsdam gathered to embrace one another.

But, when talking about Berlin and films, do espionage, war and terror always have to be the only possible topics? Producer Nico Hofmann (“Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter”, “Our mothers, our fathers”), Chairman of the Management Board at Ufa Fiction, is much more fascinated by “that sense of being a melting pot, which today, as a metropolis of global proportions, the city of Berlin is, in a similar way to the Berlin of the 1920s. Tellingly, Tom Tykwer is now filming a series, ‘Babylon Berlin’, based on the crime thrillers set back then and written by author Volker Kutscher, one of the most ambitious German series projects.”

Back to the above international series, to “Homeland”. Shooting in Berlin will continue until at least September 2015, some of it possibly on Glienicker Brücke. The eagerly anticipated results, the broadcasting of the fifth season, are scheduled to commence in the United States as early as September.