This film was made in 1927, two years before the Wall Street Crash adversely affected the global economy and 5 years before Hitler gained a foothold in legitimate German politics. We who watch this film today can see much more in it, and impute much more to it, than the folks who saw it back then.
While watching the film, perhaps we wonder how a society like this, which seemed so benign, could shift so quickly to embrace a malevolent ideology of genocide and conquest. We see flashes of anger and conflict: a man slaps a horse, two men shove each other on the street, kids jostle and shove each other on the way to school, but these surely can't be a foreshadowing of the horrors to come. In the meantime, in a city to the South of Berlin, a maniac was slowly but surely conspiring to highjack the great city and turn its inhabitants into workers and soldiers toward an utterly insane vision.
So we watch the film and wonder how many of these children died 10 to 20 years later in the war and how these folks could have been so thoroughly influenced ideologically by the Nazis. The film has taken on a meaning for posterity Walther Ruttman could never have imagined.
The orchestral score was composed by the pioneer in film music Edmund Meisel.
See the film here, free on youtube: Berlin Symphony of a Great City
