Durchs Brandenburger Tor (1929)

At the center of this old Berlin tale are master shoemaker Adolf Lehmann, his daughter Frieda and nephew Fritz, as well as Lehmann’s journeyman Franz Müller and the cheeky apprentice Max. Both Fritz and the somewhat sleazy Franz have their eye on pretty Frieda, and each would like to marry her. Frieda prefers Fritz to the pushy Franz. One day, when the First World War breaks out, Kaiser Wilhelm’s soldiers parade through the Brandenburg Gate to the sound of music, and everywhere—including at the Lehmanns’—people compete to outdo one another in patriotic declarations. Only the old journeyman Emil Lauter can’t stomach any of it; he says he has no interest in militarism. Lehmann, a fervent admirer of the Kaiser and a national patriot, throws him out, saying, “I won’t tolerate Socialists in my house.” Emil seems hardly fazed and announces that he has decided to emigrate: “I’m going to democracy—to America!” While Fritz is soon called up and is subsequently reported missing, Franz cleverly manages to dodge military service. With Fritz out of Frieda’s sight, she eventually gives in to Franz’s advances and becomes his wife. The ponderous newlywed quickly makes a fortune as a war profiteer through lucrative black-market dealings. Franz lives in luxury and enjoys himself with other women in the appropriate establishments, while masses of people are dying at the front. In the meantime, Emil Lauter has arrived in America and made his (financial) fortune there. Back home, the old shoemaker Lehmann dies, and Frieda is deeply unhappy in her marriage to Franz. Franz has meanwhile taken over the Lehmann shoe shop and made it his own. The emaciated Fritz, who had been taken prisoner by the Russians on the Eastern Front, is not sent home to Berlin from a Siberian camp until 1923, five years after the war ends. When he returns, Fritz and Frieda—who has long since grown apart from the boastful, philandering Franz—gradually draw close to each other again. Only now does Frieda realize that she married the wrong man back then, and in 1923 she divorces the detested black-market king Franz, hoping to make a fresh start with her Fritz. Franz’s fortunes temporarily decline: two criminal investigation officers arrest him, and he goes to prison for his illegal dealings and fraud. But he is soon free again and thrives at the very top of a society of speculators and fortune-seekers, like a greasy pearl. An inheritance of 5,000 dollars from America, meanwhile, sweetens Frieda’s path toward a better future and a new marriage—this time to Fritz, who is gradually finding his footing again in postwar Berlin. The money was left to her by the worldly-wise Social Democrat Lauter, who, in the meantime, died a wealthy man in America, entirely without wartime enthusiasm or jingoistic patriotism. Fritz suggests that his future wife invest the money in a fine shoe shop of their own. And so they do. The story ends with a zeppelin floating over the Brandenburg Gate.