Muskauer Str. 1973

Dino De Lau­ren­ti­is and I had agreed that the film [The Serpent’s Egg (Ing­mar Bergman, USA/BRD 1977] was to be made in Ger­many, a sen­si­ble deci­sion as it is set in Berlin in the 1920s. I went to Berlin to look for loca­tions, but could not find noth­ing except a part of the city close to the Wall, called Kreuzberg, a ghost town where noth­ing had been repaired since the war. The façades were still pock­marked from grenades and spray­ing bul­lets. The ruins of bombed build­ings had been removed, but there were emp­ty sites like open infect­ed sores between the grey blocks. The signs above the shops were in for­eign lan­guage. Not a sin­gle native Ger­man lives in this part of what had once been a proud cap­i­tal. Some­one once said that a dwelling can be a dan­ger­ous weapon and I sud­den­ly under­stood the point of this remark. The build­ings were over­flow­ing with peo­ple chil­dren play­ing on the court­yards, the garbage stink­ing in the heat. The streets were bad­ly main­tained, the asphalt inad­e­quate­ly patched. Weit­er­lesen