In 2011 the "Museumsprojekt Heimat e.V." Time-Team visited Berlin three Times to look at what remains today from the 1930s and 1940s. This is the seventh report and covers a 1930 film location at Nikolassee.

   This stop-off during the trip to Berlin was not planned, we just happened to pass Nikolassee whilst on our way to Wannsee and we remembered that we had seen a film that had Nikolassee railway station as one of its film locations. The film was a silent film made in 1929 and shown in the cinemas during 1930, called "Menschen am Sonntag" (People on Sunday).

   The film poster from 1930, the film has no known actors, instead when Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer made the film they took ordinary people off the street, who played their real lives! The film centres around five people and is a love story set in the Wannsee area of Berlin. It starts off showing their every day life at work and home, but the main focus is their free time, their Sundays, and what happens when they all meet up.

   The film, thought lost for a number of years, was put together from film out takes from four film museums in Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy. The film was restored in 1997 and has been available on DVD since 2006. Anyone interested in old Berlin would find this film very interesting, in fact it has since become one of my favorites and has opened the door to the world of silent films for me. 

   Now to the "Then and Now" pictures taken at Nikolassee. We could have obtained a better match if we had had the original screenshot images with us, but as this visit was not forseen, we only had our memories of a film we had seen some two years before. With this in mind I do not think that the match-ups are too bad. 

   All the colour images are taken by members of the Museumsprojekt Heimat e.V. and all black and white images are screenshots from the silent film "Menschen am Sonntag" taken on location at the Nikolassee railway station in 1929.

   No further comments are needed........

Only three stops from Nikolassee is Babelsberg. In the early years of film,

the German film studios at Babelsberg was Germany´s "Hollywood".