The FilmMuseum Berlin is located in the 'Filmhaus' on Potsdamer Platz, and is part of the new center of Berlin. Potsdamer Platz has a checkered history. In the 1920s it was the busiest traffic intersection in Europe, with cafés, stores, hotels, cinemas, and the headquarters of Ufa, Germany's largest movie company. After the war the square was a meeting place for black-marketeers, and for East Berliners it was the nearest central point to watch films from the West. The border between East and West Berlin ran straight through the square, and when the East German leadership put up the Wall in August 1961, Potsdamer Platz became a strange, almost unreal place: Right in the middle of the metropolis it had become a desert with watchtowers, death strip and patrolling border guards. Tourists in the West could climb onto a viewing platform to look over the Wall; what they saw were watchtowers from which border guards observed them through binoculars.

The only building of any size left intact on the square was the old Grand Hotel Esplanade, more or less rotting away and used as a location for many films - such as Sam Peckinpah's "Cross of Iron" or Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire". It was here that the FilmMuseum Berlin was originally meant to be housed after rebuilding works on the hotel, and there was plenty of criticism of these plans at first. The detractors claimed that nobody would come to this remote corner of the city. When the Wall came down in 1989, Sony bought the land, with the obligation to include the Filmhaus in their planning. The architect of the Sony Center, and of the Filmhaus too, is Helmut Jahn, a German American; the new building now stands in the direct proximity of buildings by Renzo Piano, the new Reichstag by Sir Norman Foster, Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery, and of course the Brandenburg Gate. Eighty thousand tourists visit Potsdamer Platz every day - so we couldn't wish for a better location for the Filmhaus.

On Potsdamer Platz today there are more than twenty commercial cinemas. In the Filmhaus itself you will find two art-house cinemas, the German film and television academy of Berlin, the largest film library in Germany, the Deutsche Kinemathek and the FilmMuseum Berlin. The Deutsche Kinemathek runs the FilmMuseum. It was founded around forty years ago by Gerhard Lamprecht, a director whose films you probably aren't familiar with. He made, among other things, the Berlin-set film "Emil und die Detektive", whose screenplay was written by Billy Wilder. And naturally enough, Billy Wilder plays an important role in the FilmMuseum Berlin.

In contrast to other film archives, the Deutsche Kinemathek never limited its collections to films themselves, but included material about films: posters, scripts, equipment, photos, and designs for sets, costumes and scenes. These collections are the foundation - the core depot - of the FilmMuseum.

Film history, after all, is not just the story of stars, technology, films or genres. It is also - and this applies particularly to Germany - always the story of the political and cultural development of the country where the films were made. After Hitler gained power in 1933, many Germans working in film were forced to leave the country for political and religious reasons. America, and especially Hollywood, were the destination for most of those in the film industry who had to fear for their lives at home. That's why one of the main emphases of our collection is German film exile in Hollywood. Today the Deutsche Kinemathek holds Europe's, if not the world's, most extensive archives on film exile, with collections on Fritz Lang, film agent Paul Kohner, Robert and Curt Siodmak, Fred Zinnemann and many others.

It was partly because of this aspect of the archive's work that, seven years ago, we came to take on the collected personal effects of Marlene Dietrich. In looking after her estate, we are not concerned only with the legend, the show-star, the myth, but also with Marlene Dietrich as a political figure - with Shanghai Lily and Lilli Marleen alike.

Marlene Dietrich's estate without a doubt poses one of the greatest challenges an archive and a museum can face. I'll quote you some figures here, to give you an idea of the scale involved: Over 3,000 textile items from the twenties to the nineties, including 40 film and 30 show costumes;

1,000 individual items from her private wardrobe, 70 handbags, 150 pairs of gloves; 400 hats, 430 pairs of shoes; About 16,500 photographs from 1904 to 1992, including 2,000 original prints by famous photographers like Cecil Beaton, Mario Bucovich, Irving Chidnoff, Don English, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, Armstrong Jones, Ray Jones, Eugene Robert Richee, Edward Steichen and William Walling;

About 300,000 sheets of written documents, including letters from Burt Bacharach, Charles Boyer, Yul Brynner, Maurice Chevalier, Noel Coward, Jean Gabin, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Erich Maria Remarque, Maximilian Schell, Josef von Sternberg, Kurt Weill, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder; 2,500 sound recordings from the thirties to the eighties; 350 posters, drawings and paintings; 130 pieces of luggage (trunks, suitcases, hat boxes, vanity cases); plus home movies and videos.

Over a period of five years all this was viewed, archived, restored and researched, and today it's available for use by researchers. The archiving work alone cost around two million marks, funded by the City of Berlin, the Federal Republic of Germany and the research council "Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft".

With three rooms dedicated to her, Marlene Dietrich takes up the most space in the FilmMuseum Berlin. A few numbers on this as well: The Marlene Dietrich area covers around 300 square meters, with 159 exhibits - that's about 15 percent of the exhibits in the museum as a whole. As you can see from the two sets of figures, we have only been able to exhibit a small part of the estate. The main task was, therefore, not deciding what we would show but deciding what we would leave aside. We had crucial support in these difficult decisions from the designer, Hans Dieter Schaal. Since 1995 we have set up numerous Marlene Dietrich exhibitions with him. He is familiar with the collections and together we know what kind of direction we want the exhibition to take. That's made cooperation easy.

Of all film and show stars of German origin, Marlene Dietrich is the most well known throughout the world, and her estate is probably the largest collection ever dedicated to an actor. These alone would be good reasons for the extensive space we allocate to Marlene Dietrich, but there are others. Marlene Dietrich was born at the twentieth century's opening and died in its final decade; she not only represents the history of film but also illustrates the course of German political history. She was born in Berlin and there she was buried. She went to Hollywood as early as 1930 and, apart from a short visit in 1931, only returned to Berlin after the collapse of the Hitler regime. She not only refused to work as a film actress for the Nazis, but also joined the fight against them in her very own way, as part of the USO. Her combination of glamour and political commitment makes Marlene Dietrich a positive figure whose exemplary humanist stance allows us to regard her as a role model against the horrors of all dictatorship. As you know, not all Germans see it that way. Yet in fact, Marlene Dietrich's political involvement can be understood only by looking at her roots in German culture. That's why there are not only three rooms reserved for her alone, but also objects related to her in many of the other rooms. Take "The Blue Angel". This is, of course, the film that made Marlene Dietrich famous worldwide. But additionally, around one third of the production staff, among them writer Heinrich Mann and producer Erich Pommer, as well as more than half of the actors, had to leave Germany after 1933 or else were killed in concentration camps. This is just one example of how German films are always lessons in political history as well.

Previous exhibitions have taught us that the history of film is as good as unknown to the general public. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", "Metropolis", "The Blue Angel" or "Shanghai Express" - Fassbinder, Lubitsch or Josef von Sternberg - for the majority of the public all these are unknown names and concepts. The museum's first section - cinema's early days up till 1918 - therefore, includes among its key features the German Kaiser, the First World War and the first German film star, Henny Porten. You may never have heard of Henny Porten, but you may be interested to know that Marlene Dietrich was one of her greatest fans, collecting Henny Porten photos and confiding to her diary: "Something inside me burns for Henny Porten".

Even if you've never heard much about "The Blue Angel", you may still recognize the picture of Lola Lola on the barrel. And when you see a stuffy high-school professor puffing at the feathers of Lola Lola's skimpy skirt on a postcard, then that postcard - an original prop from the film "The Blue Angel" - acquires almost a cult significance. The fact that German actors and directors like Emil Jannings, Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau were working in Hollywood even before 1933 may be a matter of indifference to you. But it might stimulate your curiosity to hear that in the Filmmuseum Berlin you can see the first Oscar ever awarded to an actor - it went to Emil Jannings in 1929 for his performances in "The Way of all Flesh" and "The Last Command". The long ocean voyage to the New World is symbolized, too, by the suitcases Marlene Dietrich took with her when she set off for America in 1929. Alongside them you can see a photo showing Marlene aboard ship, sitting on those very cases.

What we are trying to do in this museum, then, is to underpin where we can the magic of the picture, as it is passed down to us in films and photographs, with real objects. Yet without the pictures - whether films or photos - many of these objects would be like empty batteries; they would seem dead, their message entirely unspecific. A suitcase is and remains a suitcase, even if it's Marlene Dietrich's. Only through the picture - Marlene with her luggage - do Marlene Dietrich's actual suitcases acquire the many-sided meaning we wish to give them: Parting and adventure, new beginnings and uncertainty. It is the atmosphere of 'Zero Hour', of hope and risk, of the loss of homeland and security, which is subtly generated here.

From out of this emotional uncertainty, the visitor enters a room designed to fulfill all his hopes. The star Marlene Dietrich is presented in all her glamour, through her film and show costumes. Privately, we at the museum call this the myth room. In a round, almost closed-off room, eight outfits are exhibited: The navy uniform from "Seven Sinners", a saloon dress from "Destry Rides Again", a man's suit and a tailcoat, a yellow feather dress and of course the legendary swansdown coat with the tasseled gown. The tasseled gown is a show dress made of transparent gauze and embroidered all over with crystal bead tassels. When Marlene appeared in it on stage, illuminated by the spotlights, she seemed to be wearing nothing but sparkling jewelry on bare skin. The room's walls are hung up right to the ceiling with portraits and videos, which are reflected by floor mirrors and the glass costume cases. We would like the visitor to take a seat in this room and sink into the world of luxury, the world of illusion and imagination.

How imagination is manufactured can be discovered in the second Marlene room. There you see one of the few surviving original Technicolor cameras, production stills from her famous films, and the Chinese and African dolls from "Morocco"; at a multimedia workstation you can study how a set is lit and what lighting effects can do. You can also design the lighting for a ready-made set. Marlene Dietrich's private life is also thematized in this room. Two cases use photos and documents to present "Friends and Lovers": Jean Gabin and Mercedes d'Acosta, Erich Maria Remarque, Douglas Fairbanks and many others. This section is accompanied by a series of selected original prints by Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, Edward Steichen, Josef von Sternberg and Hollywood photographers. Private films by Marlene Dietrich run in the background.

This should - at least for the time being - satisfy curiosity about the star, about glamour, luxury and riches. The next room takes us to Marlene Dietrich's work in the Second World War. Here a central film projection shows a clip from Billy Wilder's film "A Foreign Affair" with the song "Black Market". You can find the dress worn by Marlene Dietrich to perform the song, and the uniform she wore during the War. A large display shows photos of Marlene Dietrich's performances for the troops; and if you look closely you'll notice that Marlene wore the same dress for her USO appearances as she does in "A Foreign Affair". Among the exhibits relating to Berlin in 1945 to 1947, also taken from Marlene Dietrich's estate, there are images of destruction, ruin and loss, but equally images of unity against Nazism. In the Marlene Dietrich room we don't take a high moral tone, we don't declare people 'good Germans' and 'bad Germans' - we simply show the consequences of the Hitler regime as far as we can illustrate them here with documents from the Marlene Dietrich Collection.

Starting with the farewell to Berlin in 1930, the visitor has thus passed through Hollywood to reach the post-war Berlin of 1945, but the journey through time is not over yet. From Berlin in 1945 we turn back to Berlin in 1936 - the year of the Berlin Olympics and the year when Leni Riefenstahl made her film about the Olympic Games. A model of the Olympic stadium helps the visitor work out which scenes were filmed where. Like close-ups, the production stills for each scene appear in the relevant place above the model. You will hear music composed specially for the film "Olympia", but occasionally this music is superimposed with Marlene Dietrich's song from "A Foreign Affair", just as Marlene's song is superimposed with the Nazi music. The two sides of German history are highlighted acoustically; they are personified biographically by the two women Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. And these two sides are also reflected in an object: a camera used to film many of the shots in "Olympia". The camera belonged to Henry Jaworsky, one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen, who worked in America from the 1950s on. As a young man he bought the camera from Hans Schneeberger, Leni Riefenstahl's longtime companion. In 1929 Schneeberger was an Ufa cameraman. And it was in 1929 that Schneeberger worked on "The Blue Angel" with this very camera - the one later used to film the Berlin Olympics. But that's not the end of the chain of circumstance: Under the Nazis, war films were shot with the camera, and after the war it was used to make East Germany's first weekly newsreels. The camera is an eyewitness to German film history and, in this part of the exhibition, it points into both the past and the future - that is, into the exhibition's next rooms. But those rooms you're really going to have to look at for yourselves.

I hope it will have become clear that our museum does not define German film history, and Marlene Dietrich's role within it, simply as the history of entertainment, the stars and the films - but links it inseparably to political history. That history is traumatic, but also holds entertainment, convolutions and surprising twists - both in the good and in the bad.

Thank you for your interest and your patience.

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