The Berlinale film festival was always political. In fact, it emerged as a vehicle for Cold War soft power: ‘cultural freedom’ as a cudgel with which to beat the allegedly more restrictive and censorious groupthink of the Soviet Bloc.
It was started by two men. One, Oscar Martay, was the Film Officer for the US military occupation. The other was Alfred Bauer, a film historian and jurist who—surprise—had been a high-ranking Nazi official, helping make films while ratting out colleagues in the industry (Berlinale suspends award over first director’s Nazi past).
Bauer became the first director of the Berlinale and held that role until 1976, miraculously hiding in plain sight until his role in the Third Reich was belatedly ‘discovered’. It’s hard to imagine anything more political than a film festival started by a military bureaucrat and a Nazi propagandist.
This year’s fracas over whether the Berlinale might inherit some responsibility for the nefarious activities of its largest sponsor—the German government—is by no means the first political scandal to rock the festival. In 1970, the Berlinale fell apart amid the stench of hypocrisy and napalm fumes when the Jury tried to cancel a Brechtian docudrama about an atrocity committed by US soldiers in the Vietnam War from the program.
But first, cut to 2026, a week or so ago….
Keep reading at Arena Online: https://arena.org.au/complicity-at-the-berlinale/
