Universum Film AG

Ufa, Berlin, Babelsberg, and Hollywood

    Also see: A Chronology of Film in Germany and Elsewhere and Emelka - Munich

    The Ufa Story - A book about the history of Germany's great film studio.

Berlin—including Babelsberg, Woltersdorf, and other Berlin suburbs—was Germany’s Hollywood before World War II. At its peak in 1921, the German film industry was literally cranking out some 600 films annually, making it Hollywood’s most serious competitor. But the advent of sound, the Nazis, and another world war would bring German cinema to a nadir that it has not recovered from to this day. The story of German cinema’s rise and fall is largely the story of the rise and fall of Ufa, at one time Germany’s largest studio and one of the largest in the world.

Ufa's first glass studio at Babelsberg.
Photo courtesy Medienstadt Babelsberg

Universum Film AG, or Ufa (OOH-fa) for short, was a creation of the German army for World War I propaganda purposes. After ignoring the nation’s infant film industry, the German Imperial Army began to see its great potential for influencing public opinion. To achieve this purpose, the army had formed a Picture and Film Office (BUFA, Bild- und Film-Amt) early in 1917, the third year of the Great War. On the 4th of July 1917, General Erich Ludendorff wrote a letter, considered to be Ufa's official founding document, in which he called for an even greater “consolidation of the German film industry” for the purpose of better coordinating programs and the more effective “influencing of the great masses in the interests of the state.” Ufa was officially registered as a government-owned corporation on December 18, 1917. It soon became the country's most powerful film production and distribution firm, incorporating most (but not all) of Germany's former commercial, civilian film companies, even the Danish Nordisk studios. Another studio absorbed by Ufa was Decla, the company founded by Erich Pommer. He soon became the film producer of Germany. It would be Pommer who would produce the expressionistic horror classic Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919) and other landmark films in cinema history.

Not long after the war, in 1921, Ufa was privatized and taken out of government ownership, if not really totally out of government control. Just a year earlier, on January 24, 1920, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei (NSDAP, “Nazi” for short) had been founded in a Munich beer tavern. This event would have serious future ramifications, not only for Germany, but also for Ufa and the German film industry. The Nazis would later bring Ufa again under state control.

During the Weimar Republic, between the two world wars, Ufa had greater freedom to be creative and produce films for the movie-going public. Although not entirely free of state and political influence, the privatized Ufa, under Erich Pommer's leadership, was soon once again in direct competition with Hollywood. As Germany’s largest film studio, Ufa was by 1919 contributing the major portion of the some 500 movies a year produced in Germany. Ufa’s films were shown in its 3,000 cinemas all across the German Reich. A million people filled those theaters each day. Ufa that year employed 2,500 workers. On September 18, 1919 Germany's grandest film theater, Berlin's Ufa-Palast am Zoo, had its opening ceremony. Living up to the luxury suggested by its name, the Ufa-Palast was truly a film palace. Ernst Lubitisch’s Madame Dubarry was the premiere feature. After that, almost every big German movie would open at the Ufa-Palast.

An aerial view of Studio Babelsberg today. In the 1920s
and '30s, Babelsberg was Germany's Hollywood,
home to Ufa's main studio complex.
Photo courtesy Medienstadt Babelsberg

German directors and the Ufa studio began to develop an international reputation. With films like Madame Dubarry (called Passion for its U.S. release in December 1920), Ernst Lubitsch, Joe May, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and other directors exported Ufa films to the U.S. in great numbers between 1919 and 1922. Ufa and Germany, after the war, soon became a major force in world cinema, both in quantity and quality. Only Hollywood exceeded German film production, and for a while only Germany offered any real challenge to America’s film industry. (Ironically, Lubitsch, May, Lang, Murnau and many other talented Ufa people would all later end up in Hollywood.) It is difficult today for us to appreciate the immense body of work that Ufa and other studios produced in the Weimar years. Despite preservation efforts in both the eastern and western halves of Germany (especially by Enno Patalas at the Film Museum in Munich), an estimated ten percent is all that survives today—distorting our picture of German cinema in those years. Few people today know who Asta Nielsen, Henny Porten, or Pola Negri were, but in 1920s Germany they were all famous household words. (Nielsen and Negri's careers ended with the sound era—the Danish Nielsen's voice was unsuitable and Negri had a thick Polish accent. Other silent era stars would flourish in the sound era: Conrad Veidt and Emil Jannings among them.) Film then was also much more international than today. With no real language barrier, the films of the silent era could easily cross borders using English, French, German, Italian, or Russian intertitles.

While German film production was strong, many in Europe admired American films such as those of Charlie Chaplin (whose films, because of the war, were not seen in Germany until 1921). But to protect the German film industry, laws were passed that required one German film to be produced and exported for every imported film. The film laws were, however, counterproductive—insuring quantity but not quality. German films, rightly or wrongly, developed a general reputation in America for being heavy and too intellectual (a stigma that endures to this day). While Ufa was producing and exporting many films, especially to eastern Europe, it was not always making a lot of money on them. Several factors—hyperinflation, talent flight, poor management, and increased competition—all came together to bring Ufa to the verge of bankruptcy by 1925.

The failure of a cooperative film distribution deal in 1925 among Paramount, Ufa, and Metro-Goldwyn, the so-called Parufamet agreement, did not help matters. Neither did expensive productions like Fritz Lang's Metropolis with its 5.3 million-mark budget, an enormous sum in those days. To prevent its total financial collapse, Ufa was taken over in March 1927 by Alfred Hugenberg’s Deulig media empire. Hugenberg, an opponent of the democratic Weimar Republic, with Krupp connections, and a member of the right-wing German National People's Party, was motivated by a desire to use Ufa for his own political purposes. This Hugenberg connection would later make it easier for the Nazis to gain control of Ufa in the 1930s. Under the continuing management of Ludwig Kitzsch, Ufa soon controlled 133 domestic and foreign companies in film production, distribution, or display.

The history of Ufa following the Nazi rise to power is a tragic one. After 1933, Ufa came under increasing state control and in 1937 the studio was once again state-owned. Many of the talented filmmakers in Germany who had not already departed did so in the early 1930s. Lubitsch had left for Hollywood in 1922, Paul Leni and F.W. Murnau in the mid-1920s, the actress Pola Negri and the actor Conrad Veidt around the same time. Even Erich Pommer, the head of Ufa since 1921, left for the greener films of Hollywood in 1926. (He returned to Germany in 1928, only to leave again because of the Nazis.) An ever-increasing talent drain began as the Third Reich made it clear that “non-Aryans” were unwelcome in Germany’s film industry. Fritz Lang left in 1933 not long after his new film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, was banned by the new Minister of Propaganda, Josef Goebbels. Soon a flood of cinema exiles poured into England, France and other neighboring countries, many to end up in Hollywood sooner or later.

As the Nazis consolidated their power, Ufa—a vital tool for promoting government views—came increasingly under state control. By 1937 the Third Reich, through cover corporations and secret dealings, owned 72 percent of Ufa. By 1942, in the middle of wartime, Ufa was totally government owned and controlled; there were no private film production companies in Germany at all. Some film historians point out that not all films and filmmakers during the Nazi era complied entirely with Nazi guidelines. In fact, Goebbels was forced at various times to remind the German film community that he was the judge of what a “good” film was, and both he and Hitler found it necessary to ban some two dozen films in the 12 years of the Third Reich. Of the 1,094 feature films produced during that time, only about 14 percent are considered to be pure propaganda. About half of the movies of the time were innocuous comedies. Nevertheless, any German cinematic production from this time is tainted with Nazi brown. Popular Ufa stars of the time, such as Hans Albers, the Swedish Zarah Leander, and Heinz Rühmann, had to bear the Nazi stigma after the war until their deaths, and few of the Nazi-era films can be regarded as classics in any light. Even the elaborate Agfacolor productions such as Münchhausen (1943), intended by Goebbels to show that Germany could equal colorful Hollywood epics like Gone With the Wind (a copy of which the German navy had obtained for Goebbels’ private viewing), do not hold up today. Ironically, the pure propaganda films of Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl, are, at least cinematically, among the best work of the period. As much as one may disagree with her allegiances, Riefenstahl’s directorial talents can not be denied.

After the war, Ufa ceased to exist. The division of Germany in 1949 meant that Ufa’s former facilities in Babelsberg came under the control of DEFA, the new East German film studio. West German film production came to be concentrated in Munich (Geiselgasteig), which had been a secondary player in film production before the war.

Scheduled tours of Media City Babelsberg run April through
October. This flame-engulfed daredevil is just one of many
attractions. See links below for more information.
Photo courtesy Medienstadt Babelsberg

The once-mighty Ufa that had begun life in 1917 as an instrument of propaganda for the German army ended life in 1945—again an instrument of propaganda for the German army. Ufa’s rise and fall is a tragedy as sad and moving as any film tragedy could be. There is no happy ending. In 1956 Ufa arose again briefly, but only as a dim shadow of the pre-war conglomerate. Today the brand name “Ufa” simply identifies an entertainment distribution company that also produces some television programming. The Ufa label can be seen on video cassettes in Europe (Ufa International), but the great movie studio and media empire once known as Ufa is no more.

The empire may be gone, but the Babelsberg studios, once Ufa’s main location, still survive. You can even take a tour of the facilities, located just outside Berlin next to Potsdam. Today the Studio Babelsberg, as it is now called, is home primarily to television and interactive media production. The French firm Vivendi bought Babelsberg in 1992. German film director Volker Schlöndorff headed an effort to turn the former Ufa and DEFA studios into an important post-Wall center of entertainment production.

Since 2001 Henning Molfenter has been in charge of handling international English-language productions like The Pianist, The Bourne Supremacy, and Mission Impossible III for Babelsberg. In 2004 Vivendi sold all of its interest in Studio Babelsberg to two private investors. (For more about Babelsberg today, see the Web links below.)

MORE > Emelka - Munich/Geiselgasteig

N E X T > A Chronology of Film in Germany and Elsewhere

Copyright © 1997-2006 Hyde Flippo. All rights reserved.

Related Pages

Emelka - Munich - Ufa's competitor in Bavaria

The Ufa Story (book)

A Chronology of Film in Germany and Elsewhere

Film Studios

Film Trivia Quiz

Film Connections (Links)

Studio Babelsberg - The Berlin studios

Filmpark Babelsberg - Studio Tour

Bavaria Filmstadt Tour - Tour the Bavaria Studios near Munich (in German). Munich became the "Hollywood" of West Germany after the division of Germany following WWII. Site in German or English.

Movie Park Germany in Bottrop (site in English, German, French, and Dutch!). - "Hollywood in Germany"

Potsdam Web Site (in German). Information about accommodations, attractions, events, etc. in the city of Potsdam.

Media City Babelsberg Web site