Archival Spaces

391: People On Sunday

Archival Spaces 391

Monograph: People On Sunday

Uploaded 23 January 2026

**Erwin Splettstößler, Annie Schreyer, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Weitershausen**

For years, I have been teaching a German film history course. One of the films I have consistently screened is Robert Siodmak’s Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (1929), not only because it is my favorite film of the late Weimar Republic, but also because it is a film that undergraduate students immediately connect with. The story of four youngsters in their twenties, spending a leisurely Sunday on Lake Wannsee, while another sleeps the day away, offers students an immediate point of identification, as does the film’s striking modernity, both in terms of content and style. Students are shocked that the generation of their great-grandparents “hooked up” for casual pre-marital sex, a scene presented without the moral condemnation that would have characterized similar scenes in Hollywood films, even thirty years later. Shot in real locations, rather than on studio sets, its improvised script, its documentary realism, its roving camera, its haphazard editing, mark People on Sunday as a precursor to both the French New Wave and low-budget American independent cinema of the past thirty years. Charlotte Ritter, a Berlin girl, like the three female protagonists, watches the film in the hit TV series, Berlin Babylon(2017-22).

Beach photographer at Wannsee in *Menschen am Sonntag*

Of course, calling it a Robert Siodmak film is a bit of a misnomer. The film was shot on weekends over months by a collective of young Jewish filmmakers trying to break into the industry, including Moriz Seeler (producer), Robert (director)and Kurt Siodmak (extra), Edgar G. Ulmer (director, uncredited), Billy Wilder (ghostwriter), Rochus Gliese (director, uncredited), Fred Zinnemann (camera assistant), and Eugen Schüfftan (camera), only Schüfftan and Gliese veterans. Almost all of the principals were forced to emigrate after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, their subsequent major Hollywood careers contributing to the film’s legendary status. The exceptions: Moriz Seeler goes into hiding in Berlin, is arrested and shipped to Riga, where he is murdered by Nazi troops in August 1942; Gliese, the art director, survived the war, protected by Gustav Gründgens, during the Third Reich, both gay men in extreme danger. Heike Klapdor reveals the last two fates in her German-language monograph, Robert Siodmoak, Edgar G. Ulmer: Menschen am Sonntag (Munich, 2025).

In less than100-pages, Klapdor discusses the convoluted production history of People on Sunday, contextualizes the film within German film production in a moment of the world economic crisis, and then subsequently critically reads the film in nine short chapters. Her guiding metaphor for the film is Kairos, a propitious moment for action, “when historical time is in a state of crisis and chronological time deviates from its linear and predictable course… allowing for liberation, if a subjective capacity for action perceives the objective crisis” (p. 18). Kairos applies to both the film team and to the film’s characters.

**Brigitte Borchart in Electrola Store**

Central to her analysis are the twenty-something protagonists, typical lower-middle-class, white-collar employees, the kind Siegrfried Kracauer analyzed in his The Salaried Masses (1930). She goes on to discuss the urban environment of Berlin, the film’s aesthetic strategy between documentary reality and fiction, the leisure time activities of Berliners, whether in the cinema or out in fresh air, eroticism and sexual relations, montages of photographic portraits, and its status as avant-garde film. Menschen am Sonntag is less a city film, e.g. Berlin, die Sinfonie einer Großstadt (1927), than “the face of urban lifestyle.”These young women have no qualms about getting picked up when a man strikes their fancy, while young men chase after sex, but are just as happy going to a football match. The five protagonists are amateurs, not actors, young people playing themselves in their hometown environments.

**Brigitte Borchert**, **Wolf** **v. Weiershausen**

Klapdor interprets the famous scene of seduction in the woods, during which the camera coyly pans up to the tree tops and then down to a pile of garbage, as a complex amalgamation of female resistance and desire, male pursuit and conquest, heaven and hell, love and death. The couple’s hook-up references a similar scene in Alfred Döblin’s best-selling Weimar novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, that ends in the murder of the girl, and Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni. Sonntag’s seducer, an itinerant wine salesman called Wolf. Klapdor’s conclusion: This film, so full of youthful exuberance, so playful in its narrative and aesthetic means, evidences a moment of real optimism, before Berlin and the nation plunged into the abyss of German Fascism: “Menschen am Sonntag is not a gloomy film, but rather a bright, preceptive film.”

Nowhere in the film is that playfulness more evident than in the interpolated photographic portraits of Berliners, taken by a beach photographer, at leisure, in motion, enjoying life; Siodmak interpolates photos of colleagues in the film business, including Valeska Gert(Joyless Street), Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Edith Meinhard (Diary of a Lost Girl), Margo Lion (Three Penny Opera) und Moriz Seeler. Is it an inside joke, or are these celebrities ultimately only ordinary Berliners? In a similar vein of self-deprecation, an early scene shows the chauffeur and his live-in girlfriend tear up star photos of each other’s favorite movie idols. Like the film, Klapdor’s little book allows us to enjoy the paradoxes, without demanding final answers.

Brigitte Borchert, **Erwin Splettstößler**

390: United States Information Agency

Archival Spaces 390

My Short Government Career

Uploaded 9 January 2025

**Entrance, “Filmmaking in America,” Opening 3 April 1988**

In the Fall of 1987, I received a call from David Paul, a producer at the United States Information Agency, asking if I could compile for them a list of German Academy Award winners. No problem. He followed up with a letter a month later, inviting me to work in East Berlin on a USIA exhibit. Founded in 1953 at the height of the Cold War, USIA was the propaganda arm of the American government. The Agency’s mission, in its own words, was “to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions, and their counterparts abroad.” Little did I know that my short career at USIA would see the last gasp of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Given the agency’s anti-Communist legacy, I was not keen on working for USIA, but Mr. Paul noted that German Democratic Republic film officials acknowledged “the expertise of Dr. Horak and are in complete agreement” to invite him to East Berlin as a film specialist for a USIA exhibit, “Filmmaking in America.” I felt I couldn’t turn down the Germans, given my long-standing relationship with the film archives of the GDR. I never found out who supported me in East Berlin, but I suspect it was Wolfgang Klaue, the head of the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR, to whom I spoke regularly at FIAF conferences. David Paul wanted me to train docents for the exhibit. Furthermore, I was to act as a master of ceremonies for the opening, give lectures, and meet with local film industry people, including a visit to the East Berlin film archives..

**Radio Tower, Alexander Place, former East Berlin**

**Ambassador Meehan (right)**, **David Paul, JC Horak** **(top center), Erwin Geschoneck (just below left)**

After receiving a U.S. government security clearance, I arrived in East Berlin on 31 March, billeted at the Hotel Metropol, a premier “Interhotel” for Western foreigners. The exhibit itself was housed on the ground floor of the East Berlin radio tower on Alexander Square. It was a massive 8,000-square-foot exhibit, consisting of prefabricated panels for easy transportation, with reproductions of photographs, film clips on monitors, and audio recordings that related the history of Hollywood. My contribution specific to the German iteration was the “Hall of Fame,” consisting of photos of prominent Hollywood film people born in Germany. The docents were all American students studying in Berlin who spoke German. After a couple of days of training, we were ready for the gala opening, which was attended by several very high functionaries of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, American Ambassador Francis J. Meehan, and the “state actor” Erwin Geschonneck (Jacob the Liar). But the real surprise was the next morning at the public opening, when literally thousands of East Berliners stood in line around the radio tower, waiting to see this first American exhibit ever in East Germany. The first seven days of the exhibit saw an incredible 30,000 visitors, and eventually brought in 126,000 visitors in 22 days, making it the USIA’s most successful site for that exhibit. And while it was reviewed in Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the Socialist Unity Party, the success was due to word-of-mouth, since it had not been supported in State media, which usually ignored or suppressed news from the West.

**Invitation to Ambassador’s film premiere**

**Boy at the Berlin Wall. 1961/62. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)**

Living in East Berlin, without ever going to West Berlin (except for one late night of bar hopping with my docents) was a strange experience. I had spent time in West Berlin for research or at the Berlinale Film Festival, but usually only visited East Berlin briefly to buy books or go to the film library, and never stayed overnight. As an American, I was able to procure a 24-hour visa easily at “Checkpoint Charlie.” On this trip, I had plenty of time to explore other parts of East Berlin, even travelling to the outskirts at Lake Müggel, where I interviewed Rudolf Hirsch, an anti-Nazi writer who, after spending years underground in Nazi Germany and the war years in Palestine, moved to East Berlin in 1949. I gave two lectures at the GDR film school “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam and the Humboldt University in East Berlin, my topic: German Jewish film émigrés in Hollywood. On the drive to Potsdam, which required an hour-long detour around West Berlin, often driving along ‘the Wall,’ Mr Klaue told me “citizens of the GDR no longer see the Wall,” which surprised me, given how far we had to drive to get around it. The Wall would, in fact, come down 18 months later and along with it the Communist government.

**Meeting with Krátký Film**, **Right**: **M. Schirn, Rachel Reichman, Tanya Weinberger**

Then, in January 1989, I received a call from David Paul, asking me whether I would organise a seminar in Prague, in connection with the Czech version of “Filmmaking in America.” While the docent training was handled by a colleague, the Czechs stated that the “history and beginnings of the U.S. film industry were quite well-known and therefore suggested an emphasis on contemporary developments,” including a seminar on animation and new independent cinema. My mission was to organise the seminar and visit Czech institutions related to film production. I invited three filmmakers and one critic: Leslie Lee, African-American scriptwriter; Rachel Reichman, independent woman filmmaker; Tanya Weinberger, independent animator; and Don Crafton, film academic and author of an important history of animation. We arrived on Sunday in May, Monday, we had all-day briefings with the American Embassy and our host, Krátký Film. The next day, we staged our seminar, Rachel and Leslie making presentations about their work in American independent cinema, followed by a discussion, where I asked most of the questions, while the audience politely listened. I learned privately that not only had the State-owned Krátký Film done almost no advanced publicity, inviting only selected individuals, but that they were extremely nervous about the topics which might come up. The exhibit itself had been hidden away in an exhibition hall in Letna Park, north of the Moldau.

**Don Crafton, Leslie Lee, Rachel Reichman, Tanya Weinberger on Charles Bridge, Prague**

**Filmová a televizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění** **(FAMU), Film School, Pague**

The second day, dedicated to animation, proceeded much more smoothly, animation being less politically charged. Tanya discussed her computer-generated animated films, which the Czech audience of animators ogled in awe, as if suddenly having a window into the future, given that computer culture in Prague was still in the dark ages. Don’s lecture on the history of American animation, with numerous examples, was received with a different kind of interest because the Czechs had probably never seen them. Over the next few days, we met with a host of other Czech film industry types, having candid discussions and less productive propaganda sessions, sometimes even perceiving schisms in the Czech ranks, with younger hosts openly sympathetic. The Apparatchiks had reason to worry; in less than six months, the Stalinist government would fall.

**Entrance, Filmmaking in America, Katowice, Poland**

A little more than a year later, my wife and I were in Madrid on vacation when David Paul tracked me down again. His “Filmmaking in America” docent trainer had to cancel days before the Polish iteration opened in Katowice. After getting permission from the George Eastman Museum, I flew to Kraków in June 1990, where a day later, I began training local Polish students. The opening and subsequent interviews with the press went well. The Communists had relinquished power only months earlier, so Poland was a bit like the Wild West, a country in political limbo. Prostitutes formed a gauntlet in my hotel lobby, drugs were easily obtainable. I did have a chauffeur and a car at my disposal. I asked him to drive me to Auschwitz, but that is another story. With the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the USIA’s days were also numbered.

**Jan-Christopher Horak in Katowice at entrance to exhibt**

389: Saul Bass & Oscar

Archival Spaces 389:

Saul Bass wins an Academy Award

Uploaded 26 December 2025

***Why Man Creates,*** **Saul Bass, 1968**

Ten years ago, in 2015, I published Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, a University of Kentucky Press book, a French edition arriving seven years later. Not many people know that George Lucas worked for Saul and accompanied him to the 41st Academy Awards, where Bass won for Why Man Creates. Behind the scenes, there was turmoil.

**Dorothy Chandler Pavilion**. Photo by Bud Gray – © 1978 Bud Gray – Image courtesy mptvimages.com

The Forty-First Academy Awards ceremony took place on 14 April 1969 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on what used to be Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. It was the first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast worldwide and the first held at that location. As usual, it was a star-studded affair. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as best actress for the second year in a row, this time for The Lion in Winter, an award she would have to share with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl—the only time there has been a tie in this category. Saul and Elaine Bass, too, were present at the awards ceremony, the designer nominated in the “best documentary short” category for Why Man Creates (1968). The couple rode to the Chandler in a rented limousine together with USC graduate student and Bass advisee George Lucas, who had been an assistant on the production. Lucas would never work for or with Bass again, but he gave strong public support to Quest (1983, Saul Bass). Bass’s competitors for the Academy Award were The House that Amanda Built (Fali Bilimoria), The Revolving Door (Lee R. Bobker), A Space to Grow (Thomas P. Kelly Jr.), and A Way out of the Wilderness (Dan E. Weisburd). Given his longtime work in the film industry, Bass was heavily favored to win.

**Saul Bass and Tony Curtis at the Academy Awards (frame from television footage of the event. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.**

**Offical Academy portrait w/ Oscar. Courtesy AMPAS.**

At the ceremony, Bass sat in an aisle seat at stage left, ten rows from the podium; Elaine was next to him in a light-colored chiffon dress. Actors Diahann Carroll and Tony Curtis read out the names of the nominees for best documentary and best short documentary, respectively. When Tony Curtis called out Bass’s name as the winner, he bounced up to the stage, despite the wooden cane that preceded his every step. Curtis handed the Oscar to Bass, who was wearing a traditional tuxedo, in contrast to Curtis’s mod outfit. Bass took the Oscar in his right hand while balancing his weight with his left hand on the cane. He bent over the microphone and, in an uncharacteristic moment of brevity, said, “Thank you, thank you very much.” Then he quickly walked offstage. No thanks to his staff, no thanks to his wife, certainly a co-creator, no thanks to the Academy. More importantly, Bass failed to mention Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, the film’s sponsor and original producer, causing a mini-scandal to erupt at corporate headquarters. Did Bass just forget, due to nerves or under pressure, to keep his acceptance speech short? Or was it something else? We will probably never know. The oversight may not have been accidental, however, given the huge fights with Kaiser over the film’s final structure, laboratory costs, and even the title. Bass hated the title because he thought it promised more than he could deliver.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Bass deserved to win for what would be his greatest cinematic achievement, although his largely avant-garde work certainly challenged the Academy’s notions of genre. Indeed, the category “Best Documentary, Short Subjects” hardly describes Bass’s free-form essay, a hodgepodge of film notes that asks many more questions than it answers. And what makes it a documentary? The film includes several forms of animation and mostly staged sequences. Indeed, it is a modernist romp, at moments seemingly incoherent and yet also brilliant in its open-endedness; its fragmentation forces the viewer to engage in the construction of meaning, thus fulfilling the promise of every modernist work to make the audience an active participant. In addition to the Academy Award, Why Man Creates won numerous film festival and other awards, and was placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002, designating it a national treasure.

But the somewhat tortured production history of the film also points out the pitfalls of having a corporate sponsor for such a personal and highly idiosyncratic project. In Bass’s most cynical evaluation of the film, he admitted to a group of AT&T executives: “I think now that the most creative thing about the film was that I found a rationalization that enabled me to convince the client, to allow me to make the film.” Even if the film was not a direct advertisement for Kaiser, the company covered all the production costs, while corporate executives and Bass often had vastly different ideas about what kind of film they were financing. Bass never wanted to answer the question the title asks; it was antithetical to his work methods, but the sponsors were looking for easy answers that could be sold in the education market. The designer usually argued that because sponsored films didn’t have to sell anything, they were preferable to commercials or industrial film productions, where the filmmaker was at the mercy of the client. But Bass wanted to have it both ways: complete freedom to produce artistic work, and complete financing by a corporate sponsor that would pay all the bills, including a substantial honorarium to support Bass’s office. Unlike most other avant-garde filmmakers, Bass was not willing to self-finance or to take on contract work to pay for his own personal films. After all, Bass had grown up in the Hollywood film industry, where no one invested their own money. Paradoxically, despite the insider status that an Academy Award seemingly represented, Bass remained an outsider in the movie industry.

388: Riefenstahl

Archival Spaces 388:

Riefenstahl (2024) – The Movie

Uploaded 12 December 2025

The penultimate scene in Andres Veiel’s new documentary, Riefenstahl (2024), which opened recently in Los Angeles, shows footage that producer Sandra Maischberger possibly shot in ca. 2002, when Leni Riefenstahl was over 100 years old. In close-up, the Nazi diva frets fussily in front of a mirror, complains to the cameraman about the lighting, wearing enough make-up to look like a way-over-the-hill Kurfurstendam whore. The scene is a metaphor for Riefenstahl’s whole life, a life spent polishing her image, brow-beating journalists into submission, denying she was only an artist, not a propagandist, and certainly not complicit in the Holocaust, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. I wrote about my own encounters with la Riefenstahl in Archival Spaces 352 (https://archivalspaces.com/2024/07/26/352-riefenstahl/), so I was anxious to see the new film, as well as meet the filmmakers Andres Veiel and Sandra Maischberger, who answered questions at the Thomas Mann House in Malibu on 12 September, and again after a screening the same evening at the Laemmle Royale.

**Sandra Maischberger and Andres Veiel**

As the pair explained, there have been several documentaries about Riefenstahl, most famously Ray Müller’s The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993), but after the death of Horst Kettner in 2016, the secretary-husband of Leni, the estate papers promised to reveal new information. In fact, there are some surprising new details, although, as both admit, Leni worked very hard “to curate” the papers and surviving film footage, and apparently also spent weeks in late Spring 1945 burning evidence of her Nazi past. From the drafts of her highly sanitized memoirs, we learn that she had been abused by her authoritarian father, who threw her into a lake to let her sink or swim, and was sexually and violently abused by her relatively short-lived husband, Peter Jacob (1944-46). Riefenstahl also claimed that Joseph Goebbels and a 1930s German tennis star attempted to rape her. Unmentioned, but repeatedly stated in her memoirs, is the allegation that Henry Sokal, her Jewish producer, tried for years to get into her pants; passages that reek of anti-Semitism.

That experience of sexual violence in her childhood and adulthood may be the key to her fascination with Hitler, since, like most Nazis, she firmly believed that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger; she apparently also had an abhorrence of any physical or mental weakness. When her Olympia cameraman, Willy Zielke, had a nervous breakdown in 1937, Riefenstahl supposedly had him committed to a psychiatric clinic where he was forcibly sterilised, in keeping with Nazi euthanasia and sterilisation policies for “all unworthy life.”

**Willy Zielke (left), Riefenstahl during *Triumph of the Will* (1935)**

One of the most important aspects of Riefenstahl is that it makes clear that the actor-director never really relinquished her Nazi ideology. Like tens of thousands of ordinary Germans who participated willingly in the Third Reich and its policies of genocide, she just screamed her innocence over and over after the war to anyone who would listen. After one controversial TV appearance in November 1976, which included a woman who had resisted the Nazis, she received hundreds of phone calls and letters from ordinary Germans expressing their support for her, many revealing their own overt racism by attacking the “Jewish” press of Springer et al. She remained friends with Albert Speer and other Nazis to the end. Horst Kettner, who filmed Leni obsessively until literally the moment of her death, shot footage of Riefenstahl “directing “ Nuba children in the 1960s by beating them with sticks, always the Aryan superwoman, the white colonialist, despite her expressed love for black bodies. In that sense, she was a prototypical fascist, not unlike many Germans (and Americans) who today support anti-immigrant ideologies and yearn for dictatorship. Despite her protests to the contrary, she was always close to Hitler and never gave up that love, even after she should have known better. Maischberger theorises that the reason Jody Foster’s Riefenstahl film never came to fruition was that there was no “third act.” Riefenstahl remained the same after 1945, no repentance, no acknowledgement of guilt, no cathartic realisation of her flaws.

Apart from the hundreds of photographic portraits of Leni, documenting he overt narcissism, and the many interviews where she is constantly denying EVERYTHING, the filmmakers subtly contradict her with images: In one interview, she states that there is absolutely no anti-Semitism expressed in Triumph of the Will, followed by a clip from the film of Julius Streicher claiming the Jewish race must perish. Leni claims she never abused any Jews or Roma/Sinti, then we see photos of her in Konskie, Poland, looking in horror as Jews are gunned down before her eyes, possibly at her unwitting instigation, according to a Wehrmacht officer. She also claimed she met her Roma and Sinti extras from Tiefland after the war, when in fact almost all died in Auschwitz. This is a hard film to watch, but also a necessary film, given the fact that so many Americans are falling prey to anti-democratic sentiments.