Built in the 1960s in former East Berlin, the Kino International bore witness to—and survived—both the division and reunification of Germany.
Blindingly blanched in the daytime sunlight and glowing from within at night , Kino International is functionally impossible to miss . Then again , that ’s the point . If you ’re going to work up the crest jewel of East Berlin movie theatre culture , and wharf it to the avenue where parades lionize thesocialist idealsandmilitary mightof the German Democratic Republic are hold , and also it ’s the middle of the Cold War , you ’re credibly not going to prefer for architectural squeamishness . ( You will , however , ramp up a bomb tax shelter in the cellar . ) As the statue maker Dietrich Worbs ’ succinctly put it in his 2015 account of the construction , “ Fast jeder Berliner kennt das Kino International an der Karl - Marx - Allee . ”Almost every Berliner fuck Kino International on Karl - Marx - Allee . No wonder , either .
The plain building built in the former ‘ 60 consists of two distinct portion : a gray ashlar - dress stem , and an enormous cantilevered 2d floor of light-headed sandstone . Its shiny frontage hangs six metre unsupported over the pavement . lodge within the overhang is the wood - paneled Panorama Bar , with an interior view that give the impression of hover over the avenue below . three-fold threshold opposite the window conduce into a single unconventionally straight screening way , where the trading floor slopes at a unconscionable enough angle that it would never pass inspection today . deteriorate a feeding bottle during a restrained scene at your own peril .
Within the former East Berlin , Kino International is something of a populate keepsake . build as part of an architectural quarter mean to stomach the various elements of socialistic living , its environ ensemble of building have come nemine contradicente worse . The Hotel Berolina , directly behind and frequented by East German gamy fellowship , was demolished in 1996.Cafe Moskau , just opposite , exclude decades ago ; while its liveliness - size of it replica of Sputnik survived multiple renovations , its Department of the Interior did not . In its flush it was a pop place for Russian cuisine , terpsichore , and high-pitched - level dealmaking . It ’s now usable for issue renting . The hair salon and peak store to either side of Cafe Moskau are now a stripe and an outdoor gear retail merchant , respectively . Once a bustling cafe ( and the subject ofa bouncy pop songby Thomas Natschinski & Gruppe , East Berlin ’s tardy ‘ 60s reply to the former ‘ 60 Beatles),the Mokka - Milch - Eisbarclosed short after the fall of the Wall . It wasguttedby a fire in 1996 . Now it ’s empty .
Photo by Yorck Kinogruppe/Daniel Horn
By this metric , it ’s no small miracle that the International has survived the last three - unmatched decades relatively intact . And it ’s even more singular that Kino International has survivedas a cinema . Western capital transform ( or steamrolled , depending on who you ask ) the architectural and ethnic material of the former East Berlin as before long as it became theformerEast Berlin , and many GDR cinemas did n’t survive reunion – a result of an overeager manifold edifice bonanza . But the International had friends in in high spirits places : The day before German reunion was legally enshrined on October 3 , 1990 , authority be active to protect it under the GDR Monument Preservation Act of 1975 . The Berlinale narrow it to master of ceremonies screenings for the 1990 fete ( and every year since ) . The building was bought by the owners of the Hotel Berolina , who planned to turn it into an consequence localization , but agreed to lease it to local picture palace strand Yorck Kinogruppe , which had break away several house in the former West since the former seventies . After the Hotel Berolina closed in 1995 , Yorck buy the building . It still operates as a premier cinema and , on social function , as a shoot location . It masqueraded as a Moscow coffee shop for 2020’sThe Queen ’s Gambit . On an instalment of Netflix ’s 2022 post - reunification tragicomedyKLEO , the nominal ex - Stasi booster is nearly round through its massive windows .
The movie theatre dates to a peculiar moment in Berlin history , and originates in a peculiar figure . It was plan in the tardy fifties by Josef Kaiser with his workfellow Heinz Aust and their collective . Kaiser was an designer and classically educate opera house tenor born in Slovenia when it was still the Habsburg - rule Duchy of Styria . During the Second World War , he built auxiliary buildings at Blechhammer and was eventually enlist into military service as a naval gunner , briefly taken prisoner then release by the British in 1945 . Although instrumental in shaping the architectural language of East Berlin , he was no GDR loyalist . He declined to join the ruling Socialist Unity Party ( SED ) and project multiple buildings in West Germany prior to the end of the border . He died shortly after reunification , in October 1991 . The International and its environ architectural quarter is arguably the cornerstone of his bequest .
Construction on the picture palace begin in 1960 amidst a moment of unplumbed political and architectural passage . Stalin was seven years utter and buried , and with him , what Kruschev termed the “ pomp of Stalinism . ” Public opinion toward Stalin ’s political and aesthetic legacy , namely the Soviet Classicist flair , had begun to sour in and out of East Berlin . The new GDR , it was decided , would no longer be architecturally referential to the nineteenth C or ideologically beholden to the late Premier . It would or else espouse an internationalist style that projected transparency , modernism , and often came chintzy .
Photo by Yorck Kinogruppe/Daniel Horn
This was no nonaged shift . Stalinallee , where Kino International was to be build , was the GDR ’s grand socialist boulevard andthevia triumphalisof the Soviet sphere . For its initial maturation phase , designer Hermann Henselmann builthigh - minded Soviet Classicist tower and apartmentsfrom elaborate preparation survey that featured workers ’ presentation and waving sword lily — a people - apt alternative to the capitalist metropolis next room access . By the time East Berlin authorities requested pattern for a distinguished new cinema and opened the second phase angle of the boulevard ’s development , Henselmann ’s buildings were decidedly out of way . He lost the celluloid spear to Kaiser . And East Berlin authorities subsequently changed the name of Stalinallee to Karl - Marx - Allee in 1963 , the same class the cinema opened to the public .
Kino International was emblematic of this internationalist geological fault . It was design , built , and advisedly named to image East Berlin as an international urban center and a beacon of a new , modern , and outside socialism . The trouble was that East Berlin wasnotan international city by the time Kino International open , having slam the proverbial door keep out by building a very literal wall in August 1961 — right in the middle of construction .
The Berlin Wall was n’t visible from the International , but it was n’t far . Its westerly boundary was just shy of two miles off as the crow flies ; its southern bound not even a full mile . The fiscal world of staffing and maintaining the cinema , however , made the windfall sure American and British films could allow for a begrudging requisite . East Berliners came to watchCabaretandAmadeus . The line for tickets toDirty Dancingstretched to the nearby tube ingress . Staff screen it six time a twenty-four hour period just to encounter need — meaning , perhaps , that the denim thatsupposedly brought downthe Wall wereJennifer Grey ’s high - waisted jortsall along .
Photo by Yorck Kinogruppe/Daniel Horn
Prior to that , however , the upper echelons of GDR power were regulars . The International ’s inaugural audience on November 15 , 1963 was attended by the city manager , the Soviet ambassador , and Walter Ulbricht , the headland of SED and , by extension , East Germany . They ’d come to seeOptimistic Tragedy , Samson Samsonov ’s Russian Revolution - set epos about a woman Commissar tasked with organizing a group of anarchists who commandeer a naval vessel . What survey has since passed into Kino International lore . The 70 millimetre photographic print of the German - dubbed film arrived at the last minute , still stiff from the lab . Under the eye of several Stasi guards , two projectionists seek in vain to keep it on trail . Several malfunctions later , an unamused Ulbricht allegedly huff , “ Und das soll nun die neue Technik sein , ja?”And this is theorize to be the newest applied science ?
