According to Helmut Weihsmann, Carl Froelich made a short city film entitled Mit der Pferdedroschke durch Berlin in 1929, which he summarizes as “a sentimental observation, no more, no less.” The film’s identity cannot entirely be retraced, as little information is available about this title. Apart from Weihsmann, a brochure by the Netherlands Filmmuseum and the Goethe Institut mentions the film, which apparently was screened together with Phil Jutzi’s Berlin—Alexanderplatz (1931) in a program about Dutch-German interrelations in the interwar period in Amsterdam and The Hague in 1982. It is described as a film by and with Carl Froelich, edited together from historical shots. A horse-drawn carriage passes the Berlin Palace, Cathedral, museums, restaurants, and parks on its way to the Brandenburg Gate.
Carl Froelich (1875–1953), sometimes also spelled Carl Fröhlich, started in the early 1900s his film career at the company of film pioneer Oskar Messter. He established his own production company in 1920 and made numerous films together with actress Henny Porten, including Zuflucht (1928), a drama set and shot in the working class quarters of Berlin. He also made Die Nacht gehört uns (1929), one of the earliest German sound films, and in the 1930s, he collaborated with famous actors, such as Emil Jannings (Traumulus, 1935) and Zarah Leander (Heimat, 1938).
As Froelich’s city film about Berlin explores the German capital from the perspective of a horse-drawn carriage, it shares a thematic link with Carl Boese’s fiction film Die letzte Drosche von Berlin (1926), which deals with the family of a carriage driver who has been forced into unemployment by modern taxis.
Eva Hielscher
further reading
Berlijn—Amsterdam 1920–1940: Duits-Nederlandse wisselwerkingen: Film (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1982).
Weihsmann, Helmut, “The City in Twilight: Charting the Genre of the ‘City Film’ 1900–1930,” in François Penz and Maureen Thomas (eds.), Cinema and Architecture: Méliès, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia (London: BFI, 1997), 8–27.
_________________________