Where every object tells a story!

Potsdam / DPA

“Everything’s a bit dusty in here,” Peter Armbruester, who looks after the props at the Babelsberg Film Studio outside Berlin, says apologetically. “But we’re not allowed to clean in here.”
In fact, Armbruester’s customers value a used look. “If everything was brilliantly polished they wouldn’t want it any more,” he says.
The Babelsberg studio is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world and after 105 years of film-making, its props depot has more than 1 million objects, the biggest collection of its kind in Europe.
It was on February 12, 1912 that the studio lights were first switched on at Babelsberg in a hastily erected greenhouse for the silent film “Der Totentanz” (“The Dance of the Dead”), starring Asta Nielsen.
Fritz Lang’s dystopian sci-fi classic “Metropolis” followed in 1926 and “The Blue Angel” (“Der Blaue Engel”), starring cinema icon Marlene Dietrich, in 1929.
Alfred Hitchcock spent time there in the 1920s, learning his trade as a director’s assistant and filming “The Blackguard” with Graham Cutts.
The legacy of the studio’s long history is housed in several halls dating back to the time when Babelsberg was part of former East Germany.
“And every object tells a story,” says studio spokesman Eike Wolf.
One enormous attic is full of all sorts of chairs and armchairs from various eras, while the shelves are filled with files from the Nazi period, the postwar Allied-occupation of Germany and East Germany.
Behind Armbruester is the US Army record player that puts Bill Murray in a sentimental Christmas mood in the 2014 World War II-drama “Monuments Men.”
And on the shelves around his desk, radios, records and books from different eras await interested parties from across Europe.
Set designers looking, for example, to recreate a typical East German flat from the 1970s would find everything they need in Babelsberg, from the fruit bowl for the living room to the drying rack for the bathroom.
The wall of one room is covered in antlers while all kinds of lamp shades hang from the ceiling.
One secret star of the collection is a stuffed badger dressed up as a night watchman with a halberd, a historical weapon combining a spear and a battleaxe.
“I laughed about the badger at first but then I saw him in an old episode of ‘Tatort’ as a decoration in a village pub,” says Wolf, referring to Germany’s longest-running soap opera. He’s since seen the armed badger in a few films.
“Most recent was when I went to see ‘Bibi und Tina 2,'” says Wolf, referring to a popular German children’s film.
But the badger has lost its comedic value over time, he says. “You have to see everything through the eyes of the set designer.”
But it isn’t just set designers and photographers who come to Babelsberg’s props
collection.
One famous resident in the nearby city of Potsdam uses it to furnish his villa for Baroque-style parties and borrows costumes for his guests.
In one corner of the depot, an oversized Oscar statuette awaits delivery to the US Embassy for a reception to mark the Berlin International Film Festival, or Berlinale.
The props depot is especially well endowed with objects dating from the 1920s to the 1940s, and from East Germany between the 1960s and the 1980s, says Wolf.
The costumes collection, which is now owned by the neighbouring Babelsberg Film Park and has more than half a million outfits, uniforms and accessories, is especially in demand around Halloween and Carnival time, says Wolf.
“People can borrow clothes from all sorts of eras,” says Wolf. “From a caveman’s bear skin to a modern suit.”