BABYLON

This publication was created with the support of the DEFA Foundation Typesetting and title design: Detlef Helmbold Printing and binding: KDD GmbH, Nuremberg There was actually no direct need. There were enough cinemas in Berlin in the economically troubled year 1929, also and above all in the area around Alexanderplatz. At the end of 1928 and also at the beginning of 1929, nobody in Germany knew exactly how the cinemas would go on, whether the silent film was really at its end and the sound film was the future, whether it would still be worth investing in the many existing cinemas. Several "waves of cinema" had already been experienced, the wave of numerous small "flea" or "towel cinemas" at the beginning, then that of the newly built, respectable cinema palaces, the "movie theaters" around 1912/13 and finally the huge wave of new cinema openings when Germany was doing particularly badly, at the end of the lost First World War, when there was hunger and misery,