Documentary about Element of Crime: West Berlin meets Northern Germany

Actor and director Charly Hübner portrays the band Element of Crime. “When it gets cold and dark in Berlin” can now be seen in cinemas.

Director and protagonist in action: Charly Hübner and Sven Regener in “When it gets dark and cold in Berlin” Photo: DCM

Charly Hübner’s 90-minute documentary about the past and present of Element of Crime begins with a seven-minute opening that will only work on the big screen. The Berlin band named itself after a 100-minute thriller by the Danish director Lars von Trier.

Nobody sees their films on their laptops either. “Wait for me, it’s too dark outside for you to be alone,” Hübner opens his declaration of love with this quote from a text by singer and trumpeter Sven Regener. “Wait for me”: So take your time, it may take time. The screen goes black.

Then Sven Regener, who has lost his calm, makes it clear to the concert audience that they are now being filmed and announces the next song: “Young and Beautiful”, a really up-tempo piece of chanson rock that Element of Crime is known for . The camera accompanies an S-Bahn journey from Ostbahnhof in the Mitte-Kreuzberg border area via the Jannowitzbrücke and Alex stations.

The television tower comes into the picture. Charly Hübner will get on. In between, the first of many archive recordings are cut: Berlin cellar children doing big city acrobatics, the band, hastily described as melancholic, having fun and frolicking in the subway. Then the death strip, the wall, the wasteland at Potsdamer Platz before the occupation by DaimlerChrysler.

Film about urban music and GDR rural youth

“When it gets dark and cold in Berlin” is a film about urban music, which, which speaks for its sophistication and universality, can also have a formative effect in the countryside, as Hübner describes in an autobiographical sequence about his youth in the GDR reminiscent of the late eighties.

Element of Crime got there via the air: At the point where Hübner’s film reminds us of places in old West Berlin, the KOB in Schöneberg and the Loft and the Metropol on Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg, Radio 100 also comes into that with Café Swing Image: the city’s first private radio station, which offered a podium to autonomous people from the West and alternatives from the East.

Element of Crime, that mix of West Berlin self-confidence and North German understatement, was probably less heard by street fighters, but the band’s history can be traced back to a music of courageous discontent. Hübner shows recordings of one of the previous bands, Zatopek, who played a bitchy amalgam of punk, which no one wanted to be, and jazz, which no one wanted to be.

A sound equivalent to how Richard Pappik describes the band’s life at the time: Kreuzberg 36, where it was the grayest, but also the most colorful, is how the drummer distinguishes Kreuzberg 36 from Kreuzberg 61. Looking back, he also says about the soundtrack that you can play like that, but you can’t listen to it. We want to talk about this again.

After four English-language albums, “Damals Hinterm Mond” was released in 1991, the LP with which today’s Element of Crime begins. Sven Regener comments on the decision to sing in German with the remarkable sentence: “There is nothing patriotic about it, more like the native language.” A wall of Berlin houses that has probably been completely renovated long ago runs through an archive sequence. An anti-fascist festival is announced on it, not with a poster, but with sweeping hand-painted lettering. It was probably created overnight.

The twilight, whether morning or evening, the twilight and the vague, formulated in clear words, that seems to be Element of Crime’s thing. Charly Hübner interviewed the band, which one can say is also his, backstage, in the café and in the park. He accompanies them from Kreuzberg, from the private club, the Lido and the mythical SO36 to Mitte to the big stage of the Admiralspalast to the open-air concert in the Spandau Citadel, tracing the band’s path once again.

“Teenage hardships turned into other hardships,” says Hübner in the credits. We have to keep singing about it: The band has invited younger artists such as Maike Rosa Vogel, Florian Horwarth and Ansa Sauermann, the bands Isolation Berlin, Von Wegen Lisbeth and the duo Steiner & Madlaina to their concerts. Sven Regener announces it euphorically.

So far, so beautiful. Before that, however, the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz can be seen again in the film. She is missing like the person who just sits there and reads. The film is dedicated to the producer and bassist David Young (1949–2022). Monika Döring (1937–2024) makes an appearance. The concert organizer helped make what can be seen in “When it gets dark and cold in Berlin” possible. She dances.