The Berliner

Otto comes home from the war. Berlin is rubble. He looks for food, for a roof and for work. Black market profiteers block him first. Then the officials do. There is always one more paper missing at every door. So Otto starts to daydream. He imagines a happier life at the end of some ever elusive rainbow. The film turns the daily life of a defeated country into comedy. The story opens with a frame set in 2048, looking back at that year. Otto is meant to be the ordinary German and nothing more. His name entered the German language after the film as a word for the average consumer. Gert Fröbe made his screen debut here. The film took a special prize at Venice. Gert Fröbe and Tatjana Sais appear in the eighty nine minute film, a German production Robert A. Stemmle finished in 1948.