In 1990 I was commissioned by German Men's Vogue to shoot a series of fashion photos in Berlin. It was just after the Berlin Wall had come down, although a small section was still standing (which I used in my photos). I made a second series of photos a few miles from Berlin at the film studios in Neubabelsberg, which had been the center of the German film industry since it was built in 1912. Each of the photos in the series was based on a different film made by the comic actor Heinz Rühmann. I knew nothing about him and later discovered that he was a real favorite of Adolf Hitler, but then, a few after that, when touring the Anne Frank house, I saw a photo of him stuck to her bedroom wall.

In contrast to the restrictions at a Hollywood studio, I was given free rein to shoot on the huge sound stage in Neubabelsberg, and a lighting crew was put at my disposal. The sound stage, and the entire studio, had hardly changed since Metropolis had been shot there in 1927. The huge doors were locked with giant wheels that looked like they might steer a U-boat.

Before the wall came down, Neubabelsberg had been in East Berlin. The lack of money for investment in East Germany had preserved it. Life in East Germany must have been hard. The faces of the people eating in the canteen were a pale shade of grey, and by our standards the food looked inedible. The clothes were stored and prepped in what had been a dressing room in Rühmann's day, above a line of fake shop fronts. This is where Greta Albrecht has her office in my story.

You can see the photos I made for Männer Vogue here on this website, and also one of several 'image books' I made for my principal client at the time, the fashion designer Paul Smith.

Goodbye Hitler, A Story For Our Times is a dramatic comedy that is now a podcast in 21 episodes. You can listen to it on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/show/033GTfQqHQzIHy1HLBqIE8

The story begins in Neubabelsberg in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and centers on Greta Albrecht, a glamorous film executive, her husband Bernard, who is a physicist and expert on rocket propulsion, and their precociously clever thirteen-year-old daughter, Hanna.