The Johannisthal Studios were film studios located in the

Berlin Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...

area of Johannisthal. Founded in 1920 on the site of a former

airfield An aerodrome (Commonwealth English) or airdrome (American English) is a location from which aircraft flight operations take place, regardless of whether they involve air cargo, passengers, or neither, and regardless of whether it is for publ ...

, they were a centre of production during the

Weimar Weimar is a city in the state (Germany), state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany (cultural area), Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg an ...

and Nazi eras. Nearly four hundred films were made at Johannistal during the silent period. Sometimes known as the Jofa Studios, in 1929 they became the base of the newly established German major studio Tobis Film at the beginning of the

sound era A sound film is a motion picture with synchronization, synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decad ...

. After 1945 the studios fell into the Soviet Zone of Germany, and later into the

Communist Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...

state of

East Germany East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR; german: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, , DDR, ), was a country that existed from its creation on 7 October 1949 until its dissolution on 3 October 1990. In these years the state ...

.Bergfelder p.24 The studios were used by the new monopoly film company

DEFA DEFA (''Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft'') was the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) throughout the country's existence. Since 2019, DEFA's film heritage has been made accessible and licensable on the PRO ...

. Although the first postwar German film '' The Murderers Are Among Us'' was shot at Johannisthal, they were used less than the

Babelsberg Studios Babelsberg Film Studio (german: Filmstudio Babelsberg), located in Potsdam-Babelsberg outside Berlin, Germany, is the second oldest large-scale film studio in the world only preceded by the Danish Nordisk Film (est. 1906), producing films since ...

Potsdam Potsdam () is the capital and, with around 183,000 inhabitants, largest city of the German state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of B ...

. It was often used for dubbing foreign films into

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

for their release. From the 1960s East German television increasingly used the site.

References

Bibliography

* Bergfelder, Tim. ''International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s''. Berghahn Books, 2005. * Kreimeier, Klaus. ''The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918–1945''.University of California Press, 1999. German film studios {{film-studio-stub