Summary
Berlin, 1920: a city still exhaling gunpowder, inhaling cocaine. In the skeletal shadow of a Zeppelin hangar, daredevil pilot Andreas Heyn (Carl Heinzius) crash-lands after a smuggling run, his biplane coughing contraband morphine vials across the tarmac like black-market hail. He staggers into the arms of Lili von Pritzbuer (Erna Pabst), chanteuse at the scandalous cabaret Die Fledermausnacht, whose sequined gown hides map-ink tattoos of clandestine air corridors over the Baltic. Lili, once the fiancée of Heyn’s war-time observer, now barters songs for secrets; every whispered lyric is a bargaining chip in a city where tomorrow is auctioned tonight. Their reunion ignites a triangular fuse with Police Kommissar Rolf Eichel (Adolf Wenter), a mutilated veteran whose tin nose chirps when he lies. Eichel hunts the morphine pipeline to finance his own morphine addiction, while dreaming of a sky-bound escape he will never take. Into this stalemate drops Felizitas Krause (Paula Barra), a cinematograph operator hired to film Berlin’s first airline promotional newsreel; her hand-cranked Éclair camera becomes silent confessor to extortion, sabotage, and murder. The plot corkscrews when Heyn is hired to fly aristocratic newlyweds to Stockholm, only to discover the groom is a cocaine-addled industrialist planning to dump his bride mid-flight for insurance. The bride, in turn, bribes Heyn to fake the crash and parachute her into a Lithuanian convent. Meanwhile, Lili blackmails the industrialist with film negatives showing him clubbing a union agitator, negatives she hides inside a gramophone record of the song Über den Wolken. At 5,000 meters, amid sleet that turns the wings into glass, Heyn confronts the limits of gravity and conscience: jettison the morphine to lighten the plane, or keep it and risk stalling into the sea? He cuts the sacks; white powder erupts like inverted snowfall. The plane limps back to Tempelhof, but the landing gear collapses, sending the fuselage skidding toward a cheering crowd. Eichel arrives to arrest Heyn, yet the camera’s footage—spliced by Felizitas into a dizzy montage—exposes the cop’s own corruption. In the final reel, Lili ascends a makeshift stage on the airfield perimeter, croons the titular lullaby while stamping the gramophone record to shards beneath her heel, liberating both negatives and melody into the slipstream of history. Heyn walks away in borrowed civilian clothes, identity dissolved, Berlin’s smog swallowing him whole.
Review Excerpt
"
Imagine, if you can, a Berlin that never quite survived the war—its lungs half-collapsed, its morals flapping like torn silk from the undercarriage of a Fokker biplane. Über den Wolken arrives as a phantom postcard from that city, postmarked 1920 yet smelling of burnt jet fuel and pre-code panic. The film was thought vanished until a nitrate reel—scorched along one edge like a love letter rescued from a fireplace—surfaced in a Riga attic. What unspools is 73 minutes of caffeinated delirium: pa..."
