Month: December 2024

Here’s another one I had not seen before: The original release German movie poster for SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD, the 1956 Lowell Thomas documentary. I have seen the souvenir program, but never the actual poster:

The movie opened in Berlin on September 23, 1960, roughly eleven months before the wall was built. I always liked posters that were printed for a single cinema, and this one is actually somewhat special:
The movie played at the Sportpalast, a multi-purpose venue in Berlin-Schöneberg that held an audience of 10,000. Joseph Goebbels’ infamous ‘Total War’ speech was held at the Sportpalast in 1943. The building was torn down in 1973. Here’s a photo from the mid-1950s, you can see the cinema entrance on the right:

Two other things are noteworthy about this poster:

Admission prices started at 2,50 DM (app. €1,25), which must’ve been on the lower end of admission prices for premiere cinemas at the time. Yet, we can assume that the better seats were a lot more expensive, as Cinerama was quite a big deal.
Instead of buying your tickets directly at the cinema, they could also be purchased at any other box office in Berlin.

When this film was shown, Berlin was a divided city, but it was still possibly to travel between the East and the West. Visitors from East-Berlin and East-Germany would get a special deal: They could pay in Deutsche Mark Ost, the East-German currency, with an exchange rate of 1:1:

Allowing visitors from the East to pay with their aluminium coins was probably not that unusual at the time (when the wall came down, I worked at venue in West-Berlin and for time, we accepted Ostmark as well). What does make this even more interesting: While it does offer some amazing footage (like the flight over an unnamed volcano, that almost caused the plane to crash due to a lack of oxygen) the film is that the movie is basically a nasty and quite blatant work of US propaganda. One reviewer on the IMDB compares it the works of Leni Riefenstahl. With the Cold War in full progress at the time it comes as no surprise that they tried to lure an East-German audience in.

One more fact I came across when researching the background of this poster: 1960 was also the year that saw an all-time high in the total number of cinemas in Germany: In this year, more than 8300 cinemas were active, 6950 in West-Germany and 1369 in the East. The decline of the cinema civilization started soon after, by 1971 the total number was down to 4163 (3314/849) (Source: de.statista.com).

The poster will go up for sale with my next website update in January.

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