A musical feast cloaked in documentary form, where truth and illusion intertwine.

This film, this performance, is a carefully spun web, an ingenious story disguised in a documentary jacket. A feast of confusion.— Jowi Schmitz in Trouw

The brilliant theatre film The making of Berlin is overwhelming from start to finish.— Gilles Michiels in De Standaard

At the end of World War II, the Berlin Philharmonic planned a final wartime performance: Siegfried’s Funeral March from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, to be broadcast live on German state radio. With Allied bombing raids intensifying, the orchestra was divided into seven sections, each rehearsing in separate bunkers. They aim to perform live from these shelters, but the plan never came to fruition due to a technical failure.

In 2016, Friedrich Mohr, the Philharmonic’s wartime stage manager, stumbled upon a performance by the Belgian documentary theater collective BERLIN. The encounter rekindled his long-dormant wish to realize the broadcast, over seventy years later.

As interviews and research unfold, more of Mohr’s past is brought to light. Following the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the Berlin Philharmonic came under the Ministry of Propaganda. The orchestra was ordered to dismiss its Jewish musicians and forbidden from performing works by Jewish composers. Mohr recalls that when six Jewish members were expelled, no one in the orchestra spoke out. One of the dismissed musicians told him, “I will remember the silence of my friends, not the words of my enemies.” That silence haunted Mohr for the rest of his life—a burden carried by the “unbrave.”

The Making of Berlin is the final chapter in BERLIN’s acclaimed Holocene cycle—a twenty-year series of cinematic portraits of cities. Through Mohr’s story, the production explores history, memory, and the search for redemption. Blending fact and fiction, theatrical performance and film, BERLIN creates a powerful work of documentary theatre that pays tribute to the city of Berlin while confronting the wounds of its past.

Premiering in 2022, the work received widespread acclaim and has since toured to Paris, Rome, Berlin, and beyond. Its performance in The Hague coincided with the Netherlands’ National Remembrance Day on May 4, where a two-minute silence was observed in the theatre’s lobby in memory of the victims of World War II.

BERLIN

Founded in 2003 by artistic director Yves Degryse together with Bart Baele and Caroline Rochlitz, BERLIN is a Belgian company that explores the fertile intersection between documentary and theater. Their works often begin with something real—a city, a seemingly trivial event, a single testimony—and evolve into singular theatrical experiences shaped by image, live music, performance, installation, and more.

Since its founding, BERLIN has developed two major project series. Holocene, named after the geological epoch, draws inspiration from specific cities or villages to explore the relationships between people, place, history, and memory. Horror Vacui, meaning “fear of emptiness,” investigates extraordinary true stories that reflect on how we confront absence and void in contemporary life.