Portable wind up gramophones started to appear in the mid twenties. Definitely more bulky than our mini MP3 players today, they were designed to be taken away during leisure time for listening music in different places. Few records could be inserted in the cover and once closed, the device looked like a compact suitcase.
The model shown above was produced around 1927 and could be bought in the Electrola shop on the Kurfürstendam in Berlin as proven by the screenshot #1 below extracted from the German movie Menschen am Sonntag (MAS), 1929/30 (People on Sunday).
Screeshot #1 from the film Menschen am Sonntag, 1929
Menschen am Sonntag is a silent movie made by Robert and Curt Siodmak. A certain Billie Wilder also participated to the screenplay (he will renamed himself Billy, with a y, after he emigrated to the US after 1933). The film is a quite interesting documentary about Berlin mixed together with a simple screenplay where five non professional actors were asked to play during their free time. Brigitte Borchert, was one of those; She was 19 years old at the time and employee of this Electrola shop were she managed to sell, according the scenario, 150 records in a month of the song "In einer kleinen Konditorei"!
Brigitte Borchert
Screenshot #2 from the film Menschen am Sonntag, 1929
On the week end of a hot summer day, this group of young Berliners took the S-Bahn up to Nikolaisee station to enjoy a picnic on the beach near Wannsee; and of course Brigitte Borchert took the portable gramophone with her… as it can be seen when she walked down the stairs at the S-Bahn station with her friend Chris.
Screenshot #3 from the film Menschen am Sonntag
Beyond a simple story, the film remarkably depicts the all kind of activities of the Berlin population during a summer Sunday at the end of the twenties. The film includes many local portraits of young and old people; it shows also various places in Berlin just few years before the nazis took up power. This includes for instance shots of the Siegesallee which was completely destroyed during WWII.
Screenshot #4 from the film Menschen am Sonntag, 1929
Tough the movie was made with a basic camera equipment, almost no editing, non professional actors, little ressources... Menschen am Sonntag (MAS) stays, after almost hundred years, one of the monument of the German cinema history produced during the Weimar Republic period. It is worth to mention that it is also one of the very last silent movies produced in Germany.
The movie ends with these nice words, slightly provocative (translated from German) :
"and then again Monday
again back to work
again the daily life
again the daily life
again the week
4 millions people - wait - for - the next Sunday"
End
End
It is difficult to say by what has replaced nowadays the 1929 Electrola shop on the Kurfürstendam in Berlin. No clues from the screenshot below may really help to locate it but one can assume, considering this location, that it is still a shop.
Screenshot from the film Menschen am Sonntag, 1929
On the contrary, the staircase of the Nicolaisee S-Bahn Station still exists and does not show not much differences in 2015 than the one of the movie shot in 1929!
Credits: C. S-L April 2015
Many film studies have been dedicated to MAS. Few short sequences were even used by J-L Godard for his movie "Allemagne année 90 neuf-zéro/Deutschland Neu(n) Null"... We recently discovered that one of the MAS screenshots #4 above was very similar in its composition with a screenshot from the movie "Il Postino/The Postman"(M. Radford, 1994). Was it just by chance or a deliberate intention from the film Director?
Anna Bonaiuto, playing as Mathilde,
Screenshot from the film Il Postino, M. Radford, 1994
And finally for gramophone lovers, a "forever spinning" gramophone (model ca 1910) playing a disc at a collector place in Köln on March 2015! Note the little box on front left hand side which contains spare stylus or needles. They normally need to be replaced after each play in order not to damage the discs!
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