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ES LIEGT WAS IN DER LUFT (There’s Something in the Air) is a Swiss German language production from 1950s, it opened in both Germany and Austria early in 1951. Here’s the original release German movie poster:
The writing above the open doors says EXIT, and we are supposed to see people leaving a cinema, still laughing.
This poster was created by Friedrich Kollatz. Not a household name in movie posters, Kollatz was not a traditional poster artist who created realistic portraits of celebrities, but rather an accomplished press illustrator, caricaturist, and illustrator.
His trademark was an extremely simplified, garish comic-book style (often reminiscent of American newspaper strips or humor magazines from the prewar and postwar periods). His typical characters show circular, wide-open mouths while laughing or screaming, chubby, bulbous noses, tiny eye lines, and highly exaggerated proportions. Perfect for conveying the slapstick nature of a ‘Filmschwank’ or ‘comedy film’.
What truly irritates me about this poster is that it transports something SO stereotypical of postwar West Germany: less than six years after the end of the war, Germans are FAT and HAPPY again. And, if we can believe the message this poster is sending, they don’t seem particularly troubled by the fact that they’re showing it.
For all I know, the movie itself is perfectly harmless. But the poster is another matter. There is something almost aggressively carefree about it: the doors of the cinema are opening, and out comes a bunch of prosperous-looking, well-fed Germans laughing their heads off. No guilt, no reflection, no hint that the country had recently emerged from one of the greatest catastrophes in modern history. Just: Mensch, haben wir gelacht! (Man, did we laugh!)
Needless to say, I don’t think there was any bad intention behind the poster. This was not a statement about Germany’s recent past. This was a comedy, and the poster was simply meant to say: look how much fun people are having!
And perhaps that’s exactly what makes it so fascinating in retrospect. This type of comic book style was perfectly typical for the time and in 1951, this image of prosperous, well-fed Germans laughing their heads off most likely seemed completely unremarkable. Today, it looks almost absurdly stereotypical of the early postwar years.
A movie poster is not a historical document, of course. But sometimes, without intending to, it tells us quite a lot about the time in which it was made.
Like the film it advertises, the poster itself is perfectly harmless. It is the historical context, and the almost breathtaking ‘Who, me?‘ attitude that surrounds it, that makes it so fascinating today.
