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Best Screenplay award at Cannes. Akin is the most prominent of the Turkish-German directors and in 2009 won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival for his romantic comedy Soul Kitchen (2009). The film is set in a Hamburg restaurant, with the role of a Greek crook and gambler on parole played by Moritz Bleibtreu (b 1971), one of the most interesting actors in Germany today. Bleibtreu also played the challenging role of Andreas Baader in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex; 2008), directed by Ulrich Edel (b 1947) and based on a book by Stephan Aust (b 1946) about the Red Army Faction (RAF) group of terrorists active in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bernd Eichinger wrote the screenplay, and the film was nominated for an Oscar in 2009 for the Best Foreign Language Film.

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Read what the critics say about 500-plus German films at www.german-cinema.de.

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The most visible international face of contemporary German film is Wolfgang Becker’s laconic and highly successful Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), with its recreation of GDR life for a bed-ridden mother. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall; 2004) is a chilling account of Hitler’s last 12 days – from his final birthday to his suicide – mostly in his Berlin bunker. Florian von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others; 2006) portrays the Stasi and its network of informants five years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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MARLENE DIETRICH

Marlene Dietrich (1901–92), born Marie Magdalene Dietrich into a good middle-class family in Berlin, was the daughter of a Prussian officer. After acting school, she worked in the silent-film industry in the 1920s, stereotyped as a hard-living, libertine flapper. But she soon carved a niche in the film fantasies of lower-middle-class men as the dangerously seductive femme fatale, best typified by her appearance in the 1930 talkie Der Blaue Engel (Blue Angel), which turned her into a Hollywood star.

The film was the start of a five-year collaboration with director Josef von Sternberg, during which time she built on her image of erotic opulence – dominant and severe, but always with a touch of self-irony. Dressed in men’s suits for Marocco in 1930, she lent her ‘sexuality is power’ attitude bisexual tones, winning a new audience overnight.

Dietrich stayed in Hollywood after the Nazi rise to power, though Hitler, no less immune to her charms, reportedly promised perks and the red-carpet treatment if she moved back to Germany. She responded with an empty offer to return if she could bring Sternberg – a Jew and no Nazi favourite. She took US citizenship in 1937 and sang on the front to Allied GIs.

After the war, Dietrich retreated slowly from the public eye, making occasional appearances in films, but mostly cutting records and performing live. Her final years were spent in Paris, bed-ridden and accepting few visitors, immortal in spirit as mortality caught up with her.

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Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam and film museums in Berlin, Potsdam and Frankfurt am Main are good starting points for anything to do with the German film tradition.

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Television

For a general overview of German media, Click here.

Social etiquette in Germany demands that you never telephone a friend at 8pm – this is when the state-funded ARD broadcasts its Tagesschau news program. German TV itself is unlikely to knock you off your lounge room chair, but it will give some interesting insights into the country. As elsewhere, reality TV and casting shows are popular staples. At the high end, one area where Germany excels is in pan-European broadcasting, such as its Kulturzeit (Culture Age; 3Sat, various times) collaboration with Austria and Switzerland, and the ARTE channel collaboration with France.

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Watch the news with ZDF at www.zdf.de or ARD at www.ard.de (in German).

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The long-running Tatort (ARD, 8.15pm Sunday) police series is a top-rating show that rotates between a dozen or more German cities, plus Vienna.