Quartet in Bed

Tempelhof airport in Berlin. Four sweet, blonde girls get off the plane that has just landed, like peas in a pod, matching on everything, not just their outfits. Each of them carries an equally cute white dwarf poodle in their arms. Press photographers crowd in, questions and bouquets of flowers pelt each other, and young man cheers the girls on, who immediately launch into a jaunty song. The female singing quartet from Saxony, the four "Jacob Sisters", make a successful appearance. Another quartet ("Insterburg and Co.") comes striding down the gangway of the plane behind dark sunglasses with somewhat helpless amazement. Their bodies and heads covered with flowing scarves. And there they are, approached by a senate official with a firm step and a hearty "welcome to this city". A narrow, smoky pub with an even narrower stage makeshift on which four bearded, long-haired men sing melancholic-absurd songs about the small fortunes and coincidences of everyday life to the guitar and sometimes to the violin. On the pub benches, people fondle each other by dim candlelight, couples hold each other and kiss. Only now and then do they risk their eyes and ears for the small stage where the quartet "Insterburg & Co." sings its poetic songs. Two faces of West Berlin in 1968: the part of the establishment that pays homage to modern housing construction, the Berlin that Bonn has reduced to a fetish - and the other, the "real" Berlin, which today can almost exclusively be found in Kreuzberg. In Kreuzberg everyone knows everyone else and everyone respects everyone else. It's the district where real life still exists beyond the anonymity of our big cities. A life, admittedly, that is somehow stuck in the twenties, but the charm and the specific characteristics of that time are still valid today. And it is this charm, which is full of romance and melancholy, but which also knows quiet irony, that wins the day at the end of the film "Quartet in Bed"...