Where are the dirty carts?
04/04/2025
How nice, someone happened to take a photo of an old Ford Taunus while driving past yesterday. That's almost true. With the crucial difference that the picture shows a scene from 1983 - or at least is supposed to, if the 2015 TV series "Deutschland 83" is to be believed.
As is so often the case, the car is to blame for the somewhat surreal impression. Because while the Taunus TC as such is historically completely accurate, its condition is unfortunately not at all. Although still present on the roads at the time, hardly any Knudsen Taunus has looked so immaculate after ten years.
There was always a rust bubble or scratch somewhere. Many of them were already emergency-welded last-hand mobiles - if they hadn't already been waiting for the melting furnace as a compressed lump of sheet metal for a long time. This one, on the other hand, doesn't even have a speck of dust on it.
Of course, it could be that Grandma Katapultski only drove her 1300 L Automatic, which she had painstakingly saved from her pension, for Sunday coffee and rubbed all the cracks clean with a cotton bud every time afterwards. But that wouldn't explain the equally perfect condition of all the other old cars in the depicted Berlin of the 1980s.
And it is precisely this reduction of the props to the mere "what" without considering the "how" that makes many German films look more like a historical play with amateur actors than a piece of the past brought into the present. Is that the intention? A kind of historical distortion? Or do the set designers really not know any better?
You don't have to deliberately smash up lovingly restored cars so that they can better fulfill their role as extras. Nor should you. But simply not washing them for a few weeks so that at least the fleeting impression is right should be possible. Or you could simply get a prop in the right condition.
However, it could have been even worse. After all, the VW T2 in episode 8 doesn't have whitewall tires...
