Documentary in the cinema – Element Of Crime: A career with heart and brain

Last but not least, the film is also a beautiful documentary about the changes in Berlin over the last 40 years. Especially people who don’t come from there or live there get a nice impression of how much history has changed with you.
I sometimes had tears in my eyes when I saw the old pictures. You experience things again that seemed forgotten. Berlin has changed a lot, for better and for worse. Nobody would want the wall back, there was so much depression and cruelty in West Berlin, but on the other hand there was also this angry urge for art and expression. My “Lehmann” novels all try to explain how people were able to exist in this strange, exceptional situation. There were often bands in Germany that had clear connotations with their homeland. But not us. We were never the classic Berlin band. Element Of Crime is very much intertwined with the history of Berlin and we certainly had – perhaps unconsciously – an influence on the city’s music, but how everything developed back then is hard to imagine today. A whole half of the city was unknown. It’s like if you live in Vienna-Mariahilf and have no chance of getting to Vienna-Neubau because a wall and barbed wire prevent you from doing so.