Wings of Desire: how Berlin has changed since Wim Wenders made it a city of angels

Director Wim Wenders often made films about journeying. Famed for his distinctly more pessimistic, European take on the American road movie form, Wenders regularly looked at journeys heading nowhere in films such as Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976). In the 1980s, Wenders’ cinema went decidedly more fantastical, notably his beautiful 1987 angel drama Wings of Desire. The journey here isn’t simply across autobahns and cities but to realms beyond the Earth.

Scripted by Wenders and Peter Handke, Wings of Desire follows the story of angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz). He watches over the people of Berlin with fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander), listening in to the various conversations and inner thoughts of humans as they go about their lives in a divided city. However, Damiel is growing tired with his role as a mere onlooker, desperate for human warmth and experience. Observing a circus entering the city, he grows close to trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), eventually descending to Earth to revel in all of the mortal experiences so far denied to him. 

Wenders’ film is a city portrait as much as a poetic tale of angels. It shares some visual heritage with earlier city symphony films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). But here there is a fantastical nature imbued in the most humdrum of locations, alongside a deeply affecting treatise on what it means to be human. This isn’t a film simply of vast, engrossing panoramas and epic architecture – though the angels’ perspective certainly provides those in abundance – but one concerned with run-down, everyday parts of town: empty warehouses, municipal housing and grimy music venues.

Here are five locations from Wenders’ Berlin as they stand today.

In some of the film’s early sequences, a number of typical Berlin landmarks are seen in quick succession, establishing the film as a distinctive city portrait. One of these buildings, on which angels stand looking down, is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The distinctive brutalist tower next to it, the bell tower of the New Church, appears to be having some kind of renovation work currently, though the location is otherwise unchanged.

Another feature seen early in the film is the German Victory Column or Siegessäule, housed in the middle of the Große Stern roundabout in the Großer Tiergarten. This is also unchanged.

When Damiel later descends to Earth, he wanders through the city (now shot in colour). Eventually, he decides he needs some new clothes in order to fit in. He avails himself of an antiques shop where he trades his armour in for some second-hand clothes. The shop was at number 6 Goebenstraße in the Schöneberg area. We first see Damiel wandering along the road towards it.

The shop has long since vanished, though the building it was housed in is still recognisably the same today.

The window where Damiel’s suit of armour appears after he’s traded it in is also still recognisable, even if the barring on the window is now of a different design.

We finally see Damiel leave the shop from its doorway in his new attire. The doorway is still there today, though it’s worth noting that the original doorway has been switched around with a window in the intervening years. The original framing of the door is, however, recognisable around the newer window.

Wenders’ film contains a number of scenes involving bridges; apt for a narrative about a bridge between Earth and the afterlife. One of the film’s most poignant examples occurs in a scene where Damiel comforts a dying motorcycle rider after a crash on a bridge over some railway lines.

We see the structure in stark detail after the motorbike-perspective-shot of driving along its centre. This shot shows Damiel standing over the injured man on the other side of the bridge. This is the Langenscheidtbrücke, again in the Schöenberg district and just down the road from the shop mentioned above.

Damiel comforts the man as he slips away. The man is leaning against the bridge’s ironwork, by its pavement, and this remains unchanged.

Damiel leaves the man and walks back along the bridge. The side of the bridge used in the shot is easily discernible thanks to the distinctive curve of the building seen behind as he walks away.

Wenders’ film is haunted by the Berlin Wall, which makes several notable appearances throughout, especially in one of the film’s most poetic scenes. Damiel and Cassiel meet on a bridge and wander together. They start on an unusual footpath down towards a river, though this has since been demolished.

This whole sequence is shot around Lohmühlenbrücke located in Berlin-Neukölln. The bridge was built around 1920 and is largely as it was. It’s the surrounding area that has drastically changed since the time of Wenders’ filming.

Many of the shots make deliberate use of the wall, showing that the bridge ultimately has no purpose as the other side is blocked. In this period of Berlin’s history, it’s essentially a road to nowhere.

This shot shows a footbridge further down the river. While the general layout of the area is the same, that particular bridge has since vanished.

The two characters look out over the other side of the bridge, again highlighting the wall and the block still standing behind it today. Eagle-eyed viewers may recognise this exact shot in another great Berlin film: Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession (1981).

The characters finally wander on, highlighting their supernatural abilities by walking directly towards the wall: a useless direction for someone living in the Berlin of this period.

Much of Wenders’ film focuses on a travelling circus that has set up camp on a barren patch of land near a brutalist housing estate. Damiel wanders around this estate a fair bit throughout the film, and finding the exact locations proved difficult at first. The estate lies on Franz-Klühs-Straße in the Friedrichstadt area of the city, just south of the famed Checkpoint Charlie. This shot is taken in a little square behind a now abandoned supermarket, looking out onto Friedrichstraße.

The following shot shows the circus on a patch of land. Its unusual composition is because it was taken from an archway inside the estate’s multi-storey car park.

The actual land used by the circus has been heavily augmented since the time of filming. The area shown in this shot of one of the circus caravans is now occupied by a football court, but is identifiable thanks to the building on the left still standing above it. The building on the right, however, has since dramatically changed.

Finally, Wenders provides a shot of the barren landscape as an elephant traipses through it. Today, this whole area has been turned into a park, the Theodor-Wolff Park. The buildings being built in the background, covered by a variety of sheets in the shot, have since been finished.