Wings of Desire

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel uber Berlin, 1987) is Wim Wenders’ lyrical meditation on a divided Berlin, following two immortal angels, Damiel and Cassiel, who drift unseen through the city listening to the private thoughts of its inhabitants.

Plot

Damiel and Cassiel are angels who have watched over Berlin since before it was a city. Invisible to adults, they move freely through libraries, apartments and the divided streets, recording the small joys and quiet despair of ordinary people. Damiel grows weary of pure observation and yearns to experience the physical world. When he falls in love with Marion, a lonely French trapeze artist, he chooses to give up his immortality and become human. The aging American actor Peter Falk, playing himself while shooting a film about the Nazi era, turns out to be a former angel who made the same choice, and gently guides Damiel toward life.

Berlin Wall Connection

Shot in 1987, two years before the Wall fell, the film is an irreplaceable document of a divided city. The angels pass effortlessly between East and West across a border that humans could not cross, a quiet reproach to the concrete barrier below. Wenders filmed at the actual death strip, and the desolate wasteland of Potsdamer Platz, then a weed-choked no-man’s-land beside the Wall, becomes one of cinema’s most haunting images of division. An old man named Homer wanders the empty square searching for the bustling Potsdamer Platz of his memory.

Filming Locations

The production filmed across West Berlin, including Hans Scharoun’s Staatsbibliothek, where the angels gather among the readers, the ruins near Anhalter Bahnhof, and the Wall itself near the Brandenburg Gate. The barren expanse of Potsdamer Platz, today a dense quarter of towers and the site of the S-Bahnhof Potsdamer Platz ghost station, is almost unrecognizable from its 1987 emptiness.

Cultural Impact

Wings of Desire won Wenders the Best Director prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and is regarded as one of the great films of the late twentieth century. Its imagery of angels over a wounded, walled city has become inseparable from how the world remembers divided Berlin. Hollywood remade it as City of Angels in 1998, but the original endures as both a spiritual poem and a precise historical record of the months before the Wall came down.

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