Director: Sabine Howe (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
The most elaborate model railway system you’re ever likely to see. Trains speed past mountains which cascade down to streams full of leaping dolphins. Cars drive along nearby roads, but then stop when they approach a traffic light or an ongoing vehicle. The landscape is filled with football stations, Cathedrals, or Venice-like canals, where groups of people gather on bridges watching the gondolas sail beneath them.
I am not necessarily the target audience for this film. Although I’ve visited Hamburg often, I hadn’t heard of Miniatur Wunderland, one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions. It contains more than 16km of train track, 290,000 models, and nearly 5,000 buildings and 10,000 vehicles, over a tenth of which are trains. 1½ million people visit every year. 350 people work for Miniatur Wunderland, under the guidance of Frederick and Gerrit Braun.
Frederick and Gerrit are twins, who are identical but quite different to each other. Frederick is the smiley one, with more ideas in his head than his brain has space for. He comes up with the big ideas and is the public face of the project. Gerrit is an engineer, a genius, his brother thinks, who gets things done. Frederick just has to come to his brother with a crazy idea, and before long, there’s a moving model which corresponds to all of Frederick’s wild notions.
Frederick explains how they lucked out and found jobs which they really enjoy. As kids they were very close, partly on account of a father who’d left when they were babies and a distant mother. Left to their own devices and a tonne of Lego and equivalent toys, they spent their time building things. They were particularly enchanted by the fire brigade, so Gerrit found a way of using magnets to create moving fire engines.
After a spell running a disco – which they only really mention in passing – the brothers visited a model railway fare in Cologne, where they asked investors to help them realise their dream. They seem offended when they recount how the investors expected them to put up money rather than just handing over the cash to let them do what they want. But they started to gather around them similar misfits who left often well-paying jobs to join in a project which allowed them to have fun.
Wunderland shows the official version of the story, part of which do seem to be good to be true. You can’t run a best-selling business if you really have as little interest in material gain as the brothers seem to do in the film. But if this is an illusion which has been manufactured to make them more sympathetic, then let’s not get too cynical and enjoy this imagined world a little. Working conditions in their factory may be terrible, but that’s for another film.
I don’t know if Gerrit and (particularly) Frederick are posing for the cameras, but I prefer to believe in the people who we see on screen. When Frederick talks with great embarrassment about being “company” “bosses”, his fingers make air quotes as he spits out the words. He seems to be genuinely only motivated by the art of what he is creating than putting on the sort of face with which he can make boardroom deals. I know this might be quite false, but I don’t want it to be.
We meet Frederick and Gerrit’s half-brother Basti, who they employed for their website after they reconciled with their father. Basti explains that the first meeting did not go well, especially after the others read something he wrote about them calling their work the result of “uneconomic thinking”. Frederick, in particular, is offended, but this is exactly the beauty of the way they work. In the version we see at least, they seem completely unmotivated by anything as ugly as profit.
We watch wide-eyed as the Brauns carry on having fun. They explain how, after the success of Miniatur Wunderland, big investors, mainly from the Gulf States, offered them big money to reproduce similar model railways in other countries. They always said “No”, until they received an offer for Gulliver’s Gate – a fair in New York. They said “No” again, but for some reason, they met up with the organisers anyway. They liked the New Yorkers, so the brothers ok’ed the exhibition.
Looking back, Frederick admits with a guilty look that he was secretly pleased that the New York exhibition was terrible. He felt precious about what he and his brother had built in Hamburg and didn’t really want anyone to be as good as them. Then he saw the South American section. We get a glimpse of rows and rows of favelas looking down on the beach with the statue of Christ the Redeemer in the background. Unlike the rest of the exhibition, this is seriously good.
The brothers sought out the people responsible for the models set in Rio – the Martinez family from Argentina, who, as it happens, were long-time admirers of the Brauns. Decades earlier, they taped a Deutsche Welle interview with the Brauns when it was on Argentinian tv. One of the Martinezes recounts that meeting Frederick and Gerrit was like meeting the Beatles. They were overwhelmed when the brothers suggested a collaboration and brought them to Hamburg.
Wunderland works because you believe in the characters, or at least because you are willing to suspend disbelief to give them the benefit of the doubt. It is about how competition does not just frustrate creativity, it removes any sense of fun. I am sure that the reality is slightly different, but I am enchanted by the possibility of a world where people like Frederick and Gerrit can create a world which is both beautiful and technically sophisticated.
If you watch Wunderland in this frame of mind, it is a joy to watch. We need people like the way Frederick and Gerrit portray themselves. And maybe they really are like that. And you know what? If they are in reality profit-grabbing succubuses, I don’t think I want to know.
CinePhil 