This beautiful and very witty film (it's dialog is much funnier than the original operetta book) could easily have been left to rot (what's the word when films are concerned?) in the basements of UFA studios in Berlin and Prag, like so many films that had reached the post production stage did at the end of WW II. The main problem was that some of the footage was in Berlin, and some in Prag, and several scenes lacked the soundtrack. It would have needed extensive re-shooting, because one of the leads, the constantly chanting tenor Meltzer (Hans Brausewetter) was killed in Berlin during the final days of the war, on April 29, 1945. It was very fortunate that the soundtrack was found in Prag; otherwise who knows what might have been. But it was put together and thus one of the last Nazi films became the first DEFA film, released in 1946. It's also fortunate that Johannes Heesters has survived for more than a century, so that this film was re-released in a brilliantly restored version. It's a pity the DVD doesn't have subtitles. I translated this film recently for a cinematic release and spent 3 days doing it, since the mix of Viennese-Hungarian accents and the drunken babbling of hilarious Herr Frosch was very hard to understand. But it was worth it.
Review of Die Fledermaus
