Everything That Doesn’t Stream
The man who runs the Videodrom in Kreuzberg calls himself Graf Haufen—Count Pile, roughly—and most of his regulars have accepted this. He presides over 35,000 films in a storefront on Friesenstraße, which makes it Germany’s largest surviving video rental store by a margin that isn’t close. It’s currently 20,000 euros in debt. The figure climbs every month.
Karsten Rodemann, to use his actual name, says rental numbers have collapsed while fixed costs—rent, insurance, the ongoing effort of acquiring films—haven’t moved. The reserves he spent years accumulating are gone. Summer is coming, which is always the slow season. He put out a public appeal because there’s nothing else left to try.
The obvious question is whether a video store needs to exist at all in 2018, when everything worth watching is supposedly available online. The less obvious answer is: no, not everything is. Streaming platforms don’t archive—they curate, and the curation is driven by licensing deals, usage metrics, and what a given rights holder is willing to offer this quarter. Films disappear from Netflix not because they’re bad or forgotten but because the contract expired and renewal wasn’t worth the fee. They don’t go anywhere visible. They just stop being there.
Karsten makes this point without softening it: Already so many films are being lost to the public that you can still get from us.
That’s the actual service a collection like the Videodrom provides. Not convenience—Netflix wins that argument easily—but permanence. A shelf with 35,000 titles is a fixed thing. It holds what it holds regardless of what’s trending. Nobody quietly removes the weird French thriller from 1974 that three people a year want to watch because it’s underperforming on the dashboard.
He calls the Videodrom a Labour of Love,
and the phrase lands differently when you read the whole account. He never expected to get rich. He wanted to cover his existence and keep the collection alive. But Berlin keeps reshaping itself around places like his—the independents pressured out by rising rents and the consolidation of everything into a handful of chains and platforms that look the same everywhere. He’s reached the point where absorbing the pressure alone is no longer possible.
What the Videodrom holds is essentially archaeological evidence. The films on those shelves are a record of what people made and distributed across several decades of cinema—including all the things that would never survive a streaming platform’s acquisition meeting. Strange things. Embarrassing things. Brilliant things that had the wrong marketing or the wrong moment. Once a collection like that disperses—back to distributors, to private buyers, to storage—it doesn’t reassemble. The films don’t vanish, but the access does, which is the part that matters.
There’s a line Karsten wrote that I keep coming back to: We see it as our responsibility to make the great film treasury we have collected over decades available in the future.
That’s a quiet thing to say about a video store, and it’s also completely accurate. Libraries make the same argument, and we build them with public money. We’ve decided that video stores are on their own.