This documentary about Berlin's legendary Kroll Opera House was first released in 1990 at the height of the euphoria about Berlin's – and Germany's – sudden and dramatic transformation. For those who experienced that moment, the fall of the Berlin Wall had the effect of making the cityscape and its long history with its waves of growth, destruction and re-building seem extraordinarily present, as though it were just yesterday when the Brandenburg Gate had been built or trees planted on Unter den Linden or the torchlit parade of SA men had marched past the presidential palace on the endless night of 30 January 1933 or the city was bombed to near oblivion or the Wall went up. Anything seemed possible in 1990, even that the lost pleasures of the past would magically rise up out of the layers of history, which had buried them deep beneath the surface for decades. Divided Berlin had never been a comfortable or beautiful place, despite restoration efforts on both sides of the wall; it had always seemed in some way suspended in time. Now spring had come, and in the way of things, the blossoms that had fallen would maybe appear again.

Hovering over this documentary is something of that giddy spirit, tempered by a too-heavy solemnity. It is not, however, a documentary about the musical or even theatrical history of the Kroll Opera House. Viewers expecting such will have to be satisfied with several wonderful interviews with two singers who worked with Otto Klemperer at its heyday, Moje Forbach and Else Ruziczka, and with Friedrich Luft, one of the most important theatre critics in twentieth-century Germany. These interviews are worth the cost of the DVD, as is the interweaving of their live testimony (Luft died in 1990; Forbach in 1993) with audiotapes of Klemperer himself and still photographs of the modernist sets of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Oscar Schlemmer and others. Much of this part of the documentary has a soundtrack of Klemperer recordings from those years, somewhat clumsily coordinated with the stage images. With or without the music, the Bauhaus sets are a revelation of freshness and visual simplicity, even after all these years. Bauhaus design, like all classics, is not so much timeless as ever timely. Altogether, these parts of the documentary add up to no more than 14 minutes out of 59.

What the documentary is attempting to do is treat the Berlin of 1990 as a palimpsest, from which past writings (in this case, past inhabitations of the space) have been effaced by subsequent building, and one must therefore scrape away the top layers to find traces of what has been lost. The notion of traces is central to the method of the film's director Jörg Moser-Metius. He uses the conventional means of portraying the past – old photographs, newsreels, maps, plans –but attempts to heighten their haunting effect with various forms of filmic legerdemain, by which images of what used to be there are superimposed on images of what is there now. The Kroll Opera House is the keystone of this effort to conjure up the past. It was built in the 1840s as a so-called ‘winter garden’: an entertainment venue with large spaces, decorated with large plants and enlivened by musical and theatrical productions. The winter garden model had its heyday in the nineteenth century, and in 1841, Friedrich Wilhelm IV had enjoyed the delights of such when visiting Breslau (today Wrocław) in 1841 so much that he convinced the owner of the establishment, Joseph Kroll, to come to Berlin and build one there. He allowed Kroll the use of a large tract of land outside the old city walls but near the neoclassical monumental arch of the Brandenburg Gate. That land had recently been decommissioned as an exercise ground for the many regiments resident in Berlin; it was abandoned space, near the old hunting grounds (the Tiergarten).

The Kroll winter garden became part of an expansive ensemble of nineteenth-century urban leisure development. As the city grew, the space became more central to the bustling modern metropolis and confident capital of a new ‘Great Power’. In the documentary, architectural historian Wolfgang Schäche talks about how the space was a ‘Leere voller Pläne’, in other words a place where dreams were to be realized. As the state built a victory column, installed statues of kings and national heroes, and tried out, rejected, finalized and finally made manifest plans for the Reichstag, the Kroll theater sat tight, the boundaries of the space it inhabited in the midst of all this bustle remaining more or less constant. Its functions did change. Initially a site for light music of quality, like operetta, brass band music and chamber orchestra performances, it was taken over by the Prussian state in 1894 – after having survived bankruptcy and change of ownership – and made over as another opera house, second in rank if not in size and ostentation to the royal opera house on Unter den Linden. After World War I, the building eventually came under the aegis of the People's Stage or Volksbühne, and in that incarnation it was the site of Klemperer's modernist productions that remain legendary in the annals of opera. In the words of Moje Forbach, these were wonderful times; the Kroll in those days was ‘etwas ganz besonderes’ – something very special.

If one did not already know this basic history, one would find the documentary unhelpful in establishing it. It proceeds through disorganized and backtracking narratives, partly as voice-over and partly in walking shots of experts, illustrated with an intriguing, if baffling, series of architectural sketches and city maps and accompanied by a potpourri of unidentified music (one senses the presence of Johann Strauss, Jr). What follows all this is – yes, that's right – the Nazis. One knew they were coming. The first shot in the documentary is Hitler in motion – an early indication that this film will not be, fundamentally, about the theatre. The documentary reaches its climax when the new Nazi government occupies the Kroll Opera House as the seat of government after the burning of the Reichstag in February 1933, across the esplanade from the Kroll itself. Hitler gave some of his most incendiary speeches there, announcing both the Enabling Act of 1933, which shut down parliamentary government, as well as the likelihood of another world war in 1939.

Films of all this are gripping in their way, though the newsreels are familiar to any student of European history or viewer of the History Channel. What is obscured, though, in this desperate effort to put the Nazis front and centre in a documentary about the history of the Kroll Opera House is the history to which it made a genuine and substantial a contribution: the history of how Germans made music – where, how, and for what purposes – and how all that changed over 80 or more transformative years. Moser-Metius is so eager to recapture the layering of horror on top of pleasure, to express the pathos of murderous actions in places of culture and art, that he builds his film by juxtaposition, flashback and foreshadowing to the detriment of clarity and coherence. The documentary has marvellous material, but its provocation to thought is too muddled to shed new light on a troubled past.