Carl Laemmle's success story in film industry would not be complete without pointing out his crucial role in managing a very intricate transatlantic relation: the connection between the German and the American film industries. As the founder of Universal Pictures Corporation, the largest film production unit in the first decades of the twentieth century, Carl Laemmle became a usual guest of film magazines and radio shows, both in the United States and in his native country, Germany. Berlin was the site of Laemmle's first overseas office in 1911, a successful collaboration which broadened the perspective and possibilities of the early silent film. The closing of the German office, at the beginning of WWI, marked also the beginning of a row of anti-German films in the United States made by Universal.

But after the guns were silent, films became again the universal language between Germany and the United States. In 1919 Carl Laemmle returned to Germany and pushed for the lifting of the ban on American motion pictures in his native country. The opening of the German Universal, a European branch of his American film concern in 1928, consolidated Laemmle's position on the German market, and also a difficult but strong cultural transatlantic connection between the two former enemies. Laemmle's international film production intensified, and Germany became his favorite pool of talents for Hollywood, where European stars were welcomed and acclaimed.