Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Tonight we party, for tomorrow we die November 20, 2022

Babylon Berlin has a quiet appeal: it sneaks up on you, unassuming, until you’re hit with the sudden realisation of its power and profundity. The German TV series, which has just concluded its fourth season in the UK, is an adaptation of a series of mystery novels by Volker Kutscher. It’s a lavish, noirish historical crime drama, set in the volatile interwar period in Germany’s Weimar Republic, with all the intensity, trauma, and tragic inevitability that entails. Its central characters — Berlin police inspector Gereon Rath, and ambitious slum-dweller-turned-police-clerk Charlotte Ritter — are chameleons, moving between genteel coffeehouses and the city’s seedy underworld, slipping from their offices in the police station to frenzied nightclub dance floors with ease, keen observers everywhere, at home nowhere. Over the course of the series, they deal with spiralling crimes that stretch from Berlin’s criminal syndicates to Soviet spy rings, and from the most desperate, destitute slums to the upper echelons of the country’s political and business elite. Everything is interconnected, and everything is laced through with corruption — the more Gereon, Charlotte and their allies uncover, the bigger the scale of the problem becomes.

The show is infused with a terrible sense of desperation, not just in the face of the considerable current difficulties faced by the characters, their city and their country (corruption, poverty, hyperinflation, trauma from the individual and collective experiences of the First World War, intense political instability that sees rival armed gangs of fascists and communists used as private armies on behalf of their political leadership), but also it is as if they fear what we, from our vantage point of the twenty-first century, know is to come, even if the characters themselves have idea of the specifics of these horrors. There’s a painful futility in their attempts to bring the order of justice and equality under the law to this chaos, while we know that just around the corner there will be another, crueller attempt to bring supposed ‘order’ and to restore supposed ‘justice’ which will find greater favour with the German public. We know that everything Gereon and Charlotte do — every scandal brought to light, every crime solved, every life saved — will be swept away as if it meant nothing, in the face of the overwhelming wave that was Nazism and the Holocaust. There’s something unbearably sad about witnessing the frantic, beautiful, strange life that existed in Weimar Berlin’s interstitial spaces — jazz nightclubs filled with dancers of all ethnicities and sexualities, the easy democracy of the backstage areas of cabaret clubs, smoke-filled bars, the offices of dissident lawyers overflowing with books and papers — while knowing that this fragile ecosystem is only (at the point of the fourth season) two years away from being destroyed by those who never saw its value. The show is very careful, too, to allude to numerous real and fictional moments when Germany could have pulled itself back from the brink, and some combination of human fraility, individual self-interest, complacency, and sheer bad luck combine to prevent that from happening, and force things to carry on towards their dark conclusion. The implication, of course, is that we are faced with such moments at various points in our own lives, and we are equally incapable of recognising the weight of them as the oblivious Berliners of 1931.

Babylon Berlin is apparently Germany’s most expensive ever TV series, and it is in part the work of Tom Tykwer (who co-writes and co-directs it), the screenwriter of Lola Rennt — and both of these things show. It’s gorgeous to look at, drawing heavily on the cinema of the era in which it is set, in terms of how scenes are composed, and in the presence of sweeping, elaborate song and dance numbers. The two embedded videos, of a sequence from the first season, and another from the fourth, should give a clear picture of the look and feel of these types of set-pieces — dark in tone, full of a frenzied, desperate sense of life and survival.

The show’s music is incredible, and the whole thing is just a feast for the eyes, as dazzling in its own way as the music video-esque loops of Lola Rennt.

The dazzle will, at some point, have to come to an end. Volker Kutscher, the author on whose books the show is based, has said recently in an interview that he will conclude the series in 1938, at the point of the Kristallnacht pogrom. The show has always been shot through with bleakness, but I’m not sure it will even continue as far down that road as the books intend to travel. The Gereon of the books is apparently a more apolitical character, and possibly more capable of continuing to operate within a police service under the control of a Nazi government than the TV show version, who was seen in this season sternly warning his young nephew about the cruel indifference to human life that is part and parcel of fascism. Whether Babylon Berlin carries on past 1933 or not, it is already an incredible achievement — a perceptive and empathetic study of the ingredients, both societal and individual, that can combine to lead human beings to their darkest moments, and all the little unnoticed choices that might have prevented them from getting to that point.