Babylon Berlin

Okay, now here’s one you can sink your teeth into.  Babylon Berlin, streaming on MHz.

Germany, 1929, the Weimar Republic.  An experiment in social democracy that nobody was ready for, not after the slaughter in the trenches, and the poisonous embarrassments of Versailles.  The great political struggle of the 20^th century is being played out in the streets of proletarian Berlin, as murderous performance art, the reactionaries and revanchists trying to beat back the Bolshevik menace, and in the economic and social exhaustion that comes, the Nazis will step in to pick up the pieces.

This is rich soil to cultivate, and for me, as a political junkie with a side in history, naturally fascinating.  It’s a little Cabaret - without the eye-watering phoniness of Liza Minnelli – and very reminiscent of Philip Kerr’s series of Bernie Gunther novels, but darker and more Gothic than both.  It also happens to be mordantly funny.

The success of the show, I think, is that it’s absolutely convincing in the details; it certainly convinces me.  You land right in the middle of this disturbed environment, a postwar collapse that’s never properly righted itself.  And the sexual license, the drugs, the music (fabulous cameo from Bryan Ferry as a nightclub performer, but who also wrote some of the songs), are all of a piece: the place is crazy wild, and you want your share.  Everybody’s on the make, the mob, the crooked cops, the political outliers and also-rans, the pimps and the whores and the dopers. 

Now, of course, you need somebody to root for, and the show has two engaging leads, as well as a shifting cast of slippery secondaries, some of whom step up to full-frontal villainy, and some who fade.  The violence is abrupt, as are the sudden sexual encounters.  The whole feeling is of fragmentation, that your faith or assumption in a larger social stability, or benefit, is delusional.  (The guys who wrote the show, and exec produce, say one of the things that interests them about it is the fragility of the era.)  Watching the heroine and the hero try to navigate this chaotic house of cards - while they themselves are sometimes trusting of one another, and sometimes suspicious – is what gives the narrative its forward motion.

The show is based on a series of novels by the German writer Volker Kutscher, which I’m now interested in, and are available in English translation.  The series, though, changes the chronology.  So far, the first three seasons take place in 1929, the fourth in 1930-31, and the last – the fifth season, yet to be released - in 1932-33, when the Nazis come to power.  And, as odd and ominous as the first three seasons are, the Nazis haven’t even shown up yet, which gives you an idea just how odd and ominous the series really is.  Things are already bad enough.

The producers have also put a lot of time and effort and money into recreating period Berlin, and as somebody who’s actually spent some time there – and considering how much of the city was flattened, during the war – they’ve done a terrific job.  They do use CGI, but it’s pretty seamless.  The famous Alexanderplatz doesn’t really exist the same way it once did – Berlin Alexanderplatz is a hugely successful 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, adapted twice to film – but it looks plenty real here, in all its prewar significance.  

This may be an acquired taste, in that not everybody shares my fascination with the place and the time, but I think it repays your attention.  It’s not a history lesson, or a documentary, although they aren’t fudging the facts - it’s more along the lines of a fevered dream, which seems like an entirely accurate representation.  Berlin, then and now, has always been a state of mind, somewhat hallucinatory.