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. 

The One From the Other

My sis sent me a Philip Kerr book she spotted, The One From the Other, and although I thought I’d read all the Bernie Gunther novels, this turns out to be one I missed. Philip Kerr died in 2018, so the last book published in the Bernie series was Metropolis. There aren’t any more to come.

If you don’t know Bernie, here’s the short version.

He’s a former homicide bull in the Kriminalpolizei, who’s turned private. When we meet him in 1936 Berlin, Weimar has rolled over and died, and the Nazis are now in the saddle. The hook is that Bernie is trying to navigate a maze of opaque signals and ambiguous rivalries, a hierarchywithout any structural consistency or guiding principle except brute force. The world seems to have collapsed around a single dynamic, that the weak are prey, and you can’t protect yourself. The strong will take whatever they want, whenever they want, because they can.

The gangster ecology is familiar from noir convention, but it feels different, in this terrain. It’s not individual – or entrepreneurial – although that flourishes, too, in the contaminated, feverish atmosphere: the opportunities for random cruelty are everywhere. The menace, though, is institutional. It’s built-in, the mechanics of behavior part and parcel with the political climate. Terrorism is a tool of the state.

Some things worth noting.

The books aren’t chronological.

They slide around in time, from book to book, and sometimes within a single book. This has a counterintuitive effect, that when we zoom in, the immediate focus is even tighter. The idea of a larger context, or that historical distance might soften the moment, is rarely any comfort. Bernie the acerbic Berliner is always ready with some gallows humor, but the gallows itself is never far from his mind. Before whatever it is happens, he anticipates the worst, and it never fails to be more devious and infernal than he’s prepared for.

Which leads to a second observation, about historical or dramatic ironies.

We learn early on in the series that Bernie survives the Nazis, that he survives the war, but he can’t overcome memory. The similarities to Alan Furst’s spy novels, or Eric Ambler’s, of a generation before, are striking; a character, thrown into the deep end of the pool, keeps their head above water by grabbing anything that floats into reach. More to the point, it’s very much of the moment. We, the reader, know Hitler dies, and the Reich goes down in flames, but the people in the story don’t. Philip Kerr never lets Bernie, who’s narrating the books, use a device like Had-I-But-Known. He rarely, if ever, foreshadows. Bernie meets a sociopathic snake like Reinhard Heydrich, chief of security, and his main concern is hoping the Reichsprotektor forgets his name – not Heydrich’s looming date with destiny in Prague, although seven books later, Bernie will show up just in time to turn the final page, and survive to walk on Heydrich’s grave.

As to the matter of voice.

Bernie seems to be talking out of the corner of his mouth, with a lit smoke burning down in the other corner, the ashes ready to fall behind his teeth. He confides in us. And the vocabulary! Kerr was Edinburgh-born. He read for the law, like Scott and Buchan, and began a post-graduate fascination with things German. Here’s a trick, in the Bernie books. Bernie uses a lot of slang, and to my ear, it sounds like idiomatic Berliner Deutsch, rendered as an English equivalent. It isn’t, in fact. I’ve heard some of the real thing, and what Kerr is up to is creating a kind of parallel idiom. It sounds right, and it feels right, in the context, but it might as well be Klingon: he’s making it up, umlauts and all. Which isn’t to say it’s not convincing. And that’s the point.

Kerr wrote the first three Bernie books, the Berlin noir trilogy, and then Bernie dropped out of sight. The One From the Other came out fifteen years after A German Requiem, book three. Kerr just says stuff got in the way. There it is. I wish there were more books, of course. But the best thing about my sister happening on The One From the Other, is that as soon as I finished it, I went straight to the library and took out March Violets, the first of the books, and I’ve started the series again, from nose to tail. Trust me on this one.