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. 

Berlin Noir

David Edgerley Gates


I mentioned last time around that I'd discovered a new enthusiasm, the Bernie Gunther mystery series written by Philip Kerr. These are period stories, set mostly during WWII, and because Bernie's a German homicide cop, he has to answer to the Nazi chain of command.

I picked up on Bernie mid-stride, reading A MAN WITHOUT BREATH first - the ninth book, which takes place in 1943, and involves the murder of Polish military prisoners by the Russians, at Katyn. My habit, generally, if I happen on a writer I like, is to go back and read their books in the order they were written. Right? Seems only fair. In this case, as it was with Alan Furst, I snatched up what was immediately available, and took one step forward, with THE LADY FROM ZAGREB, and one step back, with PRAGUE FATALE, and then FIELD GRAY. Next on the list is the Berlin Noir trilogy, the first three Bernie novels. I couldn't help myself. I grabbed whatever title was on the library shelf. I was too impatient to wait my turn.

I think there are three elements that make the books so fascinating. The first is historical irony. In more than one novel, actually, the story's framed with a look back, from the later 1940's or the early 1950's. Secondly, there's a constant sense of threat, the Nazi regime a bunch of backstabbers, and Bernie hangs on princes' favors. One dangerous patron is Reinhard Heydrich, a chilly bastard who meets an appropriate end. And thirdly, Bernie is really trying to be a moral person, against all odds. You go along to get along, to simply survive, in a nest of vipers, and hope it doesn't rub off on you. After seeing the Special Action Groups at work in Russia, and himself participating, Bernie is sickened by the whole enterprise. He suspects, too, that the handwriting's on the wall.

Bernie's a Berliner, a guy with street smarts, and too smart a mouth. He fought in the first war, in the trenches, and started out as a cop during Weimar. He has no politics. He's as contemptuous, early on, of the Communists as he is of the Nazis, and then, the better he gets to know the Nazis as they consolidate their power, he comes to realize they aren't the lesser of two evils. They are evil. And it does rub off on you.

This is the question often raised in Alan Furst's books, and the two writers have some things in common, aside from the time-frame and the context of their novels. We don't in fact know how we might behave at a personal breaking point, in the context of Vichy France or Nazi Berlin. It's comforting to think we might Bogart through, but daily life becomes an enormous struggle, for the simplest of things. Having a conscience, or a moral compass, might be a luxury we couldn't afford. We might not rise to the occasion. One of Bernie's superiors in Minsk even quotes Luther - "Here I stand" - and then dismisses it. You can't be serious, he tells Bernie. There's no room for that.

And in the middle of all this, institutionalized murder, mass hysteria, people still commit common crimes for common reasons. They kill people for shoes, or bread, or envy. FIELD GRAY has Bernie trying to solve a homicide inside a POW camp. The fact that he's a POW, and the camp is run by the Russians, only makes the whole thing more surreal. Often enough, it isn't some crazed Nazi weirdness at work, although that usually informs it. Everything's out of square. The truly strange thing is that you begin to see this unbalanced world as somehow the norm, at least to the degree of understanding how to navigate it, and once you go there, you've stepped over the edge. The pit opens.