Babylon Berlin, modernism & history
How the hit TV series answers the 'German Question' of the modern world
Babylon Berlin is must-watch television. All four seasons are now screening on SBS in Australia, and other services elsewhere. If you watch this noir blend of historical drama, thriller, and crime fiction, you will discover some surprising truths about modernism, modern history, and the multipolar world. You will see history more clearly through the eyes of the early 20th century’s world city, Berlin.
Historical fiction in books, film and television can help you explore world history, and provide new ways of relating the stories of the past to concerns of today. Of course, you need to choose the right fiction. In the era of Netflix, many American historical dramas represent the past as a costume drama of contemporary society. They flatter the present by presenting the past, especially if it involves royal families, as a comic, constrained version of ourselves. But the best historical dramas challenge us to change the stories we tell ourselves about the past and how our modern world came to be. If you like that kind of historical drama, then ignore Bridgerton, and binge watch Babylon Berlin.
I binge watched the fourth season of Babylon Berlin over Easter. It is brilliant entertainment: a well-made story, superb realisation of sets and costumes, brilliant music in the mode of Kurt Weill and German cabaret, modernist art direction, and recreation of the mood and the Weimar Republic, Germany in the “Golden 1920s”, careening towards the German catastrophe of the 1930s and 1940s.
Babylon Berlin has two chief co-protagonists, both of whom come as outsiders to Berlin society, then the self-conscious, cultural capital of the world. Gereon Rath comes from the southern, Catholic provincial city of Cologne to take up a role as police inspector, initially in the vice squad. Charlotte Ritter comes from an impoverished, ailing family of the lumpenproletariat. She works as a prostitute at night and works her way up into a role as assistant detective, together with Rath in the homicide unit. They work together in the homicide unit, where they slowly unwind a series of murder cases, linked to politics and other conspiracies of both left and right, of domestic and international politics. They follow the blood from these murders into the fissures of German society, where they meet a cast of characters, real and fictional. They seek consolation from the traumas they have both experienced in the vibrant, new, consumerist modernist culture that blossomed in Germany and other parts of the world in the 1920s - before the fall of economic, social, military, and political disaster.
The television series has been a commercial and cultural success. The first season was the most expensive series in German television history. The series has sold in over 90 countries, including distribution through Netflix. Season 4 was released in October 2022 in Germany and came later to other countries, releasing this year in the United States and Australia. A fifth and final season is being shot later this year.
However, the television series is based on equally popular series of novels by Cologne-based author Volker Kutscher. The series comprises nine novels so far:
Der nasse Fisch (2008), set in 1929.
Der stumme Tod (2009) is set in 1930,
Goldstein (2010) is set in 1931,
Die Akte Vaterland (2012) is set in 1932,
Märzgefallene (2014) is set in 1933,
Lunapark (2016) is set in 1934.
Moabit (2017) (a short story set before the first Rath novel)
Marlow (2018), set in 1935.
Olympia (2020), set in 1936.
Transatlantik (2022), set in 1937.
Only five of these novels have been translated into English so far. I have sampled them, but not read them yet, and there are, of course, differences in style, character, and approach between filmed and written drama. Yet, they are compelling novels. While the television series will end, the novelist plans to continue, and his publication record demonstrates more finishing energy than George R Martin. Volker Kutscher plans to end the novel series in the year 1938. He has said
"I must include the collapse of the German civilization of 1938, by which time even the last 'apolitical' person knew that the Nazi rulers were working towards a World War and the Holocaust, towards the great human catastrophe. It will be bitter, and it will not be a good ending for many of my characters, but only then can I close the series."
Babylon Berlin - both in its novel and television forms - has been a breakthrough for German culture and a new flowering of a strong German tradition, since 1945, of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which is translated as “struggle to overcome the [negatives of the] past” or “working through the past”. I wrote an essay, “Berlin, Vergangenheitsbewältigung and finding freedom in the past,” on this tradition of historical reflection, embodied in the monuments, museums, walking tours and culture of Berlin. You can read it in From the Burning Archive (by the way Amazon is selling the paperback for $10.55 - which is a steal - at the moment, so consider buying the Kindle edition, for my sake!). My essay was based on my own visit to Berlin in 2019, before I was aware of Babylon Berlin. I checked back in on this essay this morning and here is the passage on the limits of this tradition, which, to some extent, anticipated what I saw in Babylon Berlin when I binge watched the series this Easter.
Germany is rightly commended for the sophistication and openness of its approach to dealing with the moral legacy of its dark twentieth century. It is contrasted to the approach to history in China, or Russia, or heavens forbid – America. It has influenced truth and reconciliation commissions throughout the world.
But it is not without its controversies and weaknesses. Theodore Adorno criticised the idea as a mask for false contrition and inattention to fundamental inequalities in social conditions, which were in his blinkered Frankfurt School view, the true cause of fascism. There have been major controversies over whether there is a unique German war guilt, and debates over the inclusion of various groups in the monuments of victims. I know only a little of these debates, but did leave Berlin with the impression that, at least, the tourist experience of German history is trapped within narrow lanes of working through the past – the Nazis and the Berlin Wall.
Please don’t misunderstand me. No-one should forget or minimise these experiences. But I wondered if a trite tourist trope has trapped the greater depth and complexity of German culture and history. I stood on Bebelplatz and heard the stories from our guide about culture-hating book-burning Nazis, but I heard no-one comment that here we were standing in front of the university named after Alexander Humboldt, no reference to George Steiner’s observation that the intellectuals and universities were part of the crimes of the Nazis (Heidegger burnt no books), and no reference to the book-burning of our times, the de-platforming and social media flaming of the identity radicals. George Steiner had a more acute feeling of this co-habitation of cruelty and culture. As he wrote in Language and Silence,
We come after. We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant. In what way does this knowledge bear on literature and society, on the hope, grown almost axiomatic from the time of Plato to that of Matthew Arnold, that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transferable to those of conduct?
George Steiner, Language and Silence (1967).
In another way, Checkpoint Charlie and Eastside Gallery struck me as trite renditions of history. It surprised me that more was not made of how Berlin has moved on culturally since 1989, and created its own culture and its own kind of freedom. Overall, there is so much to German history, literature and culture beyond the events of 1932 to 1989, I wondered why we cannot view this city and this country through a different lens. As Steiner wrote,
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past.
George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971).
Babylon Berlin gives us a wonderful series of compelling images of the past, not to conceal past wrongs, not to evade guilt for past crimes, but to recover the openness of the past. It raised new questions for me about the “German Question” in modern history, which is so often a kind of mental prison which American and British authors lock the German past inside. The Anglo-American approach to the German Question, as recently revived by Jordan Peterson and Niall Ferguson, no less, in this unworthily popular YouTube video, closes downs inquiry about the past. It does not open our eyes to all its complex, terrible, new beauty.
Most of all Babylon Berlin is a German perspective on the German question that is presented in the German language, although with some Yiddish and Russian (both large parts of the Berlin population in the 1920s and 1930s) thrown in as well. Indeed, there is a story that some investors wanted the series performed in the English language to suit the American market. The creators, writers, and directors (Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Hendrik Handloegtenom) directly refused to comply. They insisted that this drama about the German Question would be performed in German language and culture, not to confirm Americans in their own Hollywood images of the past.
I admire how Babylon Berlin restores the openness of events and the chaos and unpredictability of German, or indeed most nations’, societies and politics in the late 1920s. Babylon Berlin helps you see modern history more clearly through German eyes; by going back in time to 1929 when what everyone knows about Germany in modern history had not happened yet. By doing so, it makes history more intriguing. It reveals open possibilities that lay before Germany and the world in the 1920s, when despite defeat in war and economic troubles, Berlin was the central node of modern culture, the most important capital in the modern Babylon.
In the 1920s Berlin had over four million residents, and was one of the three biggest cities in the world: only New York and London were more heavily populated, and only Los Angeles took up a larger geographical area. They had experienced defeat in World War One, and crushing economic collapse in the early 1920s. But in Berlin, like many parts of the world, selected affluence returned in the later 1920s, and the new dimensions of modern culture and society bloomed. This was the era of the "Golden Twenties" where Berlin was a central node for the creation of the modern world. The Babylon that was Berlin housed dance, jazz, cabaret, sexual liberation, psychology, trauma, experiments and execrations of democracy, consumerism, film, forensic science, modern philosophy, radio, flight, and so much more. In high culture, science and modern thought in many disciplines, Germany was the fountainhead of the twentieth century and cultural modernism itself. As Modris Eckstein wrote in Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (1989), “Germany has been the modernist nation par excellence of our century.”
This history of modernism, revealed in Babylon Berlin, decentres America from the story of the 20th century, and reveals disturbing new questions, which connect ideas we like to separate: what is liberation, and what is repression; what is trauma, and what is cruelty; what is avant-garde, and what is social violence? Eckstein summarised:
“Avant-garde has for us a positive ring, storm troopers a frightening connotation. This book suggests that there may be a sibling relationship between these two terms that extends beyond their military origins. Introspection, primitivism, abstraction and myth making in the art, and introspection, primitivism, abstraction and myth making in politics may bear a blood relationship to the highbrow religion of art proclaimed by many moderns.”
(Modris Eckstein, Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, 1989)
Although some historians have criticised Babylon Berlin as perpetuating an Anglo-American myth of Weimar as a “doomed republic”, I disagree. It provokes the audience to reflect on the story they think they know so well, and to think again. It dramatizes for the audience the foretold tragedy and the alternative possibilities of modern history, in Germany and beyond. It decentres America from the twentieth century modernity that its journalistic ideologues, like Henry Luce proclaimed to be in the 1940s, the American Century. It “breaks down the rigidity of the ‘German question,’ and exposes for reflection the haunting beauty of modernism.
I am considering doing a series of articles or YouTube videos on Babylon Berlin and German modernism, but have not fully committed to that project. If you like that idea or have questions or themes you would like me to discuss, then please leave a comment.
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Definitely keen on further discussion 👍🙏🏻
A series of articles on Babylon Berlin gets my vote. You have encouraged me to watch the series and would enjoy your analysis to read alongside. Thank you.