Keywords

In Screening Twentieth Century Europe: Television, History, Memory (2020), Ib Bondebjerg explores how twentieth-century European history is represented and culturally mediated in a variety of German and British documentaries, docudramas, and historical TV dramas. He underscores the importance of storytelling in the development of the audience’s relationship with the past and of a collective historical conscience. European TV series, in particular, offer a unique opportunity here in that they activate what Landsberg (2004) calls the prosthetic memory of the audience, leading to a negotiation of cultural roots and identities. Thus, the fictionalized depiction of historical events and their characters can pave the way for new forms of cultural encounter and community building:

It is a cultural encounter with another time and historical characters and events, it is an encounter with an often very different national past and reality, and when we are watching a fiction from another European country, it also becomes a transnational, mediated cultural encounter. (Bondebjerg 2020: 13)

The transnational dimension of European TV dramas is enabled by the proliferation of co-productions, adaptations, and creative networks that are growing more independent of their national context of origin (Bondebjerg et al. 2017). Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, European productions have progressively become a suitable environment for mediated cultural encounters and collective memory (van Dijck). This development is also due to distribution networks linked to non-linear audiovisual media services, in line with creative fan practices of appropriation, and is rooted in “encounters between national audiences and non-national TV drama” that “enhance reflexive understanding of cultural others” (Bondebjerg et al. 2017: 5).

Crime is a genre that can be defined through its evolution in time, its historical and cultural specificities, and the various contexts of production (Turnbull 8). The crime genre plays a major role in connecting European TV seriality to the construction of transnational communities and memories. This relationship takes a number of different forms. Firstly, the broad appeal of crime TV series results in a production that is quantitatively relevant. The large-scale circulation of the crime genre testifies to a widespread interest in the narrative and thematic complexity of European popular culture. Crime is a lens through which we can investigate the darkest places and anxieties of contemporary societies. Secondly, the proliferation of subgenres amplifies the range of geographical specificities, which become popular by embodying national stereotypes that are consumed and reinterpreted at a transnational level. For instance, the Nordic noir and the Mediterranean noir genres reinforce an interest in the specific cultural traits of European countries while “engag[ing] deeply in questions about localities, regionality, Europeanness, and the business of cross-cultural exchange” (Hansen, Peacock & Turnbull 3). The third and final factor regards the narrative structure of the crime genre and, more specifically, the mechanism of detection, a pivotal plot-building device that places an emphasis on the role of time (Todorov). Crime series characters often have a problematic relationship with the past and move between concealing their past actions and acknowledging them in the present. Detection therefore becomes a useful narrative device to explore not only the mysteries hidden in the past but also the ways in which the past continues to impinge on the present, laying bare its often traumatic effects and open wounds.

A noteworthy trend in recent European crime drama involves the reflection on collective and personal memory, often in relation to major traumatic events of the twentieth century. Examples include Romanzo criminale—La serie (Sky, 2008–2010), set in Rome during the so-called anni di piombo (Years of Lead, between the late 1960s and the late 1980s), and which tells the story of the notorious Magliana criminal gang and its relations with political terrorism and Italian institutions; Deutschland 83/86/89 (RTL/SundanceTV, 2015/2018/2020), a cycle of three miniseries set in Germany between 1983 and 1989, addressing the attempts to come to terms with World War II crimes in the context of the Cold War; and Peaky Blinders (BBC, 2013–present), which revolves around the Shelby crime family in Birmingham and the efforts of the protagonist Tommy to overcome the traumatic consequences of World War I. In these and other TV crime series, the investigation and diagnosis of major historical events intersect with the protagonists’ personal experiences. The characters face tumultuous reckonings with their own past as they struggle to make sense of their broken lives in the context of wider historical events.

Directed by Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten, and Tom Tykwer, Babylon Berlin (Sky/ARD, 2017–present) is exemplary of this trend. Set during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), this award-winning drama follows the life and investigations of commissioner Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch) as he relives the trauma he experienced on the World War I battlefield. As the tormented commissioner and his charismatic assistant Charlotte Ritte (played by Liv Lisa Fries) move from the slums and nightclubs of Weimar Berlin to the centers of its political and military power, we wait for the German capital, along with the rest of Europe, to fall into the hands of the Nazis. Bondebjerg argues that in most historical European TV series “there is a general tendency to deal with the history of [...] the twentieth century by combining an everyday perspective with more traditional large-scale history” (Bondebjerg 2020: 171). In Babylon Berlin, the sociopolitical chaos and the artistic and cultural ferment of the Weimar years are intertwined with the everyday life of a commissioner who is struggling with his past. At the same time, in his investigations he must deal with the violence and crimes that, within a few years, will lead to the rise of the Nazi regime and the outbreak of World War II. In this way, the everyday life and investigations of Gereon and Charlotte become a powerful tool for questioning the cultural and social crisis of the Weimar Republic and its effects on European history.

This chapter addresses Babylon Berlin and its peculiar historical reconstruction as an emblematic example of the importance of crime narratives in European popular culture. More specifically, I argue that the German TV series becomes an important space for reflecting not only on the legacy of past traumas but also on the ongoing consequences of these traumatic historical experiences for our consideration of national and transnational identities and reconciliation in the present. In what follows, Babylon Berlin will be analyzed on a number of levels. Section two examines how the co-production and international distribution, managed by Netflix and other Over-the-Top streaming services, enabled the series to reach a transnational audience. The wide-ranging financing network, connected to a revived German TV production culture interested in enhancing the “multilayered brand images of Berlin” (Eichner 203), offered audiences in Germany and across Europe the chance to reassess their understanding of this period of history through the lens and values of contemporary TV culture. Section three focuses on the key locations used in the series and examines how the overlay between the ‘real’ spaces and locations of contemporary Berlin and their equivalents in the imagined Berlin of the Roaring Twenties offers audiences a way to reflect on the ongoing connections between past and present. This process of negotiation and mediation is further developed through a range of intertextual references that connect the culture of the Weimar Republic, notably film production of the time, and the mise-en-scène of the series. Later sections of the chapter analyze the world-building in Babylon Berlin, notably the ways that the narrative and its attendant investigations allow the two main characters, Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter, to move through every echelon and aspect of Weimar Berlin and in doing so explore its social tensions and contradictions. The final part of the chapter investigates how Babylon Berlin uses the crime genre to interrogate traumas of Germany’s history and the ongoing consequences of these traumas for our understanding of the present. The representation of the cultural ferment of the Roaring Twenties, the tragedy of the veterans of World War I, Germany’s political instability after its military defeat, and the national and later global economic crises become a way of exploring topical issues such as contemporary political corruption, the financial crises of late capitalism, and the emergence of new identities based on the complex joins between nationality and ethnicity, and the rebirth of Populism.

Berlin as a Production Site and Narrative Cityscape

Babylon Berlin is the most expensive German drama ever and the first series ever co-produced by a public-service channel (ARD) and a commercial channel (Sky Germany). In his essay on the production culture of transnational TV dramas in Berlin, Lothar Mikos (2020: 383) outlines the financing network, composed by Medienboard, Filmstiftung NRW, and The German Motion Picture Fund, and the 40 million euro budget allocated for the first two seasons of Babylon Berlin. These huge investments had the ultimate goal of bringing the series to a global audience and, by extension, of attracting global production and distribution companies such as Showtime, Starz, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix. In total, Babylon Berlin aired in ninety countries: Netflix purchased distribution rights for the USA, Canada, and Australia; HBO distributed the TV series in Eastern Europe; and the support of the EU Creative Media Programme was also significant. This complex knot of financing, production, and distribution networks make Babylon Berlin an exemplary case study to understand “the European success of [...] transnational co-productions that manage to keep local creative” (Bondebjerg, 2020: 178).

The new German television wave started in 2015. German as well as American TV series like Deutschland 83, 4 Blocks (TNT Serie, 2017–), Berlin Station (Epix, 2016–2019), You Are Wanted (Amazon Video, 2017–2018), Dark (Netflix, 2017–2020), Counterpart (Starz, 2017–2019), and Dogs of Berlin (Netflix, 2018–) revived the centrality and popularity of the German capital as a location and production site for national and transnational audiovisual content. The reason for this growth is twofold: the involvement of new global players, which changed German TV drama production; and the increase in political and economic interests in the Berlin-Brandenburg media cluster (Mikos 2020: 373–374). In the aftermath of the Cold War and during the early stages of the German reunification process, “the mediated image of Berlin became an imagined city, a city where twentieth-century history is present in locations, sets and iconic buildings, and a city with a brand value” (Eichner & Mikos 46). The importance of Berlin as both the epicenter of a new production culture and a mediated space, filled with iconic locations and a specific ‘local colour’ (Eichner & Waade), fits the production, narrative, and aesthetic requirements of crime and drama fiction. Its remarkable urban spaces can be tied to, and seen in, numerous significant historical events of the last century—events that left visible and distinctive marks on the city’s squares (Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz), buildings (the Reichstag building), monuments (the Brandenburg Gate, the Berlin Television Tower, and the Holocaust Memorial) and of course on the remains of the Berlin Wall. But an older Berlin, tied to the interwar years, is also visible in and through these ‘real’ locations, and an accompanying sense of historical authenticity is an important way of engaging audiences for several reasons:

First, the physical place of contemporary Berlin that corresponds to the first-hand memories of local audiences; second, the imagined place of the Weimar Republic and the Roaring Twenties, which stems from our cultural and historical knowledge; and third, the mediated place shaped by popular films. (Eichner 204)

The ‘authentic’ representation of the past and its hidden mysteries are crucial to the appeal and success of a crime series like Babylon Berlin. The production, sustained by an international distribution network, and driven by narrative complexity, has benefited from the transformation of the Berlin cityscape into a palimpsest of “historical memory and forgetting” (Huyssen 49) which in turn speaks to the larger issue at stake in this chapter: the way in which our understanding of history is shaped by the account of the past we are offered in and by contemporary historical crime dramas.

Detecting Babylon’s Locations

Having contextualized the production of Babylon Berlin in the wider scope of Berlin’s cultural history, thanks to which the city becomes not only a production site, but also a twentieth-century cityscape and an imaginary landscape of the new millennium, we can now analyze the specific locations deployed in the TV series and their main stylistic features. Filmed in the capital and at the Babelsberg Studios in nearby Potsdam, and featuring more than 300 locations and 150 characters, Babylon Berlin is an impressive audiovisual experiment in the reconstruction of 1920s Berlin. Uli Hanisch, Production Designer of Babylon Berlin, “constructed a historic Berlin that corresponds to the mediatized image of the city” (Mikos 2021: 185). The plethora of references to topical places from 1920s Berlin is striking. The building complex of the former Deutsche Bank in Mauerstraße, in the central Mitte neighborhood, has been used both as a costume warehouse and for scenes filmed inside the Rote Burg (the Red Castle), the police headquarters. The Delphi cinema in Weißensee, which first opened its doors in 1929 and closed in 1954, a cult site for the shooting—and screening—of trademark German silent movies, was transformed into the cabaret Moka Efti, one of the most fascinating locations in the show. Many of the streets and environments featured in the series were entirely recreated in the Babelsberg Studios, which opened in 1912. In the third season, the Babelsberg Studios become a sort of ‘set within a set’ in which a masked murderer kills the victims during the shooting of the film Dämonen der Leidenschaft. The use of green screens and post-production CGI also revived the visual memory of the spaces of the German capital,Footnote 1 most notably in the recreation of the site of clashes between police and protesters from the Communist Party, also known as Blutmai, since the demonstrations provoked several days of riots.

Even in cases where the use of particular locations in the series could not be linked to or with their historical equivalents, such as the example of Alexanderplatz, which was a construction site in the 1920s but was reimagined in the series as a lively square and transport hub, the resulting anachronisms generated interest and debates among audiences, keen to eke out connections and disparities between the series’ representation of Berlin and the historical record. More generally, though, the stylistic details of the sets are based on careful cross-references to and re-elaborations of the Weimar culture (Gay; Kaes, Jay & Dimendberg). This term refers to a variety of artistic expressions (in particular the cinema) from the period which have collectively generated a wider historical imaginary, comprising both received understandings of history and the historical record and relevant cultural representations (Elsaesser). As such, and as we shall see in the next section, Babylon Berlin successfully synthesizes distinctive elements from the Weimar culture and archival understandings of what the city was really like to recreate an imagined Berlin that allows audiences to think carefully about the complex joins between past and present and the ongoing legacies of the past vis-à-vis the lived experiences of the present.

Like a Weimar Film

Babylon Berlin opens a conversation built on references to the Weimar cinema, an expression that summarizes and conveys “a mentality and political conjuncture, identified with the still fascinating phenomenon ‘Weimar culture’, lasting from 1918 to 1933” (Elsaesser 20). The conversation unfolds in many aspects of the show, starting with the opening titles by Saskia Marka. Effects such as distorted angles, intense colors, the circular cutting of the image, or superimpositions can be traced back to Expressionism. The lettering has a very simple, Art Deco aesthetic. The circle surrounding the name of the TV series at the center of the frame produces a hypnotic visual effect and, at the same time, suggests “that Berlin is always in motion, always changing, vibrating and is also dangerous at the same time” (Marka).

Some of the characters in the series are developed from screenplays and plots dating back to the Weimar cinema. Anno Schmidt, the alias of Rath’s brother who was believed dead in the trenches during World War I, is a tribute to the main character of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Lang, 1922). The character of Ernst Gennat, head of the murder squad, is based on a real person: he was an expert criminologist during the German Reich who also inspired the fictional character of inspector Karl Lohmann in Fritz Lang’s M (M—Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder, 1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1932). Moreover, in some cases, German films from the 1920s are included in the episodes, especially when characters are watching a movie. In the third episode of season one, Charlotte goes to the movies to watch People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), a silent movie directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Georg Ulmer. In the fifth episode, Rath enters a screening room where several producers are watching The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930), the first German non-silent movie, directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich as the cabaret dancer Lola. Finally, the third season, which focuses on a series of murders committed during the shooting of the talking picture Dämonen der Leidenschaft, pays tribute to some of the masterpieces of Weimar cinema. The lighting and set design dominated by distorted geometries of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Weine, 1920) become a source of inspiration. And the presence of doppelgängers during the shooting of this film evokes The Student of Prague (Der Student von Prag, Rye, 1913) and Metropolis (Lang, 1927).

This abundance of quotations and references feeds the TV show’s transmedia storytelling (Jenkins), which includes a bespoke podcast and video interviews with directors, cast, and crew, and additional information on filming techniques and historical details shared on the official social media of the TV series.Footnote 2 The broad articulation of this fictional universe, especially regarding the series’ historical details, becomes a source of excitement for the forensic fandom (Mittell 288–291), eager to get involved in debates about the meaning and significance of all aspects of the series’ historical reconstructions.Footnote 3 As such, Babylon Berlin revisits, remediates, and updates the history, imagery, and emotions that characterize Germany in the interwar period. The format creates a dense network of intertextual references that evoke and reclaim the themes, styles, and atmospheres of Weimar culture and induce the viewer to reflect on their present anxieties and uncertainties. In particular, intertextuality is enabled by a logic of reconstruction that is “predicated on an awareness of Weimar cinema writ large as part of today’s cultural vocabulary of fear, especially fear about the political future” (Hall 318).

Babylon and Its Narrative Complexity

Babylon Berlin is not necessarily about Nazi Germany and the attendant crimes committed by its key players “but instead [tells] the story of all that went just before, all the things that helped pave the way for what was yet to come” (Bondebjerg, 2020: 179). In order to tell this more expansive and indeed complicated story, the series dispenses with crime fiction’s more familiar structure, featuring a single protagonist and a single line of enquiry. On the contrary, it gives us two co-protagonists, hundreds of locations, and a plethora of inter-related and overlapping storylines. In other words, the series maintains the audience’s attention and curiosity by virtue of the complex TV model (Mittell), now a consolidated European phenomenon whereby episodes are interconnected via horizontal storytelling. This format allows the main narrative arcs to evolve across consecutive seasons, and while particular cases or incidents might be resolved at the end of particular episodes or seasons, the more general effect of this complexity is an overwhelming sense of decay and rottenness breeding in the main institutions of power.

As is traditionally expected of period dramas, Babylon Berlin pays a great deal of attention to historical detail. The events of the three seasons take place in 1929: the first two seasons cover the three-month period from April to June, while the third takes place from September 20 to October 29, a five-week period that includes the infamous Black Tuesday, the start of the Great Depression. But this emphasis on historical authenticity is also overlaid by the narrative shape offered by crime fiction. Volker Kutscher’s crime novels (2018a; 2018b) lie at the crux of Babylon Berlin, providing essential crime plots and the typical German noir mood. Through the trope of detection, the characters and the audience are able to access Berlin’s remotest corners, exploring its ideological clashes, destructive drives, and sexual revolution. Narrative and visual elements are so effectively developed that audiences experience something akin to a time warp, that is, they are parachuted directly into Berlin at one of its most fraught, fascinating, and painful historical moments. The series’ crime plotlines provide a valuable interpretive key to understand the transformation of institutions over time, such as the advent of new techniques and technologies in the fight against crime. The development of photo archives for criminal profiling, fingerprint files, and ballistic and forensic analysis are among the systems of social control and surveillance (Foucault) that are part of the series’ ongoing enquiry into the challenges of finding and apprehending criminals—a task made even more fraught by the specter of Nazism that hovers over the series as a whole. This double move prompts reflection on the tension between crimes committed by individuals and by societies and systems.

Gereon Rath and the Serialization of the Traumatic Experience

Gereon Rath’s character perfectly combines the figures of the detective and veteran. Thanks to this twofold aspect, Rath’s storyline brings together the stylistic elements of the crime genre and the war movie, in order to better think about the ongoing effects of trauma and traumatic memory (Caruth; LaCapra): how the crime plot both obscures and activates Rath’s memories of violent conflict. Haunted by visions of the trenches and battlefields of World War I and hence afflicted by the kinds of traumatic neuroses examined by Freud (1990), the police commissioner finds himself trapped in and by the same memory or scene which we see at the start of the first season and then again at the end of the second season and as many as ten times across the series as a whole. Our first exposure to this “memory trauma plotline” (Bondebjerg 2020: 182) comes in the very first episode via a whirling, disorientating montage sequence. Rath’s eyes are open but his sight is blurred by the hand of Dr Anno Schmidt, who is about to hypnotize him, talking in a soothing voice. The commissioner’s breathing is regular and deep as he follows Anno’s instructions, which transport him back to the violent origins of his torment. What the audience sees and what the character relives is not a flashback, a fictional device typically used to contextualize and set in motion a particular story; on the contrary, the scene operates as an obstruction to the development of the main narrative. A kaleidoscopic blur of fragmented sounds and images conjures Rath’s afflicted psyche; eventually these fragments begin to cohere into a semblance of memory: a church in Cologne, the call to arms, a marriage, a death, an impossible love. Upon arriving back in Berlin after the war, Rath is haunted by the specter of his brother who perished in the trenches of Northern France and by a sense of survivor’s guilt made more intense, for Rath, by his secret romance with his brother’s wife Helga (who later becomes Rath’s wife).

This sense of trauma and guilt is sharpened by the rudiments of investigation—the fact that his first task as detective is to retrieve a sadomasochistic tape involving Konrad Adenauer, the Mayor of Cologne. This quest for the tape’s fragments transports Rath into the dark, cosmopolitan heart of the metropolis, where he is confronted by a blackmail plot involving illegal pornographers, hallucinatory trips to Berlin’s notorious nightclubs, and violently repressed socialist demonstrations. Rath witnesses a nationalist coup orchestrated by the Schwarze Reichswehr (the Black Reichswehr), an extra-legal paramilitary organization born of the resentment regarding the harsh reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty. He must also disentangle from convoluted machinations involving the mafia Russian Trotskyists who are seeking to gain control of a train filled with gold. After a frantic unraveling, which Rath is unable to exercise complete control over, the commissioner is returned to the primal scene of his torment, captive to a traumatic past that continues to jeopardize his present. In presenting his character in this light, the series shows how Rath and traumatized war veterans like him struggle to adjust to the chaos of modernity and urban hyperstimulation (Benjamin). But Rath is also a detective, a role which requires him to excavate and show mastery over the past in order to bring the investigations of the present to some kind of order—and the series as a whole struggles, deliberately so, to reconcile these two antagonistic moves. Indeed, the overlapping, interconnected storylines of the three seasons are intended to draw attention to and amplify this contradiction—between Rath’s failures to master his own traumatic memories and his efforts to find out what happened in the past to satisfactorily solve the crimes of Weimar Berlin. As the series progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to do so insofar as these crimes are shown to be intertwined with a wider sense of State corruption. This device, familiar to crime fiction readers, in turn draws attention to a related set of fault-lines running throughout contemporary Europe.

Charlotte Ritter: A Police Flapper of the Weimar Urban Modernity

Unlike her literary counterpart in Kutscher’s crime novels—a girl from the bourgeoisie who works for the police to pay for law school—Charlotte Ritter in the TV series comes from the lumpenproletariat. Her attempt to climb the social ladder by working in the city’s cabarets, and then her role as assistant to Commissioner Rath, makes her emblematic of a particular kind of precarious subjectivity, although she is also a determined go-getter in the face of injustice and pervasive gender discrimination. As such, Ritter’s character “embodies the precarious and changing identity of women, as well as the cultural and social mobility of female identity, symbolizing the rapid changes of Berlin’s urban modernity” (Morsch). Her physical appearance is that of the ‘flapper,’ a model of femininity known for its transgressive approach to fashion, social conduct, and the female body. An expression of the Weimar Sex Reform movement (Grossman 153–171), this ‘new woman’ “became omnipresent, both physically and in images used in advertising, the media and party-political propaganda on hoardings in the cities’ streets” (Boack 255). Also known by the French neologism garçonne, Ritter embodies this new type of femininity, adopting both a non-conformist lifestyle and sexuality (Bard 1998) and breaking down the traditional dichotomy between the ‘masculine’ public and ‘feminine’ private. Part of her success at doing so is engendered by her role as detective and by her place in and connection to the city. As both detective and ‘femme flâneur’ (Gleber 76) Ritter moves with confidence between Berlin’s high society and underworld and in doing so enacts or personifies the energies and chaos of the city.

At the beginning of the series, Ritter works as a typist at the Red Castle, the police headquarters in Alexanderplatz, and at night, she moonlights at the city’s most glamorous cabarets as a dominatrix and prostitute, in order to support her family. One of these spots, the Moka Efti, hub of Berlin’s nightlife and a magnet for all kinds of shady business, features one of the most impressive, revealing sequences of the series; at the end of the first episode, accompanied by a roll of drums, Swetlana—a singer and Soviet spy—takes to the stage and starts singing ‘Zu Asche, zu Staub.’ Like Ritter, Swetlana is characterized by androgyny: she wears a man’s top hat, gloves, and black leather raincoat and draws a thin moustache on her face. She goes on stage to the audience’s wild applause, the same audience that, a few years later, will flood the city to greet their Führer. The spectators are hypnotized by the music and dance. The song is an ode to ashes and dust, that is, to a life beyond death where only the light dies. Swetlana raises her forefinger to the sky and disappears in a cloud of smoke, leaving behind only the darkness, a figurative night which is prophetic of the political darkness that will soon ensnare city and nation. In connecting Ritter and Swetlana, the series draws attention to the twin forces of sexual liberation and urban chaos that characterize Berlin more generally—and that compel Ritter to do her job as detective while threatening her very existence. Indeed, while Rath’s vision as detective is impaired by drugs and his troubled past, making it difficult for him to adequately read the city, Ritter is much better equipped to navigate its secrets and excesses—perhaps because she is closer to and defined by these same forces. To the commissioner she becomes not only a support in his investigations but most importantly an indispensable guide in the task of disentangling and making visible the intricacies and dark truths of the city. Thanks to her double role as a flapper and detective, Ritter’s character captures the essence of urban modernity, its threats and yet also what it offers—the promise of the new: new social experiences, new identities. As such, and like other female and perhaps also proto-feminist detectives, she “represent[s] a great challenge to the norms and conventions of the crime genre, as well as an important key to interpreting how gender identities are socially re-negotiated” (D’Amelio & Re).

Conclusion: Remediating European Memories

As in the two previous seasons, the third opens with a hallucination that anticipates some of the main plot elements, to be disclosed only in the season’s finale. Gunshots are fired inside the Berlin stock market, corpses are hanging from the ceiling, the main room is paved with insolvent bills of exchange and papers left behind by brokers. After reaching the exit door, the commissioner is overwhelmed by a surging mob. It is October 25, 1929: as the American economic system is collapsing, Germany and the rest of Europe are hit by an unprecedented financial crisis. In the subsequent five years, this crisis will play a pivotal role in fueling the wide social appeal of the Nazi party and the spread of its dictatorial terror. The voiceover of Dr Anno Smith guides the commissioner into this horrifying flash forward only to predict, in the end, the arrival of a new type of figure marching on the streets of the city. Like the previously outlined scene featuring Swetlana’s cabaret act, this sequence exemplifies how Babylon Berlin presents a symptomatology of the psychic, cultural, and social processes that will subjugate the German people into a single mass that is at once seduced by and frightened of the Nazi power. Indeed, the series as a whole is scattered with ‘prophetic’ frames that outline and anticipate the tensions running through Berlin and Germany at the end of the 1920s.

The narrative formula, combining and reworking formal elements of the crime and noir genres, and using intertextual mechanisms and references to draw together Weimar culture and later efforts to represent this culture, offers a powerful lens through which to assess the legacies and ongoing significance of this historical moment. The logic of repetition, the plot complexities, and the montage sequences conjure a Weimar aesthetic—that is, a “strategy for comprehending the fragments of an untotalizable whole. […] a technique that challenges synthesis and closure” (Kaes, Jay, & Dimendberg xvii). In doing so, Babylon Berlin reopens the traumatic wounds of the interwar period and builds a fictional world where the past can be reworked in order to better understand its traces in the present. The fragility of the Weimar Republic, its economic and social inequalities, the racial hatred bubbling beneath the surface, and the stock market crisis of 1929 lend themselves to comparisons with the current precariousness of European democratic systems, from our increasing intolerance toward migrants and outsiders to the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In terms of its production and reception, this same logic is evident. While the transnational success of its distribution and circulation practices points to what can be achieved through European co-operation, the specter of disillusion and collapse which haunts the narrative can also be understood as allegory of the fragility of the democratic project that underpins the European Union and of the risks of political radicalization:

Babylon Berlin clearly has an international audience in mind. Rather than being the story Germany tells itself about its own history, the show comes across as the story about its own history that it tells others. […] Which is to say, Babylon Berlin is not only concerned with making sense of what Friedrich Meinecke once called ‘the German catastrophe’. It wants to make broader points about democracy and its institutions, how they survive staggering inequality and a general loss of faith in them. (Daub)

To conclude, one can explain the cultural impact and symbolic value of Babylon Berlin on three levels: first, the TV series shows the origins of one of the most traumatic episodes in twentieth-century European history; second, it enables the creation of a space for sharing collective memories and traumas; and lastly, it helps us to better understand the hidden deceptions of the present that threaten the democratic foundations of our societies.