Toeing the line was the order of the day. The medium became rather prosaic, often a bit superficial and never experimental. It wants to speak to both a domestic and a global audience, fans who for almost 50 years have religiously watched the successful crime series Tatort as well the devotees of The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.Īnd why not? Is Germany not the country that – in the era in which Babylon Berlin is set – produced films like Metropolis? Nazi propaganda films and the repressive kitsch of post-war cinema would later teach Germans a healthy skepticism of the seductive power of imagery. The most expensive German series of all time is seeking to step out of the provinciality of German TV and onto the world stage without betraying its roots in European culture. To make it all happen, the fee-financed public television station ARD first had to join forces with the subscription channel Sky. The mammoth project shot at 300 locations for 185 shooting days with over 5000 extras in just two seasons, on a budget of (gulp) €40 million.

Lead director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run Sense 8), who also co-created the series with Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten, claims he is trying to hurl his audience into a time machine. We find ourselves at the peak of the Roaring Twenties, a year in which the Worker’s Revolt meets its bloody suppression, Alfred Döblin pens his Berlin Alexanderplatz and Bertolt Brecht delivers the triumphant Threepenny Opera. The images in the final sequence are cut to the rhythm of the music, forming a wide shot in the mind’s eye: Such is Babylon Berlin, the capital of the German Reich in the year 1929, six years after the hyper-inflation of the early Weimar Republic, and four years before Hitler comes to power. The singer lowers her mask, banana-skirted dancers contort their bodies à la Josephine Baker and a love-struck youth looks on in awe.Įverything spins, everything happens at once and everything relates to everything else: the glamorous and the gruesome, lust for life and fear of death, desire and pain, the lives of the little people and the global political order. A lady of the night finds her John confetti litters the air bodies fall in a flurry of gunfire. As the first double-episode of Babylon Berlin comes to a close and the denizens of a packed nightclub throb to the music, entranced and infatuated by the androgynous charm of the Russian performer on stage, elsewhere in the city Stalin’s henchmen unload their Gatling guns on an underground band of Trotskyite dreamers.

No one evades the undertow of ecstasy, nor the vortex of doom.

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