Plague Times Diary (7) - Rod Bishop takes comfort in BABYLON BERLIN (Series Three, Tom Tykwer and others, Germany, 2019) screening on Netflix

Far and away Germany’s most expensive television series, Babylon Berlin is also the most successful, having been sold to over 100 countries including new markets for the Germans such as India, Africa and China.

In episode 2 of the first series, we watched - in awe - an 11-minute song-and-dance sequence in the re-created Weimar nightclub Moka Efti (left). The sequence was beautifully described in The Guardian:

…an ashen-faced Russian woman in tails performs a Marlene-Dietrich-meets-Kraftwerk routine flanked by semi-naked dancers in banana skirts while an ecstatic crowd jerk in sync to stabbing jazz rhythms: a generation half-reeling, half-dancing on the edge of the abyss”.

Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries),
Babylon Berlin

Series 3 does indeed, take us closer to the abyss. Brown-shirts and the early manifestations of Hitler Youth swirl around fascist sympathizers in the police force and Berlin continues its genderqueer parties, its dance routines, its coke snorting and morphine shooting. Even the main character Commissioner Gereon Rath and his police photographer Reinhold Gräf unexpectedly start another astonishing jerk-dance while having a quiet beer to discuss their latest serial killing case.

Lurking in the gestalt is Fritz Lang, and, to a lesser extent the Robert Wiene of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Series 3 opens with the collapse of the Bourse, stockbrokers shooting themselves, hanging themselves and generally making a mess of the place by throwing trading sheets and files all over the floor. A riff on the opening hook to Dr Mabuse The Gambler, of course. There are the overweight, jovial cops so resplendent in Lang’s Weimar work. And a serial killer who is bumping off look-alike Louise Brooks actresses on huge film sets where a couple of Armenian underworld thugs are using the latest sound technology to make a musical with expressionist Caligari-like sets. Lang would have loved it.

Through it all, Rath investigates the serial killing but still fights against his post-traumatic stress from the First World War. His flirtation continues with Charlotte Ritter, a flapper from the slums who moonlights as a prostitute to support her sisters and works days as a police assistant while aspiring to be the first female cop in the Berlin Police Force.

Photographer Reinhold Gräf is one of several minor characters from the previous series given more substantive roles in Series 3. Prominent among these are the fascist-leaning Oberst Wendt, with his distinctive dueling scar and his “Make Germany Great Again” political plots; Alfred Nyssen who is shorting the stock market ahead of the Wall Street Crash; Greta Overbeck, tricked by the fascists into committing assassinations in Series 2 and now awaiting her execution; Anno Schmidt, Rath’s brother, thought dead in the First World War, now running a radio program for depressed men while courting the occult and preaching a new world of men-fused-with-machines; and the exuberant investigative reporter Samuel Katelbach who makes a mean pancake soup and is trying to publish a story about corrupt efforts to rearm the Fatherland.

And it’s just as bonkers as it sounds, but always riveting to watch with an attention to Weimar detail that cannot be faulted. 

Talking of bonkers, quite what that huge spiked beast crawling through the sewers at the end of this series means is anybody’s guess. Guess we’ll find out in Series 4.