Early in this final season, set in 1933, editor-in-chief Gustav Haymann at the Tempo newspaper is trying to decide between layout options for a front-page story on Adolf Hitler.
He’s conflicted: “I also have an advance review of The Testament of Dr Mabuse.”
The investigative journalist Samuel Katelbach pipes up: “A masterpiece. Fritz Lang. Rudolf Klein-Rogge. Definitely front-page material.”
It’s another nod to Fritz Lang from the Babylon Berlin showrunners, and also an indication of how art in Weimar Germany could hold its own in a severely turbulent political landscape. Much later in the series, during the burning of the Reichstag, the enigmatic Anno Schmidt makes this observation about the Weimar years:
“Even 100 years from now people will be amazed at what we have accomplished in a few years after the war. The achievements of science and medicine, of psychology and pharmacology, of film and literature, women’s rights, the freedom of the arts and the press, free speech and constructive debate and last, but not least, the unwavering stance against war.”
For Germany’s most expensive and successful television series, currently broadcast in 140 territories, this final season spans five weeks from 28 January to 5 March in 1933. Its focus details Hitler’s ascension to power as Reich Chancellor, and dramatizes the events leading to the Fuhrer’s destruction of his incriminating medical records from the First World War.
Caught in a British mustard gas attack during the final days of the war, Hitler claimed to have lost his sight. In Mein Kempf, he wrote his will power alone restored his sight, motivated by his sense of destiny to make Germany great again.
His diagnosis, however, was actually hysterical amblyopia or psychosomatic/hysterical blindness, not physical blindness. In 1933, as Reich Chancellor, Hitler ordered the erasure of these medical records, and then ordered the Gestapo to murder any patients or doctors with direct knowledge of them.
This season is anchored as usual by Charlotte Ritter, the working-class flapper, secretary and former prostitute who becomes the first woman detective on Berlin’s police force; and by her lover, Inspector Gereon Rath, a WWI veteran whose shellshocked affliction from that war plays a significant role in this final series.
Weimar-era song and dance have been brilliant throughout, and this time the 1920 queer anthem Das Lila Lied (The Lavender Song) with a chorus “We’re just different from the others” is raucously sung at a crossing-dressing Berlin nightclub, including tables laden with gay SA officers.
Co-showrunner Thomas Tykwer composed much of the incidental music, but also the theme song To Ashes, To Dust sung in this season in a Parisian nightclub by contemporary French chanteuse Zaho de Sagazan.
It’s taken 13 years to produce, with near 50 hours of screen time and never faulted in its absorbing execution. Some have compared it with watching Weimar paintings come to life. It does waver a bit, however, in the concluding episode, when it inexplicably shifts from its customary rousing realism to a poorly fictionalized assassination attempt on Hitler, and a Reichstag fire sequence more suited to the gothic melodrama of Lang’s Die Nibelungen.
It’s small potatoes, however, in the context of Babylon Berlin’s greatest achievement – the creation of a believable Weimar world where scientific experimentation, avant-garde art, film, literature, theatre, music, architecture, fashion, drugs and sexual liberation somehow flourished, despite ruinous economic conditions, and an incendiary political caldron of communists, socialists, democrats, and fascists.
And the seizing of power by one of history’s greatest monsters.
Babylon Berlin in Concert (2023), mostly in German with no English subtitles can be found here
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