The Weimar Republic has long served as a kind of distant mirror in which Germans have both assessed their own progress from the excesses of the Third Reich, and kept a vigilant eye on the dangers of a relapse. It was the one part of twentieth-century history for which Germans could feel something like nostalgia or express something resembling pride. And it appeared to postwar Germans as a moment in which a different future for their country came almost within reach, only to be snatched away. Which is to say, you’ve been to this Berlin many times: It’s the jazzy, dizzy Berlin of Cabaret, of Marlene Dietrich, of “Mack the Knife” drifting across soggy streets.

Rather than a suspiciously eyed outlier among European capitals, Berlin in the Roaring Twenties seemed to summarize its age. The city combined sexual experimentation, ethnic, cultural and sexual diversity, and an almost painful worldliness. The 1920s were also the golden age of German cinema. In fact, the very genre of police procedural has its origin in Weimar Cinema—as do many of the investigative techniques the genre relies on. Babylon Berlin, a new political-tinged detective thriller on Netflix, is eager to conjure up these cultural references. At one point, a detective finds a producer watching Marlene Dietrich’s dailies for The Blue Angel in a building that looks an awful lot like the one in which the child killer Beckert hides in Fritz Lang’s M. The local mafia is directed by a shady psychiatrist figure who recalls another one of Lang’s creation, the thousand-eyed hypnotist Dr. Mabuse.

Set in Berlin in 1929, six months before Black Friday, Babylon Berlin follows police inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) who has just transferred from Cologne to Berlin, and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a young working class woman who is as hardened, pragmatic and unflappable as her city. He nurses a deep sense of inadequacy, a bad case of PTSD and a tendency to self-medicate. She spends her days doing secretarial work and her nights at parties and occasional prostitution in an establishment called Moka Efti. The two have the world’s most uncomfortable meet-cute in a police station men’s room: He’s covered in a suspect’s skull fragments and she helps him to some morphine. Together they investigate a mystery involving a dead man in a canal, a cache of illegal weapons, and a woman who may or may not be a Russian countess.



Weimar Germany is an easy era to mythologize, and Babylon Berlin isn’t coy about getting in on the mythologizing. But it gets the historical details right. Many of the details that may strike viewers as a bit much—the secret German airbase deep in Soviet Russia, say, or the elaborate coup attempts by disgraced generals—were perfectly real, or are riffs on actual events. This show’s Berlin is a place where past and future, East and West, communism and capitalism, politics and sex come together in a convulsive dance. And where the wisest characters are the ones who can shrug off the past, while those who recall it are compelled to repeat it.



In one scene, Rath’s new partner invites him to a dinner honoring members of his platoon left on the field of battle. Everyone in the show has lost something or someone in World War I, so what more natural way to welcome someone into a foreign city than to let them share their grief? But before long, the look back turns creepily foreboding. Men in uniforms gather around an absurd model of the field of their erstwhile battle, while a young boy in a Hitler Youth haircut narrates the events that led to the loss of their comrades. “The German army, undefeated in the field,” they intone—meaning: defeated by politicians in back rooms, sold out by democratic representatives, victims of the infamous “stab in the back.” All of the show’s characters are living with the results of violence, and careening helplessly towards more of it.