BERLIN — Like many people, Volker Kutscher reads daily newspapers to keep up with things. What’s less usual is that the two papers he relies on, the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, have been out of print for more than seven decades.

In the papers — which he reads front to back on microfilm in the city’s old state library, weeks’ worth in one sitting — he finds news of violent demonstrations, rising rents, traffic accidents, robberies and murders. He finds reviews of risqué cabarets, modern theater and promising new media (talking films). And in federal politics, there is endless news of weak coalition governments that take far too long to form.

To modern Germans all this “news” would seem eerily familiar.

The ritual is part of a painstaking research effort that has led to a series of seven best-selling detective novels and “Babylon Berlin,” a blockbuster TV series based on them. The books and the TV show, set in the Berlin of the 1920s and ’30s, have fed into a national discussion about the Weimar Republic, the roots of German democracy, the unfathomable rise of the Nazis and the pressing question of whether history might be repeating itself.

Mr. Kutscher has sold more than 1.7 million books in Germany, while tens of millions have watched the TV show there. Two of his books are in print in the United States, with at least two more coming, and Netflix is offering “Babylon Berlin” in America.