If you’re looking for an excellent television series to watch, I highly recommend The Same Sky, a German production about Berlin in 1974, which you can now stream on Netflix.

I had been complaining on Facebook about how amid all the new detective shows from abroad—especially the noirish/Anglo/Nordic TV series —it was hard to find a series that didn’t rely for its suspense and thrills on either the sexual abuse and rape of women or harm to children. The series Fortitude is one of the worst offenders on this score. At one point I thought I was going to literally throw up and had to run out of the room to the bathroom. I didn’t throw up, but I didn’t go back either.

The Same Sky is different. It is suspenseful, involving Cold War espionage in a divided Berlin at the height of detente. There are some scary moments, and some unsettling characters, whose stirring malignity you feel but can’t quite figure out. And while there is some harm to children, it’s not pornographic or sadistic. It’s realistic: the kind that flawed—i.e., all—parents inflict on their kids, the psychological harm that families do to each other in the normal pursuit of life.

But what makes the show truly great is that it is almost Greek in its ambitions. In the same way that Greek tragedies tell the story of the city through the story of a family, so does The Same Sky narrate the story of a divided city through stories of that city’s divided families. There’s also a fascinating retelling of the Oedipus story, involving a family broken in two by the Berlin Wall: one side of the family is dedicated to the East German regime and building socialism; the other is dedicated to the West and whatever the West entails (though part of the power of the series is that that is not at all clear.)

In its weaving of family and political history, the series also reminded me of an amazing review that Benjamin Nathans did in the New York Review of Books. The review was about Yuri Slezkine’s new book on the Russian Revolution, which also sounds amazing. Toward the end of the review, Nathans zeroes in on a theme that is evocative of The Same Sky (forgive the long quote; it’s worth your while):

Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family. In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government “were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,” unable to transcend the “hen-and-rooster problems” of marriage and domestic life. Many of them expressed unease at the prospect of sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation. “I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,” worried the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend. “In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.” But it wasn’t. No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution. Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as “Vladlen” (Vladimir Lenin), “Mezhenda” (International Women’s Day), and “Vsemir” (worldwide revolution). But naming was easy compared to living. The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home. It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death. The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell…, a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.” In that case, why bother with families at all? Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer. Sects, Slezkine notes, “are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise ‘all these things’ within one generation…, and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).” Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves. For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin’s social engineering. It’s worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family. Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains? Whatever the case, the children they raised in the House of Government became loyal Soviet citizens but not millenarians. Their deepest ties were to their parents…not to Marx and Lenin. Instead of devouring its children, he concludes, the Russian Revolution was devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. As Tolstoy’s friend Nikolai Strakhov wrote about the character Bazarov, the proto-Bolshevik at the heart of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (another work about family), “The love affair takes place against his iron will; life, which he had thought he would rule, catches him in its huge wave.”

The Same Sky seems to follow a similar plot twist, only it’s not just children undermining the revolution by their devotion to their parents but also parents undermining the revolution by their devotion to, well, not exactly their children—as I said, there’s a fair amount of psychic harm that is inflicted on children in this series—but to their own ambitions as lived through their children.

It’s telling how much this story departs from the standard Cold War and even post-Cold War narratives that claimed that civil society was pulverized by the totalitarian state. As this series shows, that’s not at all the case; indeed, the one character who lives up to the stereotype of children being willing to rat on their parents is almost a comic figure in this series, singular in his fanaticism. Almost everyone else is drawn to a more human proportion.

What makes the story so tragic and Greek is that the characters are impelled by some invisible force—call it dramatic fate—to act in ways that you can tell will destroy them but that they are pursuing for reasons of salvation and redemption.