A Eulogy for Babylon Berlin

Netflix gave one of the best shows of the last decade an early grave

We first meet Charlotte “Lotte” Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) through the eyes of her sister, Toni, who wakes in their tiny Neukölln apartment. Toni rises from bed, drops money into the coin-operated light switch and we get a clear look at their poverty. They share the apartment with their dying mother, their sister, their sister’s useless, abusive husband, and sister’s screaming infant. And finally, we get Lotte, smoking from the bathroom window. She is exhausted, having spent the night partying and performing sex work, the only working member of the household.

We will eventually get to Lotte’s flapper lifestyle and we’ll see the grandeur and excitement of Weimar Germany, a fever-dream era of German history of artists and libertines. But while the excellent German drama Babylon Berlin revels in the music, the dancing, and the mayhem of the Weimar era, it never escapes or glosses over the gritty destitution of a country reeling from the shameful defeat and ruination of the Treaty of Versailles and the growing underbelly of violence coming with the rise of facism.

Babylon Berlin premiered in the US in 2018 with two seasons and a third in 2020, but its fourth and penultimate season has still not seen the light of day and Netflix announced that at the end of February they’ll be removing the old episodes. It’s an inglorious death to one of the best television shows of the last decade.

Babylon Berlin is in some ways just a historical detective drama and at times falls into kind of a ham-handed early 20th C pulp detective plot. But what makes it strong is its refusal to glorify or gloss over its historical staging. In that way it feels like an anti-Julian Fellowes show. In Fellowes’ shows like Downton Abbey or The Gilded Age, everything from set design to character feel like they have been posed beneath laqueur. Streets of horse-drawn buggies are miraculously free of horse-shit. They have the feeling of watching Night at the Museum, but the museum is a DuPont mansion and laughlines are offered up by carefully staged spoons.

Babylon Berlin’s setting provides a messiness that heightens the actual joy the characters experience. Lotte’s exuberance and determination to get the hell out of poverty comes to an early spotlight in episode two where we get the show’s first big showpiece song and dance.

Zu Asche, Zu Staub is a big band number, but where most Roaring 20s film and tv feel immersed in nostalgia, this song and choreography are just weird as hell. We get the spectacular drag king performance of the character Svetlana Sorokina, the phrenetic dancing of Lotte, her friends, and the other night club patrons who have learned the routine by coming night after night, and half-naked back up dancers with banana dresses. My point on this difference of nostalgia is this: too often film and tv about periods like the Roaring 20s push the viewer to the feeling of: wasn’t this period so great, aren’t you sad you missed it? These questions feel external to the pieces themselves. But what stands out to me is that so often Babylon Berlin doesn’t push you to think about the period outside of itself; it is only concerned with creating its own world in that setting. Perhaps I am pushing too fine a point here, but this scene in particular feels so remarkably fresh and that’s why its intoxicating.

Let me step back to simply praise the TV show’s score, which is at times intense and menacing and at other times just fun. Few shows have been scored so well. S1E2’s Zu Asche, Zu Staub stands out as one of the best moments of the show. But season three offered up its opposite: the intimate and gorgeous Du Bist Alles. In the scene, Reinhold Gräf (Christian Friedel), a police photographer, hosts an intimate birthday party in his home. He emerges from his bedroom in drag to sing a duet with the chief of police playing the accordion. The intimacy here comes from Gräf revealing himself in elegant drag to a room, hermetic in its safety. Because out there, outside that room, the growing threat of anti-queer facism looms.

Elsewhere, the show offers up other delightful musical moments, including the repeated appearance of Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, among others. And beyond these set pieces, the show’s score oscillates between ominousness and joy that reiterates the dual feelings of the Weimar Era.

I have said nothing, so far, about the show’s actual main character Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch). Rath is a war veteran, a junky hiding his PTSD addiction to painkillers, and the chief detective of this story. He is a man in love with his dead brother’s wife, a man haunted by that brother’s death. I say little of him, not because he is bad (Bruch is wonderful in this role), but because in many ways the primary elements of the story are not what makes it such a delight to watch.

The whodunit mystery of the sex tape Rath is sent to find, the stolen train, or a film set murder, these are just the road on a road trip. We get gangsters feeding up the bodies of those who crossed them to their rivals. We get violent demonstrations between socialist revolutionaries and increasingly facist police. We get an anti-semitic assassination. We also get a very tedious subplot about hypnosis (this one drives me crazy).

The success and beauty of Babylon Berlin comes down to its top-to-bottom effort to make its scenes and its characters gritty and complicated. Its villains—even its most mustache-twiddling Nazis—are complex. Its heroes—even the delightful Lotte—are deeply flawed (and not just in the “junky cop” cliches).

And I come back to that first scene where we meet Lotte. That detail of dropping a coin to turn on the apartment lights, putting the wood in the stove, the coughing syphillitic mother, Lotte handing her sister the luxurious chocolate that is how her Johns call her to sex: all show us the destitution of this character who we will see bulldoze her own path into becoming a homicide detective. There is no escapism or kitsch nostalgia in Babylon Berlin, but somehow it finds a way to invite you into its world, to make you want to get inside it, despite all these flaws.

There is a lot others can say about the enshittification of Netflix, but losing Babylon Berlin is just plain depressing.