![]() ![]() One of the series' greatest joys is watching her use her courage and talent to make gradual, grinding progress toward that goal.ĭrug-addicted pornographers proto-Nazi generals and industrialists grieving war widows transgender cabaret performers Stalinist assassins organized crime bosses political opportunists grasping for advantage cop-killing communists freelance radicals who hopscotch from far left to far right on a whim - the creators of Babylon Berlin conjure an astonishingly seductive, complex, tactile world for us to inhabit. Ritter longs to escape the festering poverty and abuse in which she was raised (some of it brutally depicted) to become Berlin's first female homicide detective. Rath befriends and ends up working closely with the series' female lead, Charlotte Ritter (the wonderful Liv Lisa Fries), a sharp and ambitious woman from a destitute family who spends her days looking to pick up part-time clerical jobs at police headquarters and her nights working as a prostitute at a lavish cabaret that ends up becoming an important focal point for the unfolding story. In one of the series' most powerful scenes, a psychologist who devotes his life to treating the emotional traumas of these veterans is greeted by the angry jeers of students and colleagues who prefer to see these former soldiers as cowards and parasites. ![]() Such wounded warriors are present everywhere in Babylon Berlin - moving through the city with ugly physical and psychic wounds, despised by the defeated military elite that yearns for vengeance against the nation's enemies no less than by ordinary Germans who resent being continually confronted by the cost and consequences of a humiliating defeat. The series' male lead, police inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), is a combat veteran from the trenches of World War I, silently suffering from PTSD, addicted to morphine, and struggling with the war's deadly impact on his own family. For his muscular centrism as much as for his Judaism, Benda is loathed by nearly everyone on every side of the conflicts tearing the republic apart. Benda genuinely cares about the fate of the Weimar Republic and is willing to act ruthlessly in its defense - including conducting an elaborate criminal investigation of the highest reaches of German politics and society, and covering up shocking acts of police brutality against Communists, Nazis, and innocent bystanders alike. Then there's the thread involving the Jewish head of Berlin's political police, August Benda (Matthias Brandt), a committed Social Democrat. Yet there nonetheless remain deeply troubling parallels between the pre-history of fascism's rise to power and our own moment, and Babylon Berlin explores them in a uniquely electrifying way. There's no reason to suppose that our political polarization and cultural turbulence will end in the same totalitarian and genocidal place that it did in Germany eight decades ago, and ample reason to think that it won't. I say that as someone inclined toward skepticism about viewing President Trump and his European analogues as the leading edge of fascism. ![]() The image isn't flattering, but it's very much worth thinking and worrying about. The show is a fractured mirror in which it's possible to catch glimpses of ourselves. That Netflix's Babylon Berlin takes place in Germany in 1929, just four years before Adolf Hitler's National Socialists rose to power and brought an end to the Weimar Republic, should give us pause. But it's also a partial summation of the plot of the best television show to debut this winter. If this sounds like a distillation of contemporary politics in the U.S. ![]()
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