Babylon Berlin

Many films and TV shows have depicted the Nazi regime and the horrors that were perpetrated by the German political party. Set during the Weimar Republic, Babylon Berlin is not a true story in that its main characters are not real people who actually existed. Set in Berlin in 1929, Babylon Berlin (co-producer: Christine Strobl) has already aired in Europe to much acclaim.

But even before it originally premiered, German viewers may have been familiar with the source material. The series is based on Volker Kutscher’s popular thriller book series about detective Gereon Rath. In an interview with RadioTimes, Kutscher related the fictional police inspector to the German author Erich Kästner, saying that Gereon Rath is a child of his time, born in 1899 — the same year as Erich Kästner.

Netflix At the start of Babylon Berlin, Gereon transfers from Cologne to Berlin to investigate a pornography ring run by the Berlin mafia. And, in particular, Bruno Wolter should not be confused with the real-life Bruno Walter, the Berlin-born composer who fled Germany during the Nazi regime. Even the specific crimes Gereon investigates appear to be fictional; it’s the world around him that’s historically based.

I’m very curious about this time — an important time, Kutscher told The Guardian’s Observer. I always questioned how a civilized country, a republic like Germany, could change into this dictatorship. All these people didn’t fall from the sky as Nazis, one of the writers and directors of the series — Henk Handloegten — told The New York Times.

Beta Film Yet, the main action of Babylon Berlin still revolves around detective Gereon Rath and the crimes he is solving in the capital city. As The New York Times noted, Hitler is only mentioned once during the first eight episodes (which served as the first season in Germany). You cannot see or even smell that there’s danger coming.

Who Was Stefan Arndt’S Longtime Partner?

There were just a few weeks to go before the start of production on Babylon Berlin, the most ambitious German television series of all time, when Stefan Arndt lost his nerve. “It was just too big, too expensive,” he recalls. “We were almost ready to start shooting and I thought, ‘If we do it in German, it won’t sell.’

Arndt was meeting with his longtime partner, and co-owner of Berlin-based production company X Filme, the director Tom Tykwer, who had spent the previous three years developing and co-writing Babylon Berlin with fellow filmmakers Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries. This year, Babylon Berlin premiered on German television, on public broadcaster ARD, with 8.5 million tuning in, an average 24.5 percent market share, the best start for a series in Germany this year. Looking back, it’s easy to see how a combination of sex, drugs and crime, mixed in with the mythology of swinging 1920s Berlin and a historic foreboding, would translate into a global hit.

“And the rules of German TV were very strict — it was still one story arc per episode — and you focus on your one hero. “The biggest challenge, really, was convincing people here in Germany that German audiences were already watching shows like this, that they were ready for it,” says Tykwer. … We had to all shed our skins, leave the old ways behind, to make this work.” From the start, Arndt and Tykwer knew they didn’t want to make a typical story about the years before 1933, when Adolf Hitler took power.

In the 1928 election, the Nazis got only 1.6 percent of the city’s votes. “The world seemed to be catching up to our scripts.” By not only writing the scripts to Babylon Berlin with Borries and Handloegten, but by co-directing every episode together, Tykwer broke with the approach of nearly every TV series — not just in Europe but worldwide.

That never happens, because usually it’s one episode, one director,” says Tykwer. “But we didn’t shoot episodes; we shot locations. There’s something unpredictable about our show because, within every episode, you have three directors, three different ways of approaching things.”

The German movie industry at the time — headquartered at Studio Babelsberg (where Babylon Berlin is shot) — rivaled Hollywood. But the introduction of sound in the late 1920s threatened the German industry. “We’re continuing with the plot lines of the first two seasons — the personal and the political,” says Tykwer.

What Is The Name Of The Police Officer In Babylon Berlin?

Set in the first half of the 20th century, ‘Babylon Berlin’ is a neo-noir television series that revolves around a police officer, Gereon Rath, who goes to Berlin from Cologne to expose an extortion ring run by the Berlin mafia. In the world of drugs, corruption, and weapons trafficking, along with his companions, Charlotte Ritter and Bruno Wolter, he soon finds himself torn between exposing the dark truth and loyalty. The show offers viewers an opportunity to explore the Germany of the Weimar Republic era with its own spin.

Is Babylon Berlin Based on a True Story? No, ‘Babylon Berlin’ is not based on a true story. The series won Kutscher the Berlin Krimi-Fuchs Crime Writers Prize and was a huge success.

However, it would be wrong to presume that his work is rooted in fiction only. Kutscher’s crime series is quite historically accurate, and his knowledge of the Weimer Republic era was a key component of his novel. The Managing Director of Sandstone (a literary publishing company), Robert Davidson, in his interview with The Guardian, appreciated Kutscher’s work and added, “It’s the world of Cabaret, but it’s also realistic.

So, not only did Kutscher take care of the historical accuracy, but he also ensures that the socio-political conditions of those days were depicted in the right way. Even Hitler is mentioned only once in the first two seasons of ‘Babylon Berlin’ because Berlin in those days mostly had a stronghold of left-wing politics. The Nazis only won around 2 percent of the votes in Berlin’s 1928 election, which is why the show rarely mentions anything about them.

While discussing the character development of Gereon Rath, Kutscher mentioned in one of his interviews that it was extremely important that Rath was not a Berlin native as he wanted to have a curious and naive perspective. He also ensured that Rath was apolitical, a very common attitude amongst the youngsters in those days. The key was to create characters that were accurately depicted according to the late 1920s, which provides a rich backdrop for gangster stories like ‘Babylon Berlin.’

Even the character development is done with proper care. ‘Babylon Berlin’ fans can therefore learn a lot from the show and gain insight into the Weimar Republic.

Who Wrote The Series Babylon Berlin?

Babylon Berlin (henceforth BB) premiered in Germany on the pay channel Sky TV in October 2017 and in the United States on the streaming service Netflix in January 2018. It is based on Volker Kutscher’s series of crime novels set in late Weimar Republic and early Nazi-era Berlin. At its center are the lives and investigations of the laconic and tormented police detective Gereon Rath and his charismatic and irrepressible assistant Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter.

Its viewership in the Federal Republic was topped only by the global fantasy behemoth Game of Thrones. The series is clearly modeled on American series such as Mad Men (2007–2015) and The Wire (2002–2008) as it unfolds a complex web of characters and subplots with loving attention to the history and fashions of the time. Indeed, this collaboration of seasoned directors Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Henk Handloegten is the most expensive German TV series to date.

German reviewers questioned both the circumstances of its production and its creative ambition. While Der Spiegel called it “a masterpiece,” one much debated blog review went so far as to call it “pure crap,” which neither reflected historical truth nor carried artistic merit. Many critics faulted the series for trading in postcard clichés and creating a 1920s “Berlin Disneyland.”

(And indeed, one of the numerous intertexts of this series are Heinrich Zille’s unflinching depictions of proletarian misery.)

What Is The Name Of Volker Kutscher’S Gereon Rath Series?

Based on Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath Series, which comprises six books and an illustrated prequel (2017), the first and second seasons of Babylon Berlin follows rather faithfully the plot of the first novel, entitled Der nasse Fisch (The Wet Fish)[2], published in 2008. Nonetheless, as often happens in book-to-film adaptations, the series discards major aspects of the novel and adds new plotlines, some of which only appear in the sequel, The Silent Death. As a result, Babylon Berlin focuses only partly on the police investigation per se, and is not as Gereon Rath-centred as the novel.

But the most welcome addition to the adaptation certainly has to do with Gereon Rath’s backstory. Whereas many adaptations tend to overemphasize the romantic aspects of the works they are based on, Babylon Berlin does not focus as much on the Rath-Ritter love story as The Wet Fish does. In his seminal Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, Detlev Peukert observed that the period saw the interplay of four “generations,” namely the Wilhelminians (born in the 1850s 60s), the Gründerzeit (“founding era” of the Reich, 1871) cohort, the wartimers (1880s-90s), and the “superfluous” ones.

From the first episode onwards, one cannot help but notice how diverse the city was, as suggested by the series’ title. The Weimar era was also one of open, violent political polarization – more so than our own. Many citizens wore their politics on their sleeves, sometimes literally, as some parties had their own paramilitary organizations, most prominently the Nazis’ infamous SA (Sturmabteilung – Storm Division); the Communist Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front-Fighters’ League); the pro-Weimar, Social Democrat-dominated Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Black, Red, Gold Reich Banner); and the conservative-nationalist Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet).

A key year in German politics, 1929 saw the parties that supported the republican regime begin to weaken and the rise of the Nazis. *** Babylon Berlin is commendable for several reasons. First of all, it did not fall into the “Nazi trap,” i.e., giving Hitler and the Nazis more importance than they actually had in the 1920s. Overall, then, Babylon Berlin will not only please interwar historians, but is also an excellent starting point for the uninitiated.

NOTES [1] The Reichswehr (literally, “Country’s Defence”) was the name of the German army during the Weimar Republic and the first two years of the Third Reich (1933-35). However, by 1929, the Black Reichswehr was a thing of the past, as it had officially disbanded in 1923. [2] In police lingo, a “wet fish” is an unsolved case.

How Long Have The Vossische Zeitung And The Berliner Tageblatt Been Out Of Print?

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.

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.