Babylon Berlin is a television series about the road that paved the way to Nazism. But it does something far more unsettling than simply recount the rise of Hitler. It takes us inside a society before it knows where it is going into that strange historical moment when catastrophe is approaching, yet people are still dancing.
The story unfolds in the final years of the Weimar Republic, against the long shadow cast by Germany’s defeat in the First World War. The war has taken millions of lives, shattered families and left behind a profound wound in the German collective imagination. The economic catastrophes that followed — inflation, unemployment, poverty and finally the Great Depression — compound an already powerful sense of humiliation and uncertainty. Germany has not merely lost a war. For many Germans, it has lost its pride, its sense of continuity and, increasingly, its belief in the future.
And yet this is also Berlin at one of its most extraordinary cultural moments: intoxicating, sexually liberated, artistically experimental and astonishingly modern. Cabarets glitter while political violence erupts in the streets. Jazz, cocaine, cinema, prostitution, psychoanalysis and avant-garde art coexist with poverty, trauma and resentment. The brilliance and the darkness belong to the same city.
Against this background, radically different political forces compete to determine what Germany will become. Monarchists dream of restoring a vanished imperial order. Communists imagine a revolutionary society built upon the solidarity of the oppressed. Nationalists and the emerging fascist movement promise something psychologically different: the restoration of greatness.
They plot, manipulate, murder and massacre, each convinced that history is ultimately on their side.
And this is where Babylon Berlin becomes much more than a historical crime drama.
In remarkably subtle ways, the series shows how fascism begins to speak to the narcissistic injury of a wounded society. It offers an intoxicating answer to humiliation: you were once great; your suffering was inflicted upon you; enemies are responsible for your degradation; follow us, and you will become great again.
That promise is psychologically enormously powerful.
The monarchists look backwards, hoping to resurrect a world that has already disappeared. The communists look forward toward a utopia in which class oppression will disappear. Fascism does something more dangerous: it transforms injury into identity, resentment into belonging and humiliation into fantasies of omnipotence.
And gradually, almost imperceptibly, the unimaginable becomes imaginable.
This is perhaps the greatest achievement of Babylon Berlin. We already know what its characters do not. We know what waits for them in 1933. We know what will happen to the Jewish shopkeepers, the communists, the artists, the intellectuals, the sexually unconventional, the political dissidents and eventually millions of ordinary Europeans. Every glittering nightclub therefore carries within it the shadow of what is coming.
But Babylon Berlin never reduces history to a lecture whose ending has already been decided. Its characters fall in love, betray one another, dance, drink, desire, dream and struggle to survive. History happens around them almost as ordinary life continues.
And perhaps that is precisely why the series feels so disturbing today.
It reminds us that democracies do not necessarily disappear in a single dramatic moment. Catastrophic ideologies can enter societies through existing wounds through fear, humiliation, economic insecurity, nostalgia and the human longing to belong to something powerful again.
Babylon Berlin takes your breath away with its visual beauty, its music, its extraordinary recreation of Weimar Berlin and its almost hallucinatory atmosphere. But beneath all that beauty lies something much darker: a psychological portrait of a civilization dancing at the edge of an abyss it cannot yet see.
As the new season begins, I strongly recommend not simply starting where the story left off, but watching Babylon Berlin from the very beginning.
Because we already knew where Germany was going. What makes Babylon Berlin extraordinary is watching, step by almost invisible step, how it got there and perhaps letting it serve as a reminder to our own democracies of how unexpectedly history can twist and turn, and how quickly what once seemed unimaginable can become reality.
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