Material Witness

Why Babylon Berlin should be your next binge

If it hasn’t grabbed you already by this point, there is a scene in episode 2 of the first season of Babylon Berlin that will destroy any residual doubt that you are watching television drama of the very highest calibre.

In a night club in Berlin in 1929, drunken revellers are dancing with reckless abandon to exuberant music while downstairs a scene of betrayal and police corruption plays out. Woven into this sequence, whose soundtrack is only with the music from the club, is a machine massacre taking place in another building across the city.

 

The scene is utterly spell-binding. It draws together many of Babylon Berlin’s multiple and complex threads into one violent, raucous, sleazy pastiche.

This is Weimar Germany at the bedraggled tail end of the roaring twenties. Reds are on the streets, with the Soviets pulling strings. Ordinary Germans are broken and battered by the poverty brought about by the desperate economic situation. A whole generation is still shell-shocked by the horrors of the trenches. Those who can afford to crush their fears and misery with wine, song and dance in a setting that evokes the last days of Rome.

And so it is, with much of the ruling class still smarting from the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and plotting to make the Fatherland great again.

In the background, barely mentioned but with ghostly and insidious presence, is the shadow of Hitler and the ghost of  massacres yet to come.

It is heady, intoxicating stuff, shot beautifully with no detail spared or overlooked and directed with a verve and fearlessness that surprises over and over again. The plot is rich and complex, never taking the easy or clichéd turn, but instead opening up the twisted, dark and bloody insides of a fascinating and pivotal moment in modern history.

At the heart of the story are Gereon Rath, a police detective from Cologne assigned to the capital and Lotte Ritter, police assistant by day and hostess by night. Each is seeking to overcome their own demons while also solving a cryptic puzzle in front of them: why is there a train from Russia full of phosgene and lost aristocratic gold in Berlin? Who appears in the lost pornographic film that Rath is sent to find? And how does all this tie in to the battle on the streets between communists and a police force using all measures to subdue them?

The leads, Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries are magnetic and it’s impossible to look away whenever they are on screen. They carry a magnificent cast that delivers beauty, menace, hope and despair in equal measure.

Babylon Berlin is adapted from the eponymous book series by Volker Kutsch (with thanks to my former colleague Marco Lange for the introduction) and it is as good as any historical or police drama I can recall watching.

If its language were English you’d have seen it, read about it and watched it picking up awards by the wagon load. Don’t let the language put you off. The German actually helps because it makes you focus on the screen and the nuance and detail of the story playing out. This is five star television and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Babylon Berlin is on Sky / Now in the UK, Movistar in Spain and Netflix in the US.

Great Expectations - and a beautiful but controversial ending

Only after finishing Great Expectations, did I learn that Dickens had written two quite different endings to his epic story of ambition, love and loss.

(163-year-old Spoilers ahead.) In the version I read, Pip returns from Cairo to his village in Kent and pays a nostalgic visit to the estate of the late Miss Havisham. There he finds Estella, long the object of his affections, now widowed and somewhat softened.

Their youthful follies long buried by the cold, hard experience of life, Pip and Estella make their peace, and leave the garden together:

‘I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.’

It’s not exactly wedding bells and ‘happily ever after’, as you might expect of Dickens, who had a tendency to end his novels on an optimistic note. But there is, finally, the promise of a life together and of the happiness that has eluded them both.

In the original version, Pip ran into the widowed Estella on a London street, finding her to have remarried. It is said that friends of the author, among them Wilkie Collins, urged Dickens to rewrite a more conventional finale.  

And so he did, telling friends that he had, “put in as pretty a little piece of writing as I could”, adding that it would like be more acceptable. In the former he is absolutely right: the writing is beautiful. Astonishingly so.

Since then, literary argument has raged about whether he was right to do so. Fighting the corner for the original ending were no lesser figures than George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw. The latter called the happy ending, of a book he revered, an ‘outrage’. ”[It] is too serious a book to be a trivially happy one. Its beginning is unhappy; its middle is unhappy; and the conventional happy ending is an outrage on it.”

The counter argument is that this the novel has come full circle to reconciliation and redemption and that both Pip and Estella have emerged much changed from their suffering and deserve their own happiness.

From a literary perspective I would tend to side with those advocating the original ending. I found Great Expectations unsettling, dark and often difficult, and Pip suffering one last disappointment seemed in keeping with its tone and themes.

That said, I am pleased Dickens was prevailed upon to deliver his last, joyful line. There’s quite enough suffering in the world, and indeed in the hundreds of pages that preceded it. At heart, I’m a romantic, and I left the story with that heart just a little lighter, imagining a happier future for Pip and Estella.

And it says so much about Dickens and the incredible power of his work, and the hold it has over us, that 163 years on, his choice divides opinion.

A love letter to Spain - cada día te quiero más

A decade in Spain. Well, where did that go? It only seems like yesterday that I was nervously giving the airport taxi driver my new address in Madrid, using French pronunciation that stumped us both for a short while. 

In the 10 years since I’ve managed to move on from “una cerveza por favor” all the way through to swearing at footballers and (nearly) mastering the subjunctive. It’s been quite the journey. And I’ve learned much more besides about this wonderful country and its people.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that when I first came to Madrid – for an interview in July 2012 – I didn’t really have much of an idea of where it was. In Spain, and not on the coast, but not a lot more than that. (I did know where Spain was.)

We had made a decision to move overseas – somewhere, almost anywhere – as a cultural and educational experience for the family. Among those cities previously considered, but that didn’t come off, were Munich, Helsinki and Delhi. We weren’t really that fussy.

But we got super lucky, as a Spaniard speaking English might say. Madrid, about which more another time, was the perfect destination for us for many reasons. Happily it turned out the capital was right in the middle of the country!! And that gave us the opportunity to explore all four points of the compass.

It takes a bit of work to discover Spain. It is not to be found on a sun lounger on the Costa Brava or wondering the Barrío Gotíco – although, Lord knows both are reason enough for visiting. When we arrived, we didn’t even know what we didn’t know.

 

The north looks like New Zealand or Cornwall or Brittany, and has the country's best beaches in Galicia, and so what if the water's a little colder than it is in Alicante. The south east looks  enough like the old west that the spaghetti westerns were made there. The Basques speak a language that looks like it belongs in a fantasy novel. Beautiful, wild Teruel is so remote and unknown that its tourist board once marketed it with the slogan Teruel Existe. And on the southern coast the shadow of Africa looms as a reminder of a rich and diverse history fashioned by geography. 

Fall asleep on a beach in Formentera and you could wake up believing you were in the Caribbean, or Italy, such is the volume of tourists seeking the western Sardinia. Take a siesta in a village in Castilla La Mancha and you're right back in the 18^th Century.  

Don Quixote’s windmills can still be seen on the plains close to Toledo, and the most wondrous Roman ruins in Merida, Segovia, Tarragona... There is skiing within an hour of Madrid, and in the south within an hour of the beach and the best and friendliest resort I’ve ever visited at Baqueira in the Pyrenees. And some of the worst football I've ever seen is played in the best atmosphere I've ever experienced just a few kilometres from here. And I wouldn't miss it for the world. 

La Rioja in the autumn, when the harvest is coming in and the vines burnished in shades of red, brown and yellow, feels like the most beautiful and bountiful place on earth. Although for drama it cannot beat Ribeira Sacra (left) where the vineyards defy gravity, clinging on to the steep canyons.

Ronda is extraordinary, Córdoba even more so and Cadíz is bursting with history and grandeur. Cáceres might be the best preserved medieval City in a country packed with them, and also a marvellous place for a sundowner in the Plaza Mayor. And Sevilla apparently might be the best of all, but I’ve not made it there yet.

The Alhambra is majestic, El Escorial imposing, La Mezquita simply spell-binding. My favourite Cathedral is in Toledo, but everybody says this is only because we didn’t have time to go into the one in León. Burgos, a place that far too many people drive by – including us for many years – also has a Cathedral worthy of the diversion. It’s almost enough to turn one to religion.   

In Bilbao the Guggenheim shines with the optimism and modernity it has brought to help renew a great City. In Madrid, a young capital by European standards, the nation’s cultural heritage and history lines the walls of the Prado, from where Las Meninas calls like a siren.  And in Barcelona, you could probably visit La Sagrada Familia weekly for years and discover a new view on each occasion.

And for me there is always joy at being on the open road. Spain is a land of vast and empty landscapes, of light and shadows and there is something new to be found at every exit. We’ve been exploring for 10 years, and need another ten at least. And more still  for Portugal. 

Exploring has been wonderful, stopping just as good. There’s nothing better than taking tapas on the Calle Laurel in Logroño, unless it’s eating oysters in Vigo, navajas in Asturias or cochinillo in Segovia. Or take a beer with the ghost of Hemingway in Pamplona's Café Iruña. 

Your jamón should be from Extremadura, cherries in season too - oh my goodness, the cherries - wonderful olive oil from Jaén and beef from Ávila and Salamanca. And calamari sandwiches in Madrid? Perhaps that is one for the locals. There are too many memorable meals to mention, but I’m not sure we’ll ever beat the time we came across two men roasting whole fish on barbecues fashioned from oil drums outside a roadside shack on the coast north of Santander. Better tasting or fresher fish, I’ve never eaten.

And of course the vineyards are not just for show. Spain produces the best value wine in the world, and there’s probably nowhere in the world you can get a better bottle for under €8, and for €30 something really outstanding. I have developed a preference for reds from Ribera del Duero and whites from Ribera Sacra, but really, you cannot go wrong. Early on in our tenure here I did an experiment to see exactly how low you could go and the wine still be drinkable. It’s about €3, although the €1.50 rosé from the corner shop in Cangas was useful for cleaning the barbecue.

And Spaniards are very gregarious so there’s always a good opportunity to take a copa or a gin and tonic (which is taken very seriously). And no better people to have it with. All we have found since we came to Spain is kindness and generosity. There’s a healthy outlook on life here. People are more relaxed than their northern neighbours, live longer and seem happier. And why not? The sun almost never stops shining, and it is the land of plenty. The “relaxedness” shouldn’t be mistaken for idleness though, as it too often is. Spaniards are as industrious and efficient as any other Europeans, in my experience, they just choose not to let it interfere with life as much as the rest of us. And more power to them for that.

So to all of them and everyone else who has made our time here so enjoyable - and in particular to the four of you who came with me: Muchísimas Gracias.

And for those of you who'd like to pay us a visit: there's plenty of room at the inn, but time may be running out...