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.