It’s the global hit TV series that pulled audiences straight into the chaotic hedonism of ۱۹۲۰s Germany, dramatising the brilliance and brittleness of a newly built democratic system with unprecedented ambition.
But in the ۱۳ years that the German makers of Babylon Berlin have worked on the show, modern democracies from the US to Hungary to South Korea have come under pressure in ways the creators say they could never have imagined when they started.
Now they are preparing to unveil the fifth and final season, culminating in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the same week that Germany will face one of the biggest tests of its postwar order in a watershed state election.
The timing, they insist, is pure coincidence, but is fitting for an ambitious programme set a century ago during the Weimar republic that has always felt eerily prescient.
As the team gets ready to sign off, the inexorable end of the story is now upon the familiar characters of the noirish police procedural, with its lush period sets and frisson of impending doom.
“It’s no longer a dance on the rim of the volcano,” said lead actor Liv Lisa Fries, using a German idiom for the explosion of avant garde culture and sexual liberation in the ۱۹۲۰s before the descent into fascism. “We’re in the volcano itself.”
Fries plays the series’ intrepid working-class heroine Charlotte Ritter, who works her way up from secretarial duties and underworld sex work to become the first female detective on the Berlin police force.
Her co-star Volker Bruch is Gereon Rath, a shellshocked first world war veteran whose eventful odyssey through the trauma of his era bears a resemblance to Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey.
But the more striking parallel is Germany in ۲۰۲۶.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, an extremist, anti-constitutional party founded around the same time that work on the series began, is now leading national opinion polls.
On Sunday ۶ September, it could win its first absolute majority in a state election, in Saxony-Anhalt, and two weeks later may beat its opponents in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In Berlin, it is polling close to the far-left party Die Linke.
With German democracy facing such a stress test, Bruch said the political “parallels” jumped out. But he resisted overly simplistic comparisons, citing an old adage: “History doesn’t repeat itself that way – it rhymes.”
The blurred lines between life and art took on sometimes surreal dimensions during the course of the production.
Series three was filmed in part at the neo-baroque Villa Adlon, which in November ۲۰۲۳ served as the real-life venue for a secret meeting of AfD officials and neo-Nazis to discuss a “remigration” plan for mass deportations if the party came to power.
Series five sees Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor, just as an medical file goes missing that casts new light on his time as a soldier in the first world war.
Although it was always clear how the series would end, watching Babylon Berlin has meant hoping to the last that history would take another turn.
That poignancy transformed a sophisticated crime show into something more affecting, and perhaps more enduring.
Across ۵۰-odd hours, the show, based partly on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher, helped expand the scale and ambition of European television drama.
“It was almost impossible even then when they started,” said Scott Roxborough, the European bureau chief of entertainment trade magazine the Hollywood Reporter.
It was the product of a “pioneer time”, he said, when Germany was willing to throw massive resources at a chance to catch up with splashy shows from the US and Britain like Breaking Bad and The Crown.
“I think it would be almost impossible to do it nowadays unless an Apple TV or a Netflix decided to finance everything,” something he said was increasingly unlikely as the global streaming companies take a more cautious, profits-first approach.
Babylon Berlin has reached audiences around the world – ۱۴۰ countries at last count – with its cautionary tale of a vibrant civilisation’s inherent fragility.
“The secret to the series’s success in capturing the zeitgeist is definitely not that it mirrors the present. I don’t believe that,” one of its three creators, Tom Tykwer, said.
Rather, audiences have been drawn to the “transformative force” of Berlin in the ۱۹۲۰s, when a weak government and a churning society left room for women, gay people and new immigrants to rewrite the rules.
“That brings forth an incredible number of wonderful, positive, beautiful blossoms, but because it’s so experimental, they’re also destroyed again almost immediately,” he said.
“We’ve tried to explore the universal themes that stem from the fact that political systems are people-centred so are always under threat. It will always be that way.”
Tykwer also co-composed much of the original music for the series, including the haunting theme song To Ashes, to Dust. The fifth season features a plot excursion to Paris and an on-screen rendition of the tune by French neo-chanson star Zaho de Sagazan.
In series five, Tykwer and his team have also revived the ۱۹۲۰ queer anthem Das Lila Lied with its rousing chorus “Wir sind nun einmal anders als die andern” (We’re just different from the others) for the series.
It is rousingly sung in a nightclub frequented by cross-dressing patrons and uniformed, gay SA officers – a startling melange the producers say was not uncommon before the brutal Nazi crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community.
While Tykwer bristles at the notion that the series should deliver any sort of “message” to Germans about their choices at the ballot box this month, fellow creator Henk Handloegten said he was proud to have “struck a nerve” with audiences around the world who find themselves at a political crossroads.
“I believe that we’ve taken a clear political stand, even now in the final series, and I find it very necessary,” he said.
For Handloegten, the pressure on democracy in many countries where the show is watched, “has really motivated me”.
“It’s given me the justification to engage with [this era] for so long and so deeply, because I felt there was a relevance to it in today’s world. And for me, in a strange way, that’s political work – something we’ve been doing here for ۱۳ years now.”
