‘Babylon Berlin’ (Sky Deutschland)

Series 3 of this 2020 German television production, based on the Gereon Rath detective novels of Volker Kutscher, depicts Berlin under the Weimar Republic in the late 1920s, in the years before the Nazis came to power. Communist sympathizers struggle against the police. Conservatives longing for a return to the aristocracy seek wrest power from the Social Democrats. Decadence reigns in the nightclubs frequented by criminals and corrupt bureaucrats. And all the while, a sentiment of “art for art’s sake” takes on a modernist, expressionist direction among the acquaintances of a monied effete heir to an industrial empire waiting for what he correctly sees as the inevitability of a crash on Wall Street. And all take aim at the Jews. The arch criminals launder their drug money by making movies. They have one of the first “talkies” in German under production, a vampire story, when a spotlight in the rafters suddenly falls onto the set, killing the leading lady in the middle of a stylized expressionist dance number.

This series thus places a variety of readymade ideas in contrast with their opposites. But where it differs from the usual, flat characterization and speechifying that Ngai derides in novels of ideas (2020) is in the swirl of ideas that compete for the attention of viewers. The mystery of the crime is matched by the mystery of how these ideas clash across alignments the dichotomies they and their opposites create. Conservatives oppose not only the Social Democrats but also the Nazis. But they use the Nazis too. The Modernists-Expressionists live off the excesses of the industrialists, who are mainly conservatives, but also live among them. The criminals live symbiotically with police and politicians and finance the artists and expressionists. Only the Jews stick together, but even they are still embedded in all social classes united and divided by the tumult of ideas. The devices of short scenes with sharp cuts between them, of dialogues overlapping scene changes in ways that disorient viewers, frame this as a story of confusion, and of morality and ontology turned inside out. The brash interiors of the nightclubs and the outburst of technology – of movie-making and emerging scientific criminology – contrast with the stark dilapidation of the street scenes. After twelve hours of viewing, it can be hard to remember even the victim whose death triggered this investigation, but viewers have experienced uncertainty, challenges to conventions, and the co-mingling of beauty and seeming evil.

This series illustrates how the conventions of detective fiction and the heuristics on which it depends can be upended by breaking away from the anchor points that have created the genre. “Babylon Berlin” enacted the well understood dichotomies of ideas and exploits their well understood premises. But at the same time, it disrupts each comfortable certainty with the cacophony of other dichotomies and their repeated recombination and reconstitution. The series thus uses multiple enactments of readymade ideas to explore the ambiguities the underlie the difficulties of modernism, expressionism and politics in Weimar Germany.

Ngai, S. (2020, 25 June). The Gimmick of the Novel of Ideas. blog post at The Paris Review. Retrieved from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/06/25/the-gimmick-of-the-novel-of-ideas/