Babylon Berlin

Friday the Thirteenth!  Well, I don’t care for horror movies, including that one.  Sorry, Jason.

This TV series, two 8 episode seasons, is on Netflix, in German with English subtitles. 

Ok, now my all-too-patient readers are sensing MORE NAZI CRAP on the way, but rest assured, not quite.

This takes place in – drum roll, please – BERLIN, Germany, but during 1929, before the Crash in October.   Nazis do appear briefly, as a bunch of SA stormtroopers on a train platform in a later episode, but otherwise not mentioned or important.  The party really didn’t get in high gear until after the crash occurred and a third of German workers were unemployed, seeking answers from either the NSDAP or their major competitor, Kommunist Partei Deutschland (KPD).  So as yet the Nazis are NOT a factor here.   The Soviets are, and the embassy has some cool Stalin stuff, the NKVD, Cheka, or whatever they had at that time being very active – as are the Trotskyists, who remained active up until the man’s own demise in 1940. 

Among the Berlin police are a few interesting people who are wrapped up in crimes going on for 16 episodes.

The main guy is Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), originally from Cologne.   Like most adult males in Germany, he served in the trenches in WWI and still has nasty flashbacks, which we’d describe as PTSD.   He takes morphine, because apparently killer weed was not available in Germany at the time. 

His partner is Detective Chief Inspector Bruno Wolfer (Peter Kurth), a chubby, highly cynical guy who is easy to hate but not impossible to like.  He’s one of the more corrupt police officers on the force and we eventually see how bad he is later. 

The third is cute flapper Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), who works as a police clerk pending her attempts to break through the glass ceiling and become an actual police inspector.  She moonlights as a “compensated female companion” at the Moka Efti cabaret – which proves inconvenient when her boss Wolfer shows up expecting to actually patronize the establishment.  Oops. 

There are many, many others, including the charismatic crime lord known as the Armenian.  Believe me, lots of stuff going on, you’ll love it, unbelievable, it'll make your head spin, trust me, etc.   Apparently Berlin back then was fairly swinging and exciting, an image the show is trying hard to promote.  How that translates to tourism 90 years later in 2019, I don’t know.  Thank God for the subtitles because as Germanophile as I am with a year of high school German and two semesters of college GERM classes, it’s not nearly enough to catch the dialogue. 

Oh, and there’s a third season on its way, so maybe we’ll see what happens when the market crashes….