Henk Handloegten likes to compare Babylon Berlin to Titanic.
“Everyone knows the iceberg is coming,” he says.
For Babylon Berlin, the iceberg is Hitler.
And, in the fifth and final season of the epic German period series, he finally hits.
The series follows homicide detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and partner Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) as they unravel underworld crimes and political conspiracies in Berlin in the fading years of the Weimar Republic, when the city was a wild mix of cutting-edge science, sexual liberation, avant-garde culture and revolutionary politics.
The final season runs from Jan. 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich chancellor of Germany, through March 5, when, following a violent and murderous campaign against his political opponents, Hitler held rigged elections that secured his absolute hold on power.
Series co-creators Handloegten, Tom Tykwer and Achim von Borries, together with the show’s two leads, gave a sneak peek of the finale at a private event in Berlin on Tuesday.
Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries) share a last dance in the final season of Babylon Berlin.
© Christine Schroeder
From its first season in 2017, Babylon Berlin has been adept at balancing meticulous period world-building with the engine of its noir storylines. The series is set against the historic demise of German democracy and the triumph of the Nazis. But every season also has a crime conspiracy to solve. And at least one show-stopping dance number at the Moka Efti, the show’s underground nightclub.
Season five is no different. But the tone for the final chapter is considerably darker.
“The roaring ’20s have faded away,” said Fries. “It’s no longer dancing on the volcano. It’s just the volcano.”
Babylon Berlin season five.
Frederic_Batier
In the new season, the echoes of the present day, what Fries calls the “absurd parallels” with the 1930s, have only become sharper. When Babylon Berlin premiered in 2017, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was polling at around 10 per cent nationally. Today it is polling close to 30 per cent and, next month, could win power in a key state election.
The parallels extend beyond Germany. An early scene in season five shows a long line of volunteers signing up for the Nazi Brownshirts, the paramilitary force Hitler used to intimidate and violently suppress political opponents. Beside them is an even longer queue of families reporting loved ones seized by those same paramilitary groups.
“We wrote those scenes before ICE existed,” said von Borries.
“When we first started writing, the AfD hadn’t even been founded yet,” added Tykwer. The story of Germany in the 1920s and ’30s, he said, has “something archaic and universal. [It’s about] the struggle of a humane system [and] how vulnerable it is to radical aggression and violence. How something built up with such care over such a long time can be torn apart in an instant.”
But, Handloegten insists, Babylon Berlin is not the story of the inevitable collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism. As the series draws to a close and the dark curtain falls, the focus is on the struggle.
“This is not a story about the downfall; it is about the fight for democracy,” he said. “The entire time it was unclear whether [the Nazis] would succeed. It was a series of individual decisions that led to that end.”
Season five of Babylon Berlin premieres in Germany Sept. 10 and in the U.S. on streamer MhZ Choice in January 2027.