Babylon Berlin Review

Three directors, a budget no German production had attempted before, and the whole of 1929 Berlin rebuilt at Babelsberg: the scale is not decoration, it is the argument. The series wants you to feel a city with too much money, too many guns and no working agreement about what it is, and it gets there through crowds, traffic and noise rather than through speeches.

Volker Bruch plays Gereon Rath as a man held together by morphine and a hand that will not stop shaking, and Liv Lisa Fries is the real find, playing Charlotte Ritter as a police clerk working nights in a brothel and treating both jobs as ordinary. The Moka Efti sequences are the show at full power, and the cabaret number performed in drag while the camera holds the entire floor is the most confident thing on European television that decade.

The reservations are about plot. The conspiracies multiply, the Black Reichswehr strand asks you to hold a great many names at once, and by the later seasons the show spends episodes servicing machinery it built rather than people it wrote. Dialogue is functional where the images are not. But the May Day episode, mounted police riding into a crowd on wet cobbles, is history filmed as though nobody in it yet knows how it ends, and that is the whole achievement.