- Reviews from NPR and Vogue and NYT and Insider and DailyDot and Guardian and Inquisitr and Bloomberg and WaPo and New Republic and NY Review of Books and CreativePlanet and RadioTimes and GQ and Uproxx and ExBerliner; WSJ video review here; Wikipedia here.
- Spin and The Australian and The Spectator . "The Week" on "America's Weimar Period," here. Jacobin here. See coverage at the US Goethe Institute website, here.
- Late-breaking (Spring 2018) reviews in New Yorker (here) and NY Review of Books here.
- A December 2018 article in Hollywood Reporter looks back at Babylon Berlin and forward to Season 3 (for late 2019). Here.
- My favorite review is Meghan O'Keefe's at DECIDER. The miniseries website is here.
The male lead is police investigator Gereon Rath, with a dark back-story and some bad habits. Actor Volker Bruch resembles John Hamm.
The real star emerges after a few episodes as Charlotte Ritter, a 20ish girl from a dirt-poor family in a crowded filthy tenement (Down and Out in Paris and London and Berlin), who's working her way up in the world with ambition and pluck, including working as a prostitute in an high-end upscale nightclub. Driving the plot, she also takes ad hoc day work as a typist at the main police station, pulling her and us into the worlds of vice cops and homicide cops. Played by Liv Lisa Fries, a perky brunette with some star power (she pops off the screen.)
The series features a showpiece carbaret song, which occurs in the middle of episode 2 and runs six or seven minutes. It's sung by one the main supporting characters, Lithuanian actress Severina Janusauskaite as a mysterious platinum blonde femme fatale. The lyrics are very dark: Zu Asche Zu Staub - "To ashes, to dust, life is short, you know it - but not quite yet." The music has a pounding disco beat and steers between minor key and major key (techno-goth?); it's pitched to Januskaite's sultry deep alto voice. As the song opens she looks and sings like a cross between Marlene Dietrich in a tuxedo and a female Nosferatu.
There are several versions of the song on Youtube. The first is a direct video clip from the series, here. The second is a slightly longer version presented as a music video (also here), cross cutting back and forth to the nightclub setting but with hundreds of quick shots from across the width of the mini-series, and even a few quick "behind the camera" views of the sets and actors. (This matches the 5 min Amazon mp3 studio version of the song.) The verdict: all three of these presentations of ZU ASCHE are good; (1) seeing the song right inside the film, with all the background sounds of audience dancing and singing along; (2) watching it as a music video version with a kaleidoscope of characters and scenery from the series; and (3) the mp3 version, without any visuals, just listen to the rolling lyrics and beat. The orchestration of ZU ASCHE is complex, with up to six or seven lines woven into the percussion and background music.
More Details
12 Hours of Video
Episodes are 45 minutes, so about 6 hours per season and 12 hours total.
Enter a slideshow guide to the characters here.
After you've seen BB, an all-spoilers review of the plot points and plot line endings is here at Vulture.
Awards Won
The series won best drama, best music, best cinematography at the German Emmies. (Also here.) The producers wanted to have a German story among the internationally acclaimed historical drama miniseries like Mad Men, Downtown Abbey, and The Crown. An interview with the three writer/directors here. Interview with director Tom Tykwer at Vulture, here.
Season 3
Season 3 will appear in late 2018 and will be set in 1930 after the stock market crash destabilizes an already very shaky people and government.
ZU ASCHE / English
My English translation of the ZU ASCHE lyrics, here.
Dubbed or Subtitled? Up to You.
Netflix streams with the original German audio or dubbed in English. Subtitles available in German or in English. It's easiest to watch dubbed in English -- but if you can manage it, the actors' voices are far richer and more interesting in the original German.
Marc Hosemann
One of my favorite movies is a German slice-of-life movie from 2012 called Coffee in Berlin (great soundtrack too). Actor Marc Hosemann played Matze, the protagonist's best guy-friend, and here he plays Konig, one of the crime world bad guys in Babylon Berlin.
The Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern of 1929?
There is very little overt humor in Babylon Berlin, but two police assistants, Henning and Czerninski, we just glimpse in early episodes get many more lines and activities in the final episode (E16) - the blockbuster train chase shoot-em-up adventure episode. They are clearly there for comic relief, quibbling like Rosenkrantz and Guidenstern or like a 1929 Berlin version of Abbott and Costello.
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| Comic relief in Episode 16? |
You can argue whether ZU ASCHE is easy or hard to translate. It's short phrases, common words, metaphors of three or four words, so in a sense Google Translate alone hits pretty close. On the other hand, the lyrics are dark and grim, so hearing them from the original artist in her voice is much of the haunting beauty. And the German words fit the somber images perfectly, with lots of sonorous "aw" and "ow" sounds. One line lifts to a long high note with the syllable "kite" - letting the singer hold the long "i" then snapping down on the "t." Other words in the lyrics are easy to translate but hard to echo. In English, we have immortality, from our Latin vocabulary; the meaning is clear but it doesn't sound close to our d-word, death. In German, you get "Unsterblichkeit" (as in ZU ASCHE), which literally means "Un-Death-Ness" in the natural German wordkit.
ZU ASCHE as Complex Music
The song begins with a meandering solo piano, with an upward then downward arpeggio, almost borrowed from LA LA LAND, then the piano cones down to just one repeated note, and then we start to hear a "toot-toot-toot" from distant horns (1,2,3, pause). Then the singer comes in, with a strong deep alto voice that's actually below the tones we've been hearing. The song begins almost as a dirge. Beneath several layers of orchestration you can just hear a guitar-like figure repeated over and over, three descending notes 1,2,3, and then the same notes as a fast descending triplet on the fourth beat. Below this, deep horns like trobones play three repeated notes on 1,2,3, and then two beats on the fourth beat (making a changing harmony on 1,2,3 and then 2 against 3 rhythm on the fourth beat.) During the first stanza or two, the singer isn't actually singing: she's talking the lyrics in an ominous monotone. Later there is a long drum solo. In the second half of the song the singer's voice is more lyrical, the background more orchestral, and there's a shift toward strong major chords, although the lyrics remain very dark and in many cases exactly the same funereal imagery as the opening dirge.
The writer-directors stated in an interview that while many aspects of BB are as realistic as possible, including a few cabaret 20's era songs we hear, ZU ASCHE deliberately breaks the wall and brings modern musical and choreographic elements into this scene, borrowed from Berlin TechnoPunk of the 90s.
SEEING BABYLON BERLIN TWICE
I've seen the series twice, once in early 2018 when it was new on Netflix and again in August 2018. The production values throughout are super-high; it's not just the elaborate CGI, but the detail, photography, perfection of editing and camerawork throughout. I confirmed again that if you can tolerate 12 hours of subtitles, the original German voices are far richer than the English dubbing. Countless small details are woven throughout the 16 episodes, and while it is a great pleasure to watch the first time for the surprises, it's also engrossing (and humbling) to watch a second time for the craft.
VISIT BERLIN for BB
The VISIT BERLIN website (in English) has a lengthy page on Babylon Berlin; what is it; where was it filmed; etc. Here.
Plenty of real places and things are intermingled into the plot. The Moka Efti was a real nightclub (and in 1929 it had moved to Friedrichstrasse, as shown in the film); Lipetsk in Russia was a real secret German airfield; Brecht's Three Penny Opera had really been playing for a year at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm by June of 1929. In an interview, the producers describe difficulty filming near the Russian Embassy, which is a 1950s postwar building near the Brandenburg Gate. In one crowd scene of Communist protesters we see the Karstadt Hermannplatz department store under construction, as it was. Aschinger's was a real restaurant. The dumbwaiter-like strange elevators were most popular in Germany in the 1920s and are called Paternosters. We see a Theremin music device; it was patented in 1928. When you walk into a movie studio - like you do - a producer is screening dailies of The Blue Angel.
Not specific to BB, article on "Where to go for Weimar-in-Berlin" here and ten books on Weimar and Berlin here.
Photos
A 3-minute video that takes you behind the CGI is here and an interview with the SFX team here. (See also here.)
Rotes Rathaus at Alexanderplatz, 1869; used as "Police Presidium" in Babylon Berlin (the Victorian red brick building at left of picture below). In this photo from the series, the Alexanderplatz Tower and other modern features are photoshopped out. The 8 story tan building in the center of this picture I have seen, and I assumed was from the 1950s or 1960s. It's actually from 1929 so it's in the miniseries...AlexanderHaus. The twin buildings are Alexanderhaus & Berolinahaus (see modern article here; really detailed German article here).
I found the orientation of the above picture very confusing and I hope this description is right. This Babylon view is a CGI view hovering EAST of the main Alexanderplatz train station and looking southwest. Thus, the Fernsehturm would today be just past the train station (just over and behind it), and the two tiny steeples in the far right background right are the Nicolai Kirche, just before them would be the modern existing Rotes Rathaus. Now, the angled tan building in the middle of the picture above is ALEXANDERHAUS (with a white mohalk) and facing it is a similar but simply rectangular building (also with a white mohalk) the BEROLINAHAUS. The Police Presidium show in red is long gone and replaced by a modern department store. The stand-in for some shots was apparently the Rotes Rathaus, which is a few blocks away and built in a similar style, although distinguished by having a much taller tower. Another way of saying this, the facing-each-other white mohawks of the Alexanderhaus (center right above) and Berolina house (far right above) can just be picked out in the modern areal photo below near the tips of the corresponding orange arrows.
YouTube streams a Spiegel.tv documentary, "Television Under the Swastika," here. You can see a grainy film of the Twin Buildings at the very end (about minute 51), and the north building clearly has a sign for ASCHINGER's, the cafe frequently visited by our characters at the Police Presidium just a block further south. Pic:
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| click to enlarge |
Old Berlin Movie Set (Babelsburg/Potsdam). (For a 6-minute behind the scenes tour, German video, here.)
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| $10M Set - Click to Enlarge |
Night club with camera boom. It's the Moka Efti Club in the film, which was a real place in the 1920s, but is recreated within the 1920s silent film palace Delphi in the Berlin district Weissensee, found near the north edge of Prenzlauerberg and about two miles north of the Fernsehturm (tower) at Alexanderplatz:
For a Youtube version of the Zu Asche song with extensive behind-the-scenes production video clips (like the one just above), here.
Karstadt Hermannplatz. Waving red flags, Communist protesters in Kreuzberg storm past the Karstadt department store under construction (!). You might also see the ant-sized proletariat as symbolically dwarfed next to this towering temple of capitalism. The actual store, at Hermannplatz/Kreuzberg, was one of the largest department stores in the world and was completely destroyed in 1945. (Article from the remarkable website Berlin Companion; there is much later Karstadt at Hermannplatz today.)
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| Karstadt Hermannplatz, "under construction" CGI left |
The Nyssen mansion filmed in BB is actually Schoss Drachenburg. Here. (It's real location is near Bonn, e.g. near Cologne, in BB it's near Berlin.)
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| Schloss Nyssen (BB), Schloss Drachenburg (Bonn) |
Titles
See an article on "art of the title" re BB, here. I believe the "episode recaps" are variably positioned before or after the titles, and if I saw it correctly, I think there was an episode recap that merged into a couple new scenes not in the prior episode.
Call-outs to film history?
The vocabulary of film is so massive it's impossible not to imagine call-outs to other cinema in a 12 hour series like Babylon Berlin. With that acknowledged, here are some that I noticed on a second viewing of the whole series in August 2018. The Armenian mobster's hand wound and perpetual bandage - Jack Nicholson's nose bandage in Chinatown. The mobster's reliance on a psychoanalyst - the mobster's shrink in The Sopranos. Wolter's taking of endless shots to the chest in Episode 16 - see Death of Rasputin. The eventually relentless pursuit of Rath and Wolter of each other - Javert and Valjean in Les Miserables, or Ahab versus Moby Dick. The sharpshooter in the theater chandelier - Phantom of the Opera. Benka's assassination and a similar event in the Spielberg's film Munich.
Though not a call-out - they were filmed the same year and released about the same time - it's hard not to compare the underwater car sees in Babylon and in Chappaquiddick.
A footnote on the song -
There are actually at least three Youtube versions of the ZU ASCHE song; one is direct from the mini-series (including background sounds, dancing, singing along 4m47s); one is a music video which is mostly film clips edited together rapidly over the song (3m30s). But somewhere I also saw a third version that is mostly the actual TV series version but with just a few out of sequence character and scene shots cut into it (5m30s).
Footnote April 2, 2018: By now there are too many versions to count. An interesting one plays the full ASCHE song, but the visuals are primarily based on the most elaborate and beautiful CGI visual effects. Here.
Finale Episode: Train Scenes.
I believe the sound of the train, the suspenseful background music in some of those scenes, and the bass beat of Zu Asche are designed to all three refer to each other.
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Interpreting the fact that the word Hitler occurs only once in the 16-part series set in 1929, Refinery29, Ariana Romero, here. My comment based on a book I once saw by Alfred Kerr here; from 1923 to 1931 this famous Berlin theater critic mentioned Hitler's name 5 times, typically in the context "as crazy as a Hitler."
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Novelist Volker Kutscher, 48 in 2017, has written at least five Babylon Berlin (or Gereon Rath) novels spanning 1929-1934. He plans a few more and hopes the TV series continues at least a few more years. An English interview with the novelist, here.
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A short interview with lead actor Volker Bruch in Variety, here.
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Actress Marie Gruber, who plays police inspector Wolter's wife, died at age 62 of lung cancer in February 2018, a few months after the German premiere. German obit here. She played a woman living next door to the playwright lead character in The Lives of Others, but was best known in Germany for a 1991 comedy, Go Trabi Go, in which East Germans take their first trip to Italy in a Trabant. My short blog on her, here.
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German:
Youtube reviews include a nerdy one here (including paired clips from BB and from 1920s Weimar cinema; BB titles mimic a 1922 film), and a pair of armchair vlog reviews here and here.
German web articles. German television review in DIE ZEIT, from 12/2017, here; similarly in FAZ here; Spiegel here. A German media spat about the mention of Konrad Adenauer as mayor of Cologne in a (wild goose chase) sex scandal, here and here. Karstadt Hermannplatz (see above) gussied up for the 1936 Olympics, here. Regarding the book series, there's an elaborate Gereon Rath German website, here. A Die Welt article on the route to worldwide rights here.
An article in "World Socialist Web Site" in German, here. (Unpleased with some depictions of Communists; "Historisches Unverständnis". (Historical incomprehension. Trotski's followers were not gold smugglers!) In Berliner Morgenpost, an article on a real 1931 Berlin nightclub guidebook here.
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Charlotte as a Nancy Drew Girl Detective callback, except where it's 1929 Berlin, the character lives in a grim tenemant, works as a typist by day and as a cabaret prostitute by night.
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Pre-press (from February 2017) in Hollywood Reporter on how the series was contracted and funded.
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CGI Crowd Scene and CGI buildings (see also the 3 minute CGI video cited earlier.)
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| CGI adds crowds |
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| CGI adds buildings and upper floors |
Not from the series, but working from the original novels, a comic book edition is being produced. Also here.
A book review of Berlin Alexanderplatz, published in 1929, by Alfred Doeblin in the March 8, 2018 ECONOMIST, with link-ins to Babylon Berlin. In the early 1940s a struggling refugee, Doeblin lived in Los Angeles in a non descript small apartment near Sunset & Highland.
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Rachel McAdams and Liv Lisa Fries: Not so dissimilar.
Parting night shot:
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www.tinyurl.com/bb2018bq
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