Babylon America
The dazzling Netflix series is a warning to a crumbling America
I have now completed the first three seasons of Babylon Berlin, the Netflix show based in post-World War I Germany. It is without a doubt one of the best television shows I have ever seen.
It is also directly, or indirectly, sending a message to the United States of America: fix your problems or you will one day be like Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s under the Nazis.
I won’t post spoiler alerts here but the series focuses upon the life and struggle of a semi-righteous police detective named Gereon Rath. A mystery series, it is inspired and guided thematically by the novels of Volker Kutscher, the first of which is named after the first novel in the series, Babylon Berlin.
Rath is no superhero. He is a police detective and war veteran who is sensitive and caring for his fellow members of the lumpenproletariat. Most of the story is told through his daily struggles as a detective assigned to solving serious crimes usually homicides. He is surrounded by co-workers, friends, gangsters, lovers, and love interests, and other damaged persons who also struggle to live each day.
Rath’s Berlin, after the tragic loss in World War I, is in shambles. A proud country but an insecure nation looking for leadership and direction. Poverty is everywhere. Democracy is barely holding together. The democratic politicians and the Communists in Germany are fighting against the Nazi Party which is rising. The rise of the Nazis is self-evident.
Nightlife is lively and Berlin, Germany, remains an intellectual center in the world. The clubs are packed, sexuality is flaunted openly, women are liberated and are fully human. That is what is most striking and so true of German history. How did such a rich and well-developed cultural and political society turn towards Nazism?
That is the message that is still being revealed in Babylon Berlin. They want a show about life 100 years ago to speak to right now. Here’s what Tom Tykwer, one of the show’s directors and writers, said the show’s thrust about in an interview in Vulture:
“It was the ambition of the entire show, and in particular of sequences like this, to make the borders vanish that separate the periods from each other. To have these overlaps between today, and previous important pop-cultural periods — and the ’20s. This was a general headline that was guiding all creative conversation: How can we create something that merges all the periods? How can we make our time echo in the ’20s and the ’20s echo in our time?”
In a later question, Tykwer further elaborates on the cultural, political, and social threads that link those days to now:
“The party system in Germany is restructuring; actually, in all of Europe, it is, with new parties rising that have a huge influence on politics. And they usually are from the far right. It was the same back then. The sudden rise of a strong right-wing party is what will happen to the society of our show. For quite a time, the Nazis were completely ignored by the majority of society. They did not have any influence, nobody voted for them. They polled at 1.8 percent in 1929. Of course, you can’t simplify historical developments and pretend that this analogy holds for all substantial layers. We’ve lived in a very solid democracy now for more than 60 years. Back then, Germany’s political system was sort of an experiment: “Let’s see how these monarchists handle this new idea called democracy.”
It must be stressed that the show is mostly concerned with German society but the problems of German society that led to a horrific and evil period are in place today in many places, the U.S. included.
We all know the data of economic inequality. It has never been higher in the history of the U.S. The Pew Research Center reported disturbing gaps in economic inequality in America that do not bode well for the future.
America’s racial caste system is still firmly entrenched. And thanks to many factors, it has been quite volatile the last few years. There have always been hate crimes in America, racial violence, and racial inequality in America but the racial division is once again surging. The Equal Justice Initiative’s data confirms this.
This is the message screaming from Babylon Berlin’s fabulous storytelling, music, writing, and production. All conscious Americans who want to push forward and not go backward will get this message. But so far, the neoliberals, and their corporate state, those folks who have taken America way off course since 1980, continue to work against the change needed to avoid what you will see in Babylon Berlin.
Maybe what they really want is a Babylon America.