It’s the global hit TV series that pulled audiences straight into the chaotic hedonism of 1920s Germany, dramatising the brilliance and brittleness of a newly built democratic system with unprecedented ambition. But in the 13 years that the German makers of Babylon Berlin have worked on the show, modern democracies from the US to Hungary to South Korea have come under pressure in ways the creators say they could never have imagined when they started. Now they are preparing to unveil the fifth and final season, culminating in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the same week that Germany will face one of the biggest tests of its postwar order in a watershed state election.
The timing, they insist, is pure coincidence, but is fitting for an ambitious programme set a century ago during the Weimar republic that has always felt eerily prescient. As the team gets ready to sign off, the inexorable end of the story is now upon the familiar characters of the noirish police procedural, with its lush period sets and frisson of impending doom. Her co-star Volker Bruch is Gereon Rath, a shellshocked first world war veteran whose eventful odyssey through the trauma of his era bears a resemblance to Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey.
But the more striking parallel is Germany in 2026. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland, an extremist, anti-constitutional party founded around the same time that work on the series began, is now leading national opinion polls. On Sunday 6 September, it could win its first absolute majority in a state election, in Saxony-Anhalt, and two weeks later may beat its opponents in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
In Berlin, it is polling close to the far-left party Die Linke. With German democracy facing such a stress test, Bruch said the political “parallels” jumped out. But he resisted overly simplistic comparisons, citing an old adage: “History doesn’t repeat itself that way – it rhymes.” The blurred lines between life and art took on sometimes surreal dimensions during the course of the production.
Series three was filmed in part at the neo-baroque Villa Adlon, which in November 2023 served as the real-life venue for a secret meeting of AfD officials and neo-Nazis to discuss a “remigration” plan for mass deportations if the party came to power. Series five sees Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor, just as an medical file goes missing that casts new light on his time as a soldier in the first world war. Although it was always clear how the series would end, watching Babylon Berlin has meant hoping to the last that history would take another turn.
That poignancy transformed a sophisticated crime show into something more affecting, and perhaps more enduring. Across 50-odd hours, the show, based partly on a series of novels by Volker Kutscher, helped expand the scale and ambition of European television drama. It was the product of a “pioneer time”, he said, when Germany was willing to throw massive resources at a chance to catch up with splashy shows from the US and Britain like Breaking Bad and The Crown.
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