If you are looking for something to watch this weekend, I highly recommend Babylon Berlin, a German television series broadcast in the United States on Netflix.
Babylon Berlin is the most expensive non-English-language television series ever made. Set in the final years of the doomed Weimar Republic, the series focuses on Gereon Rath (played by Volker Bruch), a police detective still suffering severe PTSD from his military service on the western front in 1918, and his assistant Charlotte Ritter (played by Liv Lisa Fries), a part-time prostitute and aspiring homicide detective. Bruch and Fries are absolutely superb, as are all the actors in the series.
One of the show’s major themes is the fragility of German law and democracy in the late 1920s. No movie or television series has ever done such a brilliant job of showing how World War I destabilized Europe long after the guns fell silent, creating seismic aftershocks that set the stage for the most evil regime and most devastating war of all time. The whole show is fantastic, with unforgettable characters and a storyline that provides a riveting window into late 1920s Europe.
Viewers in both Europe and North America have loved the series. On the invaluable Rotten Tomatoes website, Babylon Berlin has an off-the-charts 100% tomatometer score (the aggregate total of critics’ reviews) and a similarly impressive 93% audience score (the percentage of viewers who rated the show favorably). Those are extraordinarily high scores for any movie or television series, but especially for a non-English language production.
A couple of caveats are in order. First, the show is extremely graphic in every imaginable way. Be prepared to be shocked. Second, I recommend watching the German-language version, which has English subtitles. I don’t speak a word of German (I’m still trying to master my native tongue of English), but for me, watching the series with English subtitles kept the sense of realism that is so essential to the show. In any case Netflix allows you to choose the language.
If you are interested, here is the Babylon Berlin trailer (dubbed in English, which is the only version I can find on the Netflix website). In addition, here is a YouTube preview that includes clips of many scenes as well the haunting soundtrack.
If you do watch the series with English subtitles, there is one notable mistake in the English translation. The final Netflix episode includes a flashback to a pivotal event involving the main character (Detective Rath) when he was a German soldier in the closing days of World War I. Inexplicably, the subtitle describes the battlefield event as occurring on November 14, 1918, but that makes no sense because the war ended on November 11. However, it turns out that in the German language version, the character actually says November 4, not November 14. Somehow the Netflix translator confused the German word for 4 with the word for 14. But otherwise the English subtitles are excellent and easy to follow.
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