Babylon Berlin & Police Procedurals Now
A Modest Reckoning Between Fans
Vice & Homicide: the chocolate & peanut butter of Babylon Berlin
What a difference a couple of weeks and untold quantities of tear gas and rubber bullets make. Dame Sophie and Returning Guest Editor/Radiantly Hilarious & Insightful Gem Kate Racculia started watching the German crime drama Babylon Berlin in March as a birthday gift to our friend Kathryn VanArendonk, who has been hollering eloquently about its excellence for a couple of years now. Conveniently, because the show is subtitled, fast-paced, engrossing, and visually splendid, it’s one that we had to pay full and exclusive attention to while viewing. Perfect, in other words, for putting our minds on a little vacation during quarantine. (Fair warning: we’re going to get quite spoilery throughout this issue.)
Part of what we both love so much about Babylon Berlin is its thematic and historical richness: set in Berlin in 1929, approaching what contemporary viewers will recognize as the end of the Weimar Republic, across three seasons and 28 episodes so far, the show plunges viewers into a dizzying storytelling buffet. It’s a murder mystery; it’s a lavish period piece; it’s a series about clever, resourceful strivers working their way into a power structure from the margins and trying to reshape it as they go; it’s about the long-ranging societal impact of war on the psyche of individuals and nations; it’s about the crushing historical inevitability of the rise of Nazism as it prepares to sweep away all of the fragile liberality and openness of Post-WWI Germany and other European societies. It’s also about living -- messily, beautifully, vengefully, just about every adverb you can think of -- while you can, because you could accidentally poison yourself with pesticide gas when you’re trying to open a train cargo wagon that you think is full of gold that you and your beautiful but unreliable drag king lover want to give to your good buddy Leon Trotsky over in Istanbul. Just to pull an example out of thin air.
We’ve been co-writing a sprightly deep dive into the show and its many high-appeal entry points for the last month. Initially, we thought it would just be a wildly enthusiastic guide to a show we have been giddily texting about for weeks. Now, we’re also reckoning with Babylon Berlin as part of a broader, extremely necessary cultural conversation about how we think about police officers and policing practice due to all of the cop-positive tv shows we’ve been watching for decades. Consequently, we’re going to publish our guide to the dazzling, horny spectacle of Babylon Berlin as a bonus issue next Wednesday.
Sophie: so, Kathryn wrote a really insightful piece this week -- and, whew, seeing the list of shows there, counting up the ones I’ve watched and loved and steeped in since my Mom introduced me to Sherlock Holmes way back when really made me sit with what soaking in all those stories sympathetic to or told directly from the police’s perspective have done to my brain. This quote in particular keeps rolling around in my mind, right alongside my horror at footage of cops all around the country violently escalating and retaliating against peaceful protestors who they are sworn to protect and serve: “The overwhelming mountain of cop shows amounts to a decades-long cultural education in who deserves attention, and whose perspective counts most. In stories of American crime, TV teaches us that cops are the characters we should care about.” Is this a circle we can square, with regard to Babylon Berlin in particular?
Kate: I really don’t know. Babylon Berlin is a detective show (among...many other things) that centers the perspectives of police as its primary protagonists: Gereon Rath, inspector from Cologne. Bruno Wolter, his new partner on the Berlin PD’s vice squad. Charlotte Ritter, temp stenographer and aspiring first woman in the homicide division. Even secondary characters who are somewhat outsidery, like August Benda and Reinhold Gräf, are affiliated with the institution of policing--as the Jewish head of the Berlin political police and gay police photographer, respectively. We know this world, and this structure; we are intimately familiar with how these stories are told.
I love detective stories. I love them. (I freaking write mysteries.) [Ed note: she does! They’re great & you should read them!] If a sleuth is solving a crime, basically from the womb on out I was into it (the same way--and I don’t frame it this way to make light--I was born into a world of whiteness: white as the norm, white as the standard, white as the ideal). My tastes ran to amateur sleuths, because that was where I was going to find women protagonists, but of course Jessica Fletcher worked with the police. To Murder, She Wrote’s credit, the police are hardly universally valorized. If they’re not being outright sexist, they discount her contributions and instincts as trivial, silly, not to be taken seriously, and the series regulars are genial or bumbling (which is its own thing--defanging the very real power of a police force over its citizens with cute folksiness). Murder, She Wrote’s natural subversiveness is the subversiveness of all amateur detective stories, inasmuch as it supposes that the dominant systems dedicated to justice and order are locked in to ways of thinking and acting that don’t always lead to true justice or solutions.
But those hierarchies persist. Jessica was not raging against the machine so much as bending it here and there where she could. If you’re white, and deeply acclimatized to seeing your life reflected as the dominant norm in the world, you have to work to uncover these hierarchies. You have to sleuth. You have to be a goddamn amateur detective all day, every day, to make the air around you visible, and you’re not solving “the murder” so much as the crime of the system, and how it is designed to oppress.
Sophie: “The crime of the system” is a very precise and apt summation of Babylon Berlin’s command of noir as not just genre but worldview, which it then regularly subverts. Unlike other noir classics -- Chinatown and L.A. Confidential leap immediately to mind for me -- Babylon Berlin is less nihilistic. In a classic noir, Inspector Gereon Rath’s repeated insistence on being just a simple policeman would be accepted as a reasonable response to a power structure intent on protecting its own authority at the cost of everything and everyone else. This man is bone-weary, he’s struggling with self-medicating and PTSD, and he is almost too emotionally constipated to function. He’s also from a very well-to-do and conservative family and is only on loan from the Cologne Police Department’s vice squad to resolve a blackmail case for his father’s best friend, the mayor. He has his assignment, and he’s going to complete it and get right home, thanks!
But Assistant Inspector (and Gereon’s devastatingly slow-burn love interest) Charlotte Ritter, thanks to having grown up poor and routinely relying on sex work to make ends meet for her family, has a completely different approach. While Gereon very stolidly can see only the...crime? trees?? surrounding them, she sees an entire biome of both people and institutions. Lotte’s status as an outsider gives her insights Gereon relies on as the pair synthesize a new professional and personal partnership. She refuses to let Gereon off the hook when he slouches into complicity with the seamier aspects of police work, however much she wants to smoosh her face onto his face. (Which is a lot, and which he reciprocates. More on the delights of longing next week, I promise!)
Kate: Sophie, I love how you’re enacting another one of the show’s great strengths: the power of WAITING. Regardless--in the world of Babylon Berlin, no one’s hands are clean. There is no grand design for the Lone Great Detective to discover; there are no parlor rooms with all the suspects gathered. The call is coming from inside the police’s own house, in the form of regressive ideology, unyielding ego, outright pettiness. Gereon’s idea of himself as “a simple policeman,” his willful self-absolution of any broader responsibility or awareness--compared with Lotte’s much greater perspective and clarity--makes him complicit in the system of active harm. And the show knows that. And dramatizes that. The institution of policing is a critical part of the apparatus of the rising fascist state.
Lotte’s arc as an individual ends up feeling like a shot of radical optimism into the arm of noir. She has little legal power at the beginning of the series, by simple virtue of being poor and a woman, but through persistently relying on her own instincts and abilities (often aided by the fact that no one else sees her as having any), she not only survives but enacts change. True, she’s imperiled more than one would like--she gets Dana Scully-ed quite a bit, with Gereon coming to her aid. But her character isn’t a paragon of impossible virtue, or of winking pluckiness. She’s a human who makes mistakes and feels pain but also knows release and joy. She is the developing moral center of the Babylon Berlin universe.
Sophie: Always, and with increasing intensity and insight, particularly when she works alongside the deliciously righteous attorney Hans Litten (based on the historical Hans Litten, a person everyone should know more about, what an icon!). In the final episode of Season 3, Lotte is prevented from halting the unjust execution of her friend Greta, who was ensnared in an assassination plot by her fake Communist/actual Nazi boyfriend Fritz. At Greta’s graveside, she gently tosses a flower on the sack holding Greta’s body and tells Gereon that they, and by extension the entire Berlin Police Department, are responsible for Greta’s death, saying “we’re to blame. We arrested, questioned, and sentenced her.” I’ll be very curious to see how the show continues to develop and use her increasing awareness of how power is wielded, where she can make a difference, and where the hard limits of her own power and influence are.
Which is kind of where we are now, both with the show, and with our present historical moment. As we finish preparing this issue for publication, we are wrapping up a week when the President threatened to send troops to cities across the country to quell demonstrations against police brutality and the New York Times published an op-ed from a sitting U.S. Senator suggesting that a military crackdown on protests was just fine, actually. We feel dread and unease and fear every day. We know there’s only so much we can do day by day, and we also know we have to fortify and sustain ourselves for what’s next, whatever that turns out to be, for however long it turns out to be. As it was in 1929, so it is in 2020 -- the stakes are almost too high to measure, and yet we must try, and to insist on joy alongside the terror and grief.
The cracks and baked-in inequities in our society have never been more visible and revolting to more people than they are right now. We have an obligation to approach all culture with a more thoughtful and critical eye: to become amateur detectives ourselves, to leverage our own outsiderness wherever possible to interrogate the stories that become larger narratives. To make the invisible air visible. To recognize, and use our collective power and privilege to demand better. And in some cases, to decide that there are shows and stories we’re just not going to consume anymore.
We think Babylon Berlin is worth every moment of critical viewing, and look forward to sharing more about that next week.
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