TELEVISION / The Brutal Brilliance of Babylon Berlin / Corey Paige
Image © X-Filme Creative Pool | SKY Deutschland
Babylon Berlin is set in Berlin when it was the center of the world for brassy jazz, exquisite drinking, all night dancing, artistic expression, and breathtaking sex. All of it happening as the worst imaginable nightmares are waiting for them right around the corner.
The writers created the show to explore the question of how people become Nazis.
Because none of the original Nazis were born that way. Fascism didn’t exist when they were growing up. So why were so many people willing to give up democracy for authoritarianism? What allowed cab drivers and tailors to start forcing women and children into gas chambers?
The answer can be found in a poem written fifteen years before Hitler made himself chancellor. In “The Second Coming”, W.B. Yeats, writes:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
But how exactly does that happen? What claws and rips away the center enough to allow the best of us to look the other way as the darkest nightmares march in to swallow us whole?
Many people believe democracy only survived Trump because he wasn’t smart enough to pull off authoritarian rule. I think the more pertinent reason was too many of us still felt like we had something to lose if the system was allowed to collapse. If that ever changes, it’s lights out.
What if there are no vaccines for the next pandemic? What if the next financial crisis plunges the world into an end of times depression? What if M.I.T. is right and the next version of AI will destroy 300 million jobs, rendering consultants, managers, lawyers, teachers, writers, and almost everyone else hopelessly obsolete. Or what happens next year if the current House of Representatives uses trumped-up charges of voter fraud to refuse to certify the duly elected president, preferring instead to march their preferred demagogue into the White House?
Most of us really don’t want to consider such dystopian possibilities right now. We survived Trump and the pandemic, now it’s time to finally exhale and start enjoying life again.
You know who else was thinking that?
The characters in Babylon Berlin.
Can you blame them? They just survived a world war, the Spanish Flu Pandemic, plus the Great Depression. No wonder they all felt like they needed to chill a bit.
And this is part of what makes the show so hard to watch. The characters we come to fall in love with all exist in at least one of the following categories: Jewish, gay, artist, female, reporter, intellectual, centrist politician. There’s not going to be a lot of happy endings for any of them.
That’s also what makes the show so hypnotically beautiful.
The characters aren’t stupid. They know everything they love and cherish will probably soon be ripped away. The unthinkable terror is rushing straight at them. That makes them live for each moment, hanging on as long as they can to the full aching experience of life.
It’s also not an easy show for the actors to make. In an interview with The Guardian, one of the stars, Liv Lisa Fries asks, “Why do I do this when I can be doing a comedy or something?”
The answer she gives is why it’s so incredibly important for us all to be watching this show.
“It’s because things like this are still happening,” Fries explains. “It’s so insane and terribly sad that it’s real. When you realize how many people were there [Berlin] working creatively . . . and the role of women started to really develop. So, it’s the beginning of something. But then it’s stopped so aggressively.”
And that might very well be our fate if we all continue to focus on living our lives, trusting that someone else will be there to stop the worst among us bursting with their hateful intensity.
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The first 3 seasons of Babylon Berlin can be found on Netflix. The fourth season was released in Europe and will soon be available in the US.
Corey Paige is a fierce Californian with an MFA from UCLA. He lives in Hermosa Beach with his poet wife and hooligan dog. You can find his essays in JAKE, Drunk Monkeys and The Hooghly Review. Forthcoming: Five Minutes.
