The man in the grainy, black-and-white images in November 1918 pushing himself along a wall of the Pasewalk reserve hospital is a miserable figure. We are in the middle of the fifth and final season of “Babylon Berlin”, the series that tells of the time that made Hitler possible and, strangely, also of today.
They call him a malingerer. Like everyone in the hospital, he is traumatized by the battles in the West. The man on the wall can't see anything after the mustard gas on the Somme, he says. He doesn't want to see, says his psychiatrist Edmund Forster and diagnoses: hysterical blindness.
A sick man, but not blind. A good subject, says Forster. But full of stubbornness. During therapy, Forster suggested to the corporal that there is a God living inside of man. And this God is the will. The awakened will of God in Adolf Hitler allows him to see again and leads him to delusions of grandeur.
Everything wasn't like that - not like Hitler later described his (self-)miracle healing in "Mein Kampf" as a (political) awakening experience. Not the way Ernst Weiß tells it in his Forster novel “The Eyewitness”. It doesn't have to. “Babylon Berlin” did not revolutionize the way in which (contemporary) history is dealt with in films and novels through documentary accuracy. But because this narrative feat transforms this era, which is trembling towards its demise, into a phantasmagoria, full of disruptions, madness, glamor and disaster. And truthfulness.
“Babylon Berlin” is a swirling dance of dozens of stories and characters (fictional and historical) from the edge of a democratic volcano into the crater of dictatorship.
However, the foreseeable fall into catastrophe in the final season was also viewed with relief - the “Babylon” think tanks Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries will finally have time for non-“Babylon” films again after a good 13 years. But above all with anxiety. At the end of the fourth season, there were as many colorful threads waving loosely in the air as freshly ironed swastika flags in standard Hitler films. Tykwer and Co. allowed so many seemingly completely irrelevant characters to run around in a strangely persistent manner that in the end one would have liked to have understood their dramaturgical meaning.
The good news for all those who are worried: The finale of the “Babylon” epic is a narrative masterpiece. All circles close, all biographies come round. “Babylon Berlin” provides further proof that series are the novels of the 21st century.
The year is 1933. Hitler becomes Chancellor. In dr. A body is found in Forster's Berlin practice. There are just a few weeks until the Reichstag election. Weeks in which democracy is being driven to the wall.
It's about one file - Forster's Hitler file from Pasewalk. She could change everything if she were brought among the people. Because it doesn’t say what is in “Mein Kampf”. Because the leader would be disenchanted before he becomes leader. The hunt for the file holds everything together. Tykwer, Handloegten and Borries hang everything else on this story arc.
The last difficult waltz that Berlin dances. The Nazi takeover before the takeover - in the radio stations, in the police departments, in life. The crazy ideas of those industrial and media tycoons who supported Hitler and believe that after the election - as one of them quotes Franz von Papen, Hitler's predecessor as Reich Chancellor - they can push him against the wall if necessary, "that he will squeak" if he doesn't do what they want.
The desperate attempts to unite the self-tearing left against the real enemy are also recounted. The stories of Inspector Gereon Rath and Charlotte Ritter, who lose and find each other. The last flare-up of queerness in the Berlin clubs and how they too are being occupied by the SA.
Everything is there again. The daring cuts, the crazy equipment, the absurdity of the stories, the fades, the humor, the music. And the cast, who play as if it were about their own survival.
The horror of what is happening is etched deeper and deeper into their faces. They just can't believe it. People flee, are kidnapped, tortured, people die, the Reichstag burns - a gigantic cinematic vision. Historians will be up in arms. That may not be the truth. But it has a grandiose, overwhelming, emblematic truthfulness, with everything that its creators have created in this beacon.
“Babylon Berlin”, from September 10th, 2026 in the ARD media library, on the 19th and 25th on Erste.
