Weimar Lockdown

Babylon Berlin and Nostalgia

I hope the rest of you have been fulfilling your lockdown plans to catch up on reading. I’ve been doing something very unusual for me: I started a new TV show and actually kept watching.

About halfway through the second season of Babylon Berlin, a plane almost crashes into some trees. The plane is a cutting-edge prototype, which means it doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to work. But if Babylon Berlin conveys anything clearly, it’s that very few things in Germany in 1929 worked the way they were supposed to work.

The overarching story of the Weimar Republic is familiar: A nascent “democracy” assailed from the left and the right, in the midst of an economic crisis and the ambient trauma of a disastrous war. Babylon Berlin uses this frame to stage a noir, showing us individual operators largely out for themselves in a broken system. You have the gallantly crusading Good Cop, the wild-boar Bad Cop, the striving lower-class young woman triangulating between sex work, sleuthing and a defeating home life, the undercover NKVD operatives, the proto-Nazis in their army uniforms.

Keep an eye on those nationalists and their putsches, we’re always thinking—the show knows that we know what happens next. Indeed, what Babylon Berlin most excels at is showing us that this system can’t go on as it has for much longer, not because of some natural collapse, but because people are organizing and gathering power to remake it the way they want. And despite the dedication and bravery of Berlin’s communists, we all know who wins that struggle.

Given that its setting means Babylon Berlin is forever winking at those few of us who have heard of Hitler, the show makes a cunning move: The story focuses on characters who are invested in everything in this teetering society staying the same. By the end of the second season, the two most important surviving characters are both police officers. The Berlin police are always invoking their desire to preserve “social democracy.” A contemporary viewer is left asking, what social democracy? It’s not as if we see evidence of a strong welfare state or any centralized effort to ameliorate the dire economic conditions that are made viscerally real for us. The cops work to suppress a nationalist military coup, but they also fatally open fire on communist demonstrators.

In Babylon Berlin, the police force seems to be trying to will into existence a kind of centrist liberal democracy that no one else in the story is even particularly wishing for, let alone experiencing. When Gereon Rath—the opiate-swilling Good Cop and the show’s protagonist—is asked by a Soviet spy why he doesn’t share the patriotism of the nationalists, he says, “I work for the police.” That is, our hero works on behalf of an idea of order and continuity, while the reality is all chaos and change. The police want to dictate the future, but they don’t even understand the present.

I’m not here to solemnly inform you that we live in the Weimar Republic. For all of our problems, for all of the unprecedented strangeness of life in a pandemic, we don’t—at least not exactly. That’s not a statement about the future or the present so much as a statement about the past. We can dramatize Weimar Berlin in certain powerful ways precisely because we do know what happens next.

None of us know exactly what comes next right now, but we do remember what was different just a few weeks ago. For those of us who have seen dramatic changes in daily life, nostalgia is a constant companion. I miss live sports, I miss going to coffee shops and bars. I already remember these things as being better than they probably were.

My nostalgia gets weird. When I watch a show that’s designed to make me fall in love with a frenetically decadent Berlin alleged to have existed several decades before I was born, I miss things I’ve never experienced. I never went to a vast cabaret show in an underground bunker in the Weimar Republic, but I miss the sense that I could have. I tell myself I might have been character in a better story than the one I currently find myself struggling to narrate. I start to convince myself that I had infinitely more control over my life once upon a time, and that may be the falsest nostalgia of all.

I had complicated feelings about that airplane that almost crashed in Babylon Berlin. It’s a foreseeable peril. We’ve already encountered the failings of medicine, sanitation, industrial safety, and above all governance in a story committed to rendering the dangerous details of life almost a century ago; why would we expect a ride on an airplane to go smoothly? The plane clears the trees and takes off, albeit barely. Later in the flight, lightning strikes the fuselage and the engines go dead for a minute or two. The pilot has to do a nosedive to unstick whatever mechanism will let the copilot manually restart the propellers. In the back of the plane, two police officers who have never flown before are throwing up and losing their minds. This is unprecedented for them, and it is terrifying.

Terror wasn’t what I felt watching that scene. Partly because I knew the plane couldn’t crash—our hero was on board, and there were more episodes to come. But also, I started to wonder what it would be like to be on that flight. I started to wonder when I’d next get to board an airplane, and where I’d be going. It’s impossible to say.