Babylon Berlin reemerges with a triumphal fourth season

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

A handful of critics seem a little bemused by the popularity of Babylon Berlin. 

The New York Times referred to a “a small core of aficionados” and a “cult” who track “the right subreddit” and spend their time “commiserating with a Facebook friend group of the requisite sophistication,” who “would argue [it’s] the world’s best television show.”

Meanwhile, vulture.com calls Babylon Berlin “the best show you’re not watching” — that is, unless you’re “already obsessed.”

Count me among the “small core of aficionados” and one of the “already obsessed.” I’ve been avidly consuming this show since its first season way back in 2018, when the German-language neo-noir series set in the Weimar Republic came to Netflix. I hardcore binged the first three seasons, as the latter two streamed in 2019 and 2020, respectively,  but had to agonize for four years before the fourth season finally appeared in full — which it did at the end of July.

Courtesy photo.

I was so much into Babylon Berlin that I started buying the thrillers on which the series was based — the so-called “Gereon Rath mysteries,” by German journalist-turned-author Volker Kutscher. Sadly, I must report that the books are not nearly as addictive as the show, which made my four-year wait all the more difficult to endure.

So imagine my frustration when I realized that Babylon Berlin had been removed from Netflix and the entire series — including the much-awaited fourth season — transferred to something called MHz Choice. Unfortunately, that’s the only platform on which U.S. viewers can access the show, but I bit the bullet and signed up for the free seven-day trial (subscriptions are $7.99 per month). I didn’t need all seven of those days, burning through 12 episodes — each about an hour long — over the course of two sittings in the past week. Then I promptly canceled MHz.

It should be obvious by now that I am 100% the target audience for this show.

For those unfamiliar with the history on which Babylon Berlin is based, the late 1920s and early ’30s in the German capital city were a crazed melange of sex, drugs, crime, jazz, art and general socio-political experimentation. 

Broken by World War I and later the worldwide depression, Berlin lashed back with a supercharged culture of desperate decadence seldom seen before or since. Into this intoxicating mix, Babylon Berlin places traumatized war veteran and detective Gereon Rath, who navigates his own inner demons, the labyrinthine politics of his fellow officers and the sinister forces prowling the streets.

In short order, Rath falls in with prostitute Charlotte Ritter, whose intelligence and pluck eventually land her a job at police headquarters as a kind of junior officer, and later full member of the homicide squad.

The first three seasons of the show ricocheted from grotty slums to palatial Prussian castles, interrogation rooms to nightclubs, oily canals to derelict warehouses, fashion boutiques to photography studios, and more coffee shops, beer halls and bars than you can count.

The cases taken up by Rath, Ritter and their colleagues run the gamut — gambling, blackmail, smuggling, spying, revenge — but shot through them all is the spectral looming of something bigger and more terrifying: the rise of the Nazis.

Seasons 1-3 deftly allow the Nazi threat to simmer, astutely sketching the various flavors of racism, antisemitism, nationalism and militarism that swirled through Berlin before Adolf Hitler’s party alloyed them into the ferocious instrument they became.

Season 4 brings the hellbroth to a boil, with swastika-sporting brownshirts running riot through the streets, busting up the storefronts of their enemies, scrapping with their SS rivals and certain high-level elements in the police and government looking the other way for their own political reasons.

Rath (played electric angst by Volker Bruch) and Ritter (a sublime Liv Lisa Fries) must face divided loyalties laden with often deadly secrets as they doggedly try to save their beloved Babylon from totalitarian ruin.

Yes, it is “the world’s best television show.” Find it on MHz Choice, via Amazon Prime.