The final season of the hit TV series Babylon Berlin is taking viewers back to 1933, a period that offers a dark mirror to today's Germany. Klaus Brinkbäumer, a former executive editor at Der Spiegel, writes that while the mood is dark, the parallels between Weimar Germany and the present are limited. Yet he warns of a more subtle echo: a national narrative of failure that risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A Nation's Fear Reflected on Screen
Made by the public broadcaster ARD, Babylon Berlin has run for over 10 years, fictionalising how Germany sleepwalked into Nazism and the second world war. The fifth and final season begins in January 1933 with Adolf Hitler appointed Reichskanzler.
Watching the show 93 years after the events depicted, Brinkbäumer says he constantly wants to shout at the screen, urging the characters to kill Hitler at a dinner and prevent the Reichstag fire. The dramatists accurately describe February 1933 as the month in which German society was radically torn apart at extraordinary speed due to mistakes made by party leaders and others who could still have stopped it.
Political Timing and the AfD's Rise
The timing of the final season is apt. Babylon Berlin began streaming in 2017, the year the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) entered the Bundestag for the first time with 12.6% of the vote. Nine years on, the AfD has become the country's dominant political force. In September, it won 44% of the vote in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt and 38.3% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In the latter contest, Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU dropped to 4.9% and failed to enter the state parliament.
Despite the temptation to see parallels, Brinkbäumer argues they are not straightforward. There are not millions of desperate unemployed people on today's streets, nor paramilitary armies. There is no Versailles trauma, and the last global financial crisis was in 2008. Germany has a strong constitutional court system, powerful federal states, and has created and maintained European integration along with democratic institutions designed because of the lessons of Weimar.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Decline
The more interesting connection lies in a conviction that everything is falling apart. Germany excels at describing itself as a country in terminal decline, Brinkbäumer writes. Trains are late, bridges and streets are crumbling, schools are failing, and bureaucracy is suffocating business. He notes that Germany's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate climbed back above 3 million in September, and inflation reached 3.3%.
Brinkbäumer relates his own experience of a train from Hamburg to Tübingen delayed by two hours, which then terminated in Mannheim, forcing him to cancel his plans. He argues that the national narrative of failure has developed a disturbing relationship with reality, and that the extreme right has a brief and simple story to tell: close the borders, deport those people we don't know, ignore Brussels, stop paying Ukraine, bring back cheap Russian energy, and abolish stupid climate rules.
The danger, he concludes, is in catastrophising so much that we cease to notice resilience and progress. German angst becomes cynicism, which turns to contempt, and contempt will make the AfD's promise of destruction sound like renewal. This is not 1933 revisited, but it is a serious moment, and a good moment for a reminder that a democratic coalition needs to govern as decisively, effectively, and empathetically as it possibly can.
