Babylon Berlin. L’histoire complexe de la République Weimar au-delà de son Komplex

• Main Author: Nicolas Hubé
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2020-06-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: Berlin; Weimar Komplex; First World War; Roaring Twenties; political violence; German expressionism; Weimar Republic
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/3921

On October 13, 2017, Babylon Berlin, a new TV series was broadcasted in two seasons of eight episodes each on the Sky 1, a channel of the pay-TV-company Sky Deutschland. A year later, the series is available in clear on the first public German channel, the ARD; and in France, on Canal +. This series is part of an interesting television moment, renewing the relationship of TV-producer to the German national history. The series is in fact not primarily about the Nazism narrative. Like others TV-series (Deutschland 83 and 86 or Ku'Damm 56 and 59), it is about a moment in German history, taken in its social complexity and specific temporality, inverting the common national narrative of the period. Babylon Berlin gets rid of the Weimar Komplex that marked the historiography after 1945 and tackles the collective memories of the Weimar Republic and the First World War. The story of a police action in Berlin in 1929 is not the announcement of the future success of the National Socialists, but addresses the complexity of political struggles, the effects of the First World War on socialization and political memories as the social transformations of urban modernity in Berlin. The script makes the choice of a renewed historiography. The Weimar Republic is re-articulated to its own temporality and not directed towards its end. The memory of the Great War is omnipresent and unsuspectingly discussed in relation to a "nationalist" reading. It structures oppositions as much as it shapes the protagonists of the series. Moreover, the series does not remain confined to politics. It address the social history of the Berlin metropolis through the cinematographic and cultural imaginary, giving it a reality effect.