Babylon Berlin: How a TV Series Is Inspiring Scholars

Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024) contains twelve chapters from different scholars-as well as an introduction coauthored by Smith and Baer-highlighting aspects of the show, set during the last years of Germany's Weimar Republic, and its unique contribution to contemporary culture. Baer recently joined Smith for a campus book launch event in the Bowdoin College Library.

Smith is a scholar of German literature, culture, gender, and sexuality, and Jewish studies from the late nineteenth century to today. Her current research focuses on the cultural legacy of the Weimar Republic, the period after the First World War when Germany was governed as a constitutional democracy for the first time in its history. This was brought to an end by the rise to power of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler in 1933.

It's a subject Smith also visits in her upcoming book, The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin: Twenty-First-Century Literature, Media, and Visual Culture, due to be published by Camden House / Boydell & Brewer at the end of 2024.

She was, therefore, keen to check out the television series Babylon Berlin when it first appeared in 2017. "I was very excited to see a large-scale cinematic production on streaming television that focused on the Weimar Republic."

It's a period of German history that has been somewhat neglected in popular media, said Smith. Set during the latter years of the Republic, Babylon Berlin is a German-made "neo-noir" television series focusing on the exploits of police inspector Gereon Rath, an outsider from Cologne, and an amateur detective who also happens to be a woman.

"I was especially excited because the show's main character is a type of woman that I've written about since I started my academic career," added Smith. Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter is a police clerk and aspiring detective at the start of the series, engaging in sex work at night to support her impoverished family.

Ritter's character really holds a mirror up to the many aspects that encompass Weimar Germany, a tumultuous episode in German history, noted Smith. "The country could have gone in any direction-could have become a communist state, could have lapsed into another type of authoritarian regime-but Germany became democratic for thirteen years, for the first time in its history."