Hamburg Noir

HISTORY

Babylon Berlin

Book
Der nasse Fisch (Volker Kutscher, 2007)

Babylon Berlin (English translation, 2018)

Film
Babylon Berlin (Handloegten, Tykwer, Borries, 2017)

Just when you think film noir is history, an obscure novelist brings its roots back to life in Berlin, circa 1929. The result is a cult TV series.

In 2007, Volker Kutscher, a journalist with a background in history and philosophy, published the first of his crime novels set in Berlin during the turbulent Weimar Republic. Der nasse Fisch (literally: “The Wet Fish,” think: “The Cold Case”) tells the story of Gereon Rath, an ambitious homicide detective just transferred to Berlin and demoted to vice after a bad shooting in Cologne. As in many hardboiled detective stories, the city is a major character.

In his new position, Rath is our eyes and ears, showing how dangerous, corrupt, and crazy the German capital was in 1929. Bad vice cops use their positions to extort sex, money, and drugs in underworld nightclubs that double as whorehouses. On the streets outside, Stalinists fight Trotskyites, while SA brownshirts fight SS black caps. The police see the Communists as the bigger threat, using live ammunition against workers in May Day demonstrations. All of this just before the Wall Street Crash that brought on the Great Depression.

What’s especially frightening is that almost no one expects the daily chaos and violence to end badly. This point is made repeatedly in the book, albeit indirectly. People live day to day, without a lot of thought about tomorrow -- not unlike today.

None of the political violence in Berlin interests Rath, who maintains that he’s “just a policeman.” He’s obsessed with becoming a homicide detective again, this time under the legendary criminalist, Ernst Gennat, also known as “Budda,” who turns murder investigations into a science with a strict methodology that includes catalogues of fingerprints, photos, even hair. Like other prominent political, military, and law enforcement figures in the book, Gennat is not made up. By introducing us to real historical figures, Kutscher grounds his novel in facts that make prewar history very personal. He even has a bibliography on his website.

As the story begins, police officers discover a body floating in the Spree River. It has signs of bestial torture, which puts it on the title page of every newspaper in Berlin. Although Gennat’s homicide squad is under pressure from City Hall and the press to solve the case, they can’t even figure out the victim’s identity.

Enter Rath, who, in the course of rounding up pornographers and drug dealers, stumbles across a connection between the victim and exiled Russians who want to use smuggled gold to buy weapons for a coup back home. Ruthless gangs and paramilitary groups are after the gold and weapons as well.

Rath manipulates a pretty police stenographer named Charlotte Ritter to get inside information he can use to build his unofficial case. In the process, he falls in love with her and gets more deeply entangled in the web of underworld and political crime he’s trying to investigate. Before long, he himself becomes a suspect and is investigated by the homicide squad he’s trying to join. Ultimately, he has to choose between career and justice. Until the very end, it’s not clear which way he will go.

Rath is definitely an anti-hero. He’s a World War I deserter and career animal who looks out for number one. Ironically, his character flaws make his behavior believable. On those rare occasions when he does the right thing, he does it against his will. Like Jake Gittes in The Two Jakes, he’s “the leper with the most fingers” in town. Unlike his colleagues, many of whom are on the take or worse, he’s haunted by his conscience. He knows he’s a heel. That’s his saving grace.

Since The Wet Fish, Kutscher has relentlessly fleshed out his historical vision, writing eight more novels in the series, the latest in 2022. Somewhere along the way, he caught the attention of Babelsberg, the German equivalent of Hollywood. Located outside Berlin, Babelsberg Film Studio is where classic proto-noir films, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, were made during the Weimar Republic.

German directors had a tremendous influence on what eventually became film noir in Hollywood. This is evident just from looking at the long shadows in these films, which came from German stage lighting in the 1920s. After the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, many German authors, directors, actors, musicians, and technicians fled to Hollywood, where they turned hardboiled detective stories by American authors into noir films. (This phenomenon is well documented in Filmexil in Hollywood. The photos alone are worth the purchase price.) In effect, Babelsberg rediscovered its own film noir roots through an obscure historical novelist from Cologne.

If success has many fathers, Babylon Berlin is a spectacular success. The German public TV series (which can be seen with subtitles on Amazon Prime or Netflix, depending on your location) has three directors -- Henk Handloegten, Tom Tykwer, and Achim von Borries -- each taking over individual episodes. Together, they rewrote the story, turning up the heat on the main characters, Rath and Charlotte.

In the TV series, Rath is a shell-shocked World War I veteran who fought in the trenches and tunnels of Flanders and is now a morphine addict undergoing psychotherapy, including electroshock, in the tunnels of Berlin. His doctor is pure evil, with ties to the Armenian mafia and the Nazis. For her part, Charlotte is a homicide squad assistant who works nights in a brothel, where she runs into cops and criminals from her day job. By changing the two main characters in this way, the directors make the story much more dramatic and colorful.

The difference between Rath and Charlotte is made clear in their first encounter, which takes place in a men’s room in police headquarters, where Charlotte finds Rath shaking uncontrollably on the ground next to a toilet. (Charlotte being Charlotte, she uses the men’s room because there are more of them in the building.) After she gives Rath two vials of morphine from his jacket pocket, his shaking subsides.

They then introduce themselves, like nothing happened:

Charlotte: “I’m Charlotte Ritter.”

Rath: “Rath, Gereon.”

Charlotte: “Gereon? Where do you come from, the Middle Ages?”

Rath: “No, Cologne.”

This short boy-meets-girl exchange achieved instant cult status with German audiences.

More than any other character, Charlotte gives us a close-up look at the wild club scene of the 1920s, where cocaine use, group sex, and transvestite performers were common. One popular torch singer is an aristocratic Russian woman dressed as a man, complete with mustache, who plays the Stalinists against the Trotskyites to get her family gold back. (Her cross dressing is imitated by women in many clubs.) Another is a South American transvestite and police informant who keeps time by hitting a golden skull with a golden leg bone. Anyone who thinks human nature has changed substantially in the past century needs to visit “Moka Efti” with Charlotte.

In the TV series, Rath, played by Volker Bruch, is still the protagonist, but Charlotte steals the show. Much of this has to do with the actress. Charlotte is played by the fast-mouthed Liv Lisa Fries. In the words of her inventor, author Kutscher, Fries “is Charlotte.” As a bonus, Fries comes from Berlin, so her cheeky accent is real. (Kutscher went so far as to use phonetic spelling to replicate the Berlin dialect in the book.) Fries is believable both as a brazen young woman trying to bluff her way into the homicide squad and as a leather-clad prostitute fitting a dog collar onto a wealthy businessman in a luxurious nightclub basement before dripping hot candle wax onto his chest.

Although the sex and violence won’t shock contemporary audiences who’ve seen too much of both, the extreme poverty and filth will. We’re talking about hungry people who have no heating when it’s snowing outside -- and tubercular coughs to match. Charlotte doesn’t work as a domina for fun or self-fulfillment. She’s earning the cash needed to prevent her family from being thrown out of their ghetto apartment. Every month, she barely comes up with enough to keep the police from evicting them.

The TV series is packed with wonderful character actors. Particularly notable is Peter Kurth, who plays Rath’s immediate boss on the vice squad, the dangerously friendly Bruno Wolter, who can comfort someone convincingly and then shoot them in the head. Wolter is something of a father figure to Rath, even if the two distrust each other -- for good reason. Kurth pulls off this living lie effortlessly. He has a similar, if kinkier, relationship with Charlotte.

Honorable mention goes to Matthias Brandt, son of former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, who plays August Benda, the Jewish head of the political police division. Benda uses his position to pursue the Black Reichswehr, an illegal paramilitary organization that is trying to rearm Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty. Brandt is especially effective in this kind of role because he grew up with world leaders in his living room, something well known to his German audience. His suave, knowing irony fits the role perfectly.

The TV series is now in its fourth season, with a fifth and final season in the works. Each season is grounded in the book for which it’s named. This historical structure channels wild scenes into a coherent story. You can sit back and enjoy the chaos because you know it’s going somewhere. That somewhere isn’t “big picture” world history. It’s the fates of individual characters you’ve come to care about. You can’t ask for more.