Babylon Berlin's final season arrives as Germany faces democratic stress test

Babylon Berlin, the German television drama that has spent thirteen years pulling viewers into the fractured glamour of 1920s Berlin, reaches its final season this week with Hitler's appointment as Reich chancellor. The timing is not accidental in its resonance, though the creators insist it is coincidental: Germany will hold a watershed state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6, the same week the series concludes, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland—a party founded around the time production began—now leads national opinion polls and could secure its first absolute majority in that election.

The show has always trafficked in a particular kind of prescience. It dramatizes the Weimar republic with unprecedented ambition, capturing both the brilliance and brittleness of a newly constructed democratic system. Its two lead characters carry the weight of that collapse: Liv Lisa Fries plays Charlotte Ritter, a working-class woman who rises from secretarial work and sex work to become Berlin's first female detective. Volker Bruch is Gereon Rath, a traumatized World War I veteran whose journey through his era's wreckage mirrors the larger political unraveling. "It's no longer a dance on the rim of the volcano," Fries said, invoking the German idiom for the 1920s explosion of avant-garde culture and sexual liberation. "We're in the volcano itself."

But the more unsettling parallel is not historical metaphor—it is the present. The AfD, an extremist, anti-constitutional party, now leads polls not just in Saxony-Anhalt but also in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where it could win decisively two weeks after the first election. In Berlin itself, it polls close to the far-left Die Linke. Bruch acknowledged the political parallels are unmissable, though he resisted simplistic equivalence. "History doesn't repeat itself that way," he said, citing an old adage. "It rhymes."

The blurred lines between the show's fictional world and actual events took on surreal dimensions during production. In November 2023, the neo-baroque Villa Adlon—where part of series three was filmed—hosted a secret meeting of AfD officials and neo-Nazis to discuss a "remigration" plan for mass deportations should the party gain power. The fifth season depicts Hitler's appointment as chancellor alongside a missing medical file that casts new light on his World War I service. Although the ending was always predetermined, watching the series has meant hoping, across fifty hours of television, that history might somehow turn another way.

Babylon Berlin reached 140 countries and helped expand the ambition of European television drama at a scale that would be nearly impossible to replicate today. Scott Roxborough, the European bureau chief of the Hollywood Reporter, noted the show emerged during a "pioneer time" when Germany invested massive resources to compete with American and British prestige television. "I think it would be almost impossible to do it nowadays unless an Apple TV or a Netflix decided to finance everything," he said, "something increasingly unlikely as streaming companies take a more cautious, profits-first approach."

Tom Tykwer, one of three creators and composer of the series' haunting theme song, resisted the notion that the show functions as a direct message to German voters. Rather, audiences have been drawn to what he called the "transformative force" of 1920s Berlin—a moment when weak governance and social upheaval created space for women, gay people, and immigrants to rewrite the rules. "That brings forth an incredible number of wonderful, positive, beautiful blossoms," he said, "but because it's so experimental, they're also destroyed again almost immediately." The fifth season revives the 1920 queer anthem Das Lila Lied, with its chorus "We're just different from the others," performed in a nightclub where cross-dressing patrons and uniformed gay SA officers mingle—a startling combination the producers say was not uncommon before the Nazi crackdown on the LGBTQ+ community.

Henk Handloegten, a fellow creator, was less circumspect about the show's political dimensions. He said he was proud to have "struck a nerve" with audiences worldwide facing political crossroads, and that he had "taken a clear political stand, even now in the final series." For him, the pressure on democracy across multiple countries where the show airs "has really motivated me," he said. "It's given me the justification to engage with this era for so long and so deeply, because I felt there was a relevance to it in today's world. And for me, in a strange way, that's political work—something we've been doing here for 13 years now." The show's exploration of how vibrant, experimental societies can collapse under the weight of political fragility has become, across its run, something more enduring than a sophisticated crime drama. It has become a mirror held up to the recurring vulnerabilities of democratic systems themselves.