Adventures in German TV: Whores of Babylon
(FYI: Spoilers galore for the first three seasons of the show as released by Ausländer Netflix.)
Babylon Berlin is peak German TV. I do not mean that Babylon Berlin is a “peak TV” show that happens to be made by German writers and directors and actors. I mean that this is the German-est German TV show I’ve ever seen. Who else could pull off this very specific combination of self-serious neo-noir storytelling and madcap self-indulgence that spawns musical numbers (plural!) and a Ghostface lookalike committing slasher-style murders (plural!)? What other nation could have produced a thespian like Lars Eidinger, then put him in these specific fits of a lifetime? What other country would stage a meet-cute outside a paternoster, a doorless elevator that’s technically a British invention but very much a German thing, and thus eternal grist for the “those wacky Germans” story mill? Wer außer den Deutschen?!!
Babylon Berlin is very German and very big and very expensive — we just can’t stop talking about how expensive it is — and it moves so quickly that it’s borderline incoherent in places but rewards rewatches. Well-executed maximalist TV really does make up for a number of modern life’s general downsides, and Babylon Berlin is maximalist TV to a T. For the most part it’s a gritty police procedural and a lavish period piece. It’s a little Boardwalk Empire-y with the crooked cops and the well-dressed robbers and the sexual libertinism and the Art Deco. I’m not the first to say it has bygone-era-of-HBO vibes, and I devoured it like I was somehow nostalgic for that bygone era instead of watching Drake & Josh most nights new episodes of The Sopranos aired.
Alas. So it goes. No matter. Every week here on CSI: Neukölln, vice and corruption win the war against vice and corruption. Leading this losing battle is Detective Gereon Rath, a twitchy idiot rat man who can nevertheless throat a cigarette, which is like a cheat code for sexual charisma. Sent to Berlin to recover evidence being used to blackmail high-ranking politicians in Cologne, Gereon’s mystery-solving misadventures in die Hauptstadt form the backbone of the show. The writers pinball him across Berlin alongside Charlotte Ritter, a street-smart typist at the department who moonlights as a prostitute and dreams of becoming a detective. Based on the budget allocated for locations, VFX, sets, and costumes alone, the world-building is the point. You could even say that Berlin is… the fourth character.
You know who else is the fourth character? Literal Hitler. Only kidding. Only not really, because this is an interwar drama and like all interwar dramas, it mines dramatic tension from the specter of inevitable doom. In other words, you know how this ends. Showrunners and creators Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, and Hendrik Handloegten know you know, so they don’t overplay their hand. Instead the Nazi problem pools at the corners of Babylon Berlin’s world. The coming terror is a slow but persistent drip, not yet the dominant current. It’s masked by good manners and excellent tailoring. It conceals the extent of its ambitions behind an amicable association with the monarchists, powerful allies now and no doubt useful idiots later. After all, the old guard always rolls over when the time comes, and the ones who don’t can be easily discarded.
The Nazis, however, are not the lone power brokers in Babylon Berlin, nor are they its central focus. Babylon Berlin’s central concerns, rather, are sex and violence. The show’s fixation on and relentless pairing of sex and violence help drive its plot and define its psychoanalytic bent, the latter embodied in a mysterious hypnotist who drops into episodes to drag PTSD-addled Gereon through the trenches of his subconscious. And believe you me, Gereon is an absolute headcase. Just a walking car crash of war trauma and daddy issues. Mental state held together with nothing but chewing gum and duct tape and morphine. If this show had a TikTok fandom, which it inexplicably does not, there would be a video of someone pretending to be his therapist while dancing to “Major Bag Alert.”
Let’s do a little trauma cataloging. As a child, Gereon’s father dismisses him as weak-willed and insurmountably inferior to his older brother Anno. His mother is acknowledged to have died of a broken heart from Anno’s battlefield disappearance and, by extension, the return of the “wrong son.” Gereon is only able to cut ties with his father after watching footage of him submit sexually to two dominatrices, the figurative castration imminent. In the single negative that leads Gereon to the film reel containing this scene, his father’s face is scratched out. Few seasons of TV hinge so forcefully on the symbolic castration and obliteration of the father figure; few non-soaps deal so directly with repressed memories and the subconscious. The surreal dream sequences in which Gereon stumbles down subterranean tunnels pursued by a faceless figure feel a little Hannibal-esque both aesthetically and thematically, although I don’t think Gereon and the hypnotist are gay for each other the way Hannibal and Will are because, uh, gross. (I’m avoiding the spoiler here. Watch the season one finale before you cancel me.)
Somewhat unsurprisingly, an insatiable id powers Babylon Berlin. This id has gravity. Greed is rampant. The desire for uninhibited power, kinky sex, and lavish wealth dominates. Criminal police director Ernst Gennat is a self-confessed glutton, and presents the latest crime statistics to the press organized into the seven deadly sins. The show uses snake-like imagery to suggest something sinister lurking beneath the surface, lying in wait in the collective subconscious. A freight train holding a single car filled with smuggled gold and enough poison gas to eliminate the urban population sits coiled and waiting to strike in Anhalter Bahnhof, and draws every major character into its orbit. The writers even manifest a monstrous snake slithering under a sewer grate in the season three finale. Gereon’s imagining it, of course, but the not-so-subtle meaning is evident.
Speaking of things that aren’t subtle in Babylon Berlin, sex is one the show’s most reliable agents of chaos and despair. It’s regularly paired with violence, and almost always accompanied by taboo, discord, despair, or scandal. Love and desire are largely unnecessary. Lots of characters have sex, but few do it purely for pleasure. Drag king and theremin-playing girlboss Svetlana fucks people she deems useful to advancing her schemes. Fritz seduces and fucks Greta to trick her into helping him assassinate political police chief August Benda, who employs her as a housemaid. The clientele at Moka Efti’s subterranean sex dungeon aren’t asking Charlotte for tender missionary. The first time we see her service a john, she chains their neck collars together and prepares to drip hot candle wax on his bare abdomen. No one smiles.
Charlotte is a useful window into the show’s sexual politics because she exists at the nexus of the show’s two worlds and moves with comparative freedom through both the underground and law enforcement HQ. She works as a prostitute and a typist for the vice cops. For Charlotte, sex is mostly a means to an end, an unsavory but effective backstop that keeps her out of abject poverty. It also keeps Bruno Wolter, Gereon’s partner and her superior, from revealing her sex work to the rest of the department and torpedoing her future. She spares a kiss for the cute coroner intern, but she never once fucks someone because she wants to fuck them. In other words, Charlotte fucks for business, not pleasure.
Gereon, on the other hand, has lots of sex for pleasure, most of it with Helga. His relationship with Helga is necessarily tainted; he’s as subject to Babylon Berlin’s vicious combining of sex, discord, and violence as anyone else. Helga is his sister-in-law and Anno’s war widow, although their illicit affair precedes Anno’s disappearance. The show treats their pairing mercilessly, condemning their shared betrayal of Anno through the inconvenient presence of Moritz, Helga’s son and Gereon’s nephew.
Moritz is the fly in the Gereon-Helga ointment. He isn’t afraid of Gereon, and he refuses to believe his father is dead when it would be much more convenient if everyone got on board with that line. He’s a huge cockblock, which the adults are not very mature about. He’s also a bit of a chaos goblin, even before he discovers shooting things with the proto-Hitler Youth kids is way more fun than raking leaves with your church group. (When this happens, Gereon surprisingly has the presence of mind to call Helga, by then his ex, and mention that her son is getting a little aggro about the Jews lately and maybe she should look into that? You did it, Gereon! You’re the Dad’s brother who slept with Mom of the year!)
Sex comes at a price and it comes in a package deal with violence, even for Babylon Berlin’s happiest couple. Reunited for the first time since Gereon’s departure to Berlin, Helga and Gereon sneak a few covert kisses while Moritz and Wolter ogle a war rifle in the next room. When Gereon and Helga join them, Mortiz swings the barrel in Gereon’s direction. Later on, when Moritz catches them in bed together — the show’s persistent Freudian fixation can always be depended upon!— and confronts them, Helga deflects by telling Moritz that his father has been declared officially dead. Sex in Babylon Berlin is bought and paid for literally and figuratively, and it’s tied to death and violence and discord. No happy couple discount.
In fact, no happy couples allowed. The machinery of the show tends to dismantle them, and the bitter end of Gereon and Helga’s relationship is indicated primarily through the demise of their sexual chemistry. When Helga initiates one morning as Gereon leaves for work, Gereon starts by taking her from behind — a notable first for them — then flips her around to jackhammer away. A lamp teeters off a table and onto her head; he comes with a grunt. His newfound sexual aggression upends Helga’s vision of their shared future. She grasps for it: “Weren’t we going to get married?” she asks. He closes the door in her face.
When Babylon Berlin dismantles a relationship, it goes all the way. Helga leaves Gereon and reverts to her maiden name, then discovers she’s pregnant. The violence is implied and overt here, as it’s possible she conceived during their final unhappy sexual encounter, and she tells him that she’s pregnant while he lies in a hospital bed recovering from serious injuries of his own. (He takes this very well and responds by basically calling her a whore.) But it ain’t over ’til it’s over on Babylon Berlin, and this relationship’s parting shot is nothing less than a grisly home abortion.
Given the rather brutal rules of the game, Tykwer, von Boories, and Handloegten take care to inch their central couple together. Gereon and Charlotte maintain near-Downton Abbey levels of loaded chastity, flitting between ‘will they or won’t they’ and ‘they don’t realize how in love with each other they are’ tropes. Would-be romantic gestures more serious than a touch or a dance are cloaked in plausible deniability. Gereon holds Charlotte for the first time because she’s distraught over the murder of her friend and colleague Stephan Jänicke. Their first “kiss” is really a mouth-to-mouth air transfer, since it happens while Charlotte is trapped underwater.
Some of this is standard-issue ship-tease. Keeping a couple at arm’s length and above the belt is a classic romance tactic. Still it makes for an intriguing contrast with the nature of the sex Charlotte has for money. Babylon Berlin likes to play with the notion of chastity and the connection (or lack thereof) between sex and desire, so it’s no accident that they relegate her and Gereon’s romance to PG territory. There’s an odd dynamic at work within Charlotte’s character and her profession(s), one in which only the whore is pure.
During the early years of the interwar period, a number of virtually autonomous volunteer armies referred to collectively as the Freikorps fought various communist, nationalist, and working class groups across Germany and Eastern Europe. Many were veterans of the First World War. They were well-paid but motivated by more than money. Although they abhorred the terms of surrender imposed on Germany by the Allied Powers, they blamed Germany’s actual military defeat on their countrymen, who they believed had proven cowardly under fire or, in the case of the communists and socialists, ideologically disloyal to the national cause to the point of undermining it.
From this mentality sprung a deep resentment of proletarian-led political organizations and a very specific brand of revulsion towards women. In Male Fantasies, a sweeping analysis of Freikorps literature and notions of gender, German theorist Klaus Theweleit partially attributes Freikorps soldiers’ disdain for women to their inherent inability to relate to the experience of war. War was the great and self-evident purpose of the so-called soldier male’s life, and women didn’t wage it. Women’s ignorance of the brotherhood of battle made them untrustworthy and remote; their function within and attachment to a nation-building project contingent on war-making was indirect and marginal at best. This meant women were an uncontrolled variable, and this made women a threat.
If women were unattached to war-making and nation-building, then Freikorps (and monarchist, and Nazi) men were committed to the cause, body and soul. In Freikorps literature, Theweleit perceives the German soldier male’s sexual prowess as inseperable from his commitment to the German nation-building process. The soldier male’s “self-esteem is dependent on the status of Germany, not on his actual relationship with a woman,” he writes in his analysis of Thor Goote’s 1935 novel Comrade Berthold. The titular character harbors a “conviction that only a German war victory, or at least a victory over the republic, will enable soldiers to become lovers and husbands,” while his sexuality “is so closely bound up with concepts like ‘fatherland’ and ‘nation,’ [that] these concepts must be intimately related to the man’s body and its ability to make love to women.”
By the late 1920s when Babylon Berlin picks up, many Freikorps soliders had successfully transitioned into the SA (or “brownshirts”), the Nazi Party’s first official paramilitary unit. They brought with them arguably the most powerful male fantasy of the interwar period: a renewed Germany forged in the fires of war. The sheer scale of this imagined future and the nation-building process was well-suited to divert male sexual energy towards the subjugation of all enemies of its progress, pro-democracy types among them. The men of the Freikorps-turned-SA believed that this fantasy and its sexual component was exclusive to their sex. They were largely right.
Female sexuality has little use for such diversions. It feels no inherent deference or duty to an external nation-building process because it has no use for it. All creation processes ultimately pale in comparison to the one that is inextricable from female sexuality. The inherent generative function within female sexuality renders male’s sexual slavishness to a nation-building process quaint, even pitiful, were it not so destructive.
However we explain women’s historical distance and exclusion from nation-building efforts throughout history, it has had a strange and specific effect. Femininity retains “a special malleability under patriarchy,” argues Theweleit, since “[women] have never been the direct agents” of “dominant historical processes.” This malleability and exclusion has the unintended effect, perhaps, of liberating women from institutional allegiances that feel natural and binding to men. It enables them to see clearly.
The women of Babylon Berlin are its truth tellers. They’re a threat to the male order. Standing over the bodies of two unarmed women shot by riot police on May Day, communist leader Dr. Völker skewers Gereon and Wolter: “The blood is not even dry yet and you’re already covering it up.” In the prison graveyard following Greta’s execution for an assassination plot in which she was just a useful pawn and the fall guy, Charlotte tells Gereon, “We’re to blame. We arrested, questioned, and sentenced her.”
The men of Babylon Berlin have no trouble doing the mental gymnastics and perjurious testimony required to un-implicate themselves and protect their brotherhoods. Testifying as a witness against the cops who shot the unarmed women, Gereon lies to protect the department. Political police chief August Benda, otherwise a key player in the campaign against high-level corruption and treason, encourages it. So do other men at the department. When Gereon, Benda, and the police close in on the power players behind the illegal rearmament of the Reichswehr, none other than the Reichspräsident steps in to thwart the investigation.
Their women counterparts simply can’t relate to this, nor do they want to. Charlotte names and shames the police for its role in Greta’s death, and she works tirelessly beforehand to obtain the stay of execution. Her moral convictions outstrip her attachment to the police department. On trial for Benda’s murder, Greta attempts to expose the Nazis who planned the assassination. She only lies after the life of her baby son is threatened. Svetlana is a paragon of self-interest who, despite her affection for Trotskyist revolutionary Alexej Kardakov, never loses sight of her goal to smuggle her family’s gold out of Russia. She’s a double agent because it suits her plan to be one, and no amount of revolutionary fervor will convince her otherwise. She kills her comrades the moment it becomes expedient for her to do so, and she doesn’t hesitate.
This lack of attachment, like much of Babylon Berlin, is morally complex. This is a show like many other cop shows that doesn’t deny the efficacy of roughing up a suspect. Charlotte loves to dabble in breaking and entering when she feels it serves a higher investigative cause. But the women of Babylon Berlin, with their own distinct visions of the future unimpeded by the attachments of the men, have a way of straightening the show’s moral compass, or at least reminding the men it exists. We did this. We arrested, questioned, and sentenced her. Charlotte sees clearly because she’s not a brother cop (as her male colleagues constantly remind her). She lacks their attachment to the cause. She refuses to sacrifice her ethics, her loyalty to Greta, or her humanity to its maintenance and protection.
In other words, only the whore is pure.
So who is the whore of Babylon?
Is it Charlotte, who has sex with men for money? Is it Svetlana, who screws who she has to in order to get what she wants? Is it Helga, who lands in Alfred Nyssen’s good graces and his luxurious hotel suite after breaking up with her missing husband’s brother? (Gereon certainly seems to think so.) Is it Elisabeth Behnke, the war widow and landlady who crushes on Gereon for a few episodes and shoots her shot when he comes home tipsy and horny? Is it Greta, who had her son out of wedlock and gave him away but kept the ghastly C-section scar? Is it Charlotte’s mother, who dies from syphilis contracted during a short-lived affair years earlier? Is it Charlotte’s older sister, who married her abusive husband because he got her pregnant? (It’s remarkable how even the sex these women had years prior to the start of the show is paid for in suffering after the fact.)
Most of these women are derided as whores, either directly or through implication. By Male Fantasies’ metrics, they’re all whores. In Freikorps literature, “‘whores’ and ‘working class women’ are hard to tell apart,” and any woman who isn’t a virgin or a nameless wife sequestered at home is functionally a whore. Women, especially working class women, out in the world are whores, and these whores are a real threat to the established order and the imagined future.
The distinctions between whore, working class, and communist are often muddled when attached to a woman in Freikorps literature. These categories combine to create a monstrous creature capable of anything. “The sexuality of the proletarian woman/gun slinging whore/communist is out to castrate and shred men to pieces,” Theweleit writes. These women present an “image of terrifying sexual potency,” encompassing “a horror that is in fact unnameable in the language of soldier males.” In the soldier male imagination, women who do not “conform to any of the ‘good woman’ images are automatically seen as prostitutes, as the vehicle of ‘urges’… and out to castrate.” And a whore is “footloose, powerful, dangerous — especially in times of disintegrating political ‘order.’”
By this metric, virtually every adult woman character of any real importance in Babylon Berlin is a whore. These are freewheeling and self-possessed women in a time of disintegrating political ‘order.’ These are women more interested in pursuing their own ambitions than hanging at the fringes of the nation-building projects so absorbing to their male peers. These are women who use sex for their own ends and do so without apology. These are women who are trying to get by and have no time for extracurriculars. What unites the women of Babylon Berlin is a collective refusal to conform to the contours of the show’s various male fantasies, be it the preservation of the republic, a National Socialist takeover, a Trotskyist revolution, or the restoration of the monarchy. Their self-interest, clear-sightedness, sense of self-preservation, and lack of male attachments make them powerful actors and agents. But they pay for their liberation, sexual and otherwise, in pain.
Babylon Berlin ultimately pits male fantasies against female reality. We know how it ends. The former wins out. A renewed Germany sets out to be forged in the fires of war. Everything burns. Especially Berlin.
If you’ve come this far, you deserve a short postscript. For the equally Berlin-heavy entry on Amazon’s Wir Kinder Von Bahnhof Zoo update, click here.
