Babylon Berlin: Where are the Nazis?
*contains spoilers*
Babylon Berlin is a rare thing. The German series, co-produced by Sky and the German public broadcaster ARD, is set in the mesmerizing Berlin of the late 1920s. Just like the Netflix produced The Crown, the period piece ate up a gigantic budget to immerse viewers in the spectacle of the German metropolis in its full glory. Moreover, Babylon Berlin’s story not only relays the city’s cultural magnetism in this period, but also manages to weave through the complicated politics of interwar Germany.
Nonetheless, one cannot but be astonished at one glaring omission: Where are the Nazis?
Babylon Berlin takes place in 1929. By that time, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) is long a fixture of German politics. In particular, this is the case for Berlin itself. In 1926, Hitler sends Joseph Goebbels to Berlin to make him Gauleiter there, the equivalent of a regional NSDAP party leader. The city was a stronghold for the left. If the Nazis could triumph there, the thinking went, the rest of the country would follow.
In prison, Hitler had earlier written Mein Kampf. The Hitler salute was established in 1926, as was the practice of referring to him by “Führer”. In the same year, the NSDAP created the Hitler Youth as the party’s recruitment organisation.
The party had survived a ban following Hitler’s unsuccessful 1923 coup attempt. After its reconstitution, the NSDAP claimed twelve seats in the 1928 Reichstag elections. Goebbels himself became one of the first NSDAP parliamentarians. Two years later, its vote share would jump to 18 per cent.
Outside the halls of parliament, the Nazis put boots on the ground — literally. SA thugs had begun roaming the streets, picking fights and marching through entire Berlin neighbourhoods. Goebbels targeted communist strongholds in order to appeal to the city’s proletariat. A popular tactic was to appear at communist party events to rile up the Bolshevist left and kick up a row. One such event in February 1927 ended up in a mass brawl between fascists and communists.
Towards the end of the decade, Hitler had successfully built up a mass following. Between 1925 and 1928, NSDAP membership grew from 27,000 to 108,000. In November 1928, several thousand NSDAP members flocked to Berlin’s Sportpalast for Hitler’s first public address to a mass audience. Previously, Hitler had been subject to a gag order in Prussia, which was lifted in September of that year.
This is where the events of Babylon Berlin come on the scene. Hitler’s appearance at the Sportpalast provoked several violent clashes between his Brownshirts and members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). In response, Berlin’s police commissioner enacted a ban on public political assemblies, which was extended to all of Prussia in 1929.
The series’ fourth episode centres on the 1929 Mayday events in Berlin, which would later come to be known as “Bloody May”. With the ban on demonstrations intact, raucous KPD protests are met with violent police action. More than 30 civilians are killed, at least 80 severely injured. The problem: Babylon Berlin’s portrayal completely omits the role played by Hitler’s thugs in the run-up to the clashes. With no back-story, the viewer is left thinking that rowdy leftists and repressive police forces are the single biggest deal in 1929 Berlin.
With the exception of one throwaway line, there is no mention of Hitler at all. Right up until the very last episode, there are no Swastikas, no brownshirts, no marching, nothing. On the one hand, it is refreshing to see a German period epic that doesn’t rely on tired Nazi clichés. On the other hand, given the facts, it is impossible to imagine late 1920s Berlin without a manifest fascist presence.
With all the care the showrunners put into achieving a realistic portrayal of time and place, this seems a peculiar historical inaccuracy. Indeed, towards the back end of the series’ last episode, we learn that the Nazis were in fact there all along. Only they disguised themselves as communists.
Tricked by two Nazis whom we are initially introduced to as KPD members, the largely apolitical Greta is conned into carrying out an assassination attempt on her Jewish boss, a well-to-do bureaucrat. She winds up killing him and his young daughter. As a metaphor for the rise of the Nazis, this is a rather troubling account.
Germans weren’t conned into the Third Reich by suddenly appearing fascist masterminds. Some actively welcomed the authoritarian turn, while others heroically resisted it. Many let it happen unopposed. Where Babylon Berlin gets much right about Weimar Germany’s political atmosphere — the sense of shame over a lost war, the perceived embarrassment of Versailles, the omnipresence of latent militarism, and most importantly virulent anti-Semitism — it is here that it gets spectacularly off track.
Why does this matter? It matters because we are rehashing many of these debates in our current political moment. Did Vladimir Putin singlehandedly pull a trick on US democracy? And did foreign actors swing the Brexit vote?
Even though meddling did take place, the answer to these questions is most likely no. In the end, we have no one to blame but ourselves. In the real world, there are no Gretas. We make choices, constrained by the environment around us. If anything, Germany’s history serves as a reminder that the lies we tell ourselves are often more dangerous than any con could ever be.
