Babylon Berlin

The investigation and the city

Gereon Rath's arrival in Berlin provides an outsider's route into a city with many competing centres of power. Police work takes him into places where entertainment, money and political ambition intersect. An apparent criminal transaction can matter to people whose aims extend well beyond the immediate case, making the city itself part of what he must learn to read.

The story begins in 1929, during the final years of the Weimar Republic. A modern viewer brings knowledge of the upheaval ahead, while the characters still have immediate jobs, hopes and practical choices to make. That difference can lend weight to ordinary decisions without requiring every scene to function as a prediction of what comes next.

Rath, Charlotte and a large ensemble

Volker Bruch plays Gereon Rath, a policeman carrying the effects of his First World War service. Liv Lisa Fries plays Charlotte Ritter, who begins as a police clerk with ambitions of becoming an investigator. Their different positions offer different views of access and opportunity: formal authority is not the only kind of useful knowledge in the city.

The ensemble includes Peter Kurth as Bruno Wolter, Matthias Brandt as August Benda, Leonie Benesch as Greta Overbeck and Lars Eidinger as Alfred Nyssen. Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten created the series from Volker Kutscher's Gereon Rath novels, bringing literary crime material into an extended historical television drama.

How to watch the historical mystery

Start at the beginning and give the first investigations room to connect. Keeping a few names and institutional affiliations in mind will be more useful than trying to guess one hidden villain immediately. The story's overlapping interests are part of the attraction for viewers who enjoy a crime drama operating on more than one social level.

The original language is German. Check the audio and subtitle options supplied by the service in your selected country if you want a particular version. You do not need to read the novels first, and the drama is not a substitute for a history text. A productive question is how a person pursues a private ambition when the institutions around them are becoming less secure.