For fans of Babylon Berlin, the wait is (almost) over. The show’s fifth and final season is set to finish shooting later this year, and co-creators Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten, and Achim von Borries have begun to share some of the details of how they plan to bring the epic German neo-noir period drama to a conclusion.
The first image of season 5, provided exclusively to The Hollywood Reporter, show Volker Bruch as Inspector Gereon Rath, in silhouette, set against a murky and ominous background (see above). The plot of the final season, adapted from Volker Kutscher’s fifth Gereon Rath novel The March Fallen, reunites Gereon with Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a flapper-turned-investigator for a final case.
After Gereon vanishes without a trace, Charlotte is on her own, investigating a series of murders of former front-line soldiers. She begins to uncover evidence that points to a link between the killings and Gereon’s past, as well as that of the new Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
The final, eight-episode series arc runs over five weeks, from Jan. 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor, through March 5, 1933, when, after a violent and murderous campaign against his political opponents, he held the elections that would secure his absolute power.
“In those five weeks, the whole country was turned upside down,” Tykwer tells THR. “Suddenly [Hitler’s stormtroopers] numbered in thousands, they became the police and were allowed to shoot and arrest socialists and communists. The first camps were opened, the whole of society was threatened on a massive scale, and at the same time, there was this promise that everything would be transformed.”
In the five weeks leading up to the election, every person in Germany, and every character in Babylon Berlin, is faced with the fateful choice: To adapt, to fight, or to flee.
“There’s always this cliché that all the Germans couldn’t wait to become Nazis. That’s not true, the reality was society was torn apart,” says Tykwer, “there were hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets almost every day to protest Hitler before he was elected…Every character [in the series] will have to take a stand.”
The fate of Babylon Berlin S5 was briefly in doubt after one of the show’s main backers, Comcast-owned German pay-TV network Sky Deutschland, shut down its local originals department. But public broadcast group ARD Degeto, Tykwer’s production company X Filme, and world sales group Beta Film committed to a final season, noting the show’s global success — it has sold to more than 140 territories worldwide — as well as its local hit status, where it has drawn more than 100 million digital views on the streaming service of German public broadcaster ARD.
In the U.S., Babylon Berlin was initially on Netflix, which carried the first three seasons, but was left in limbo when the streamer declined to pick up S4. Kino Lorber’s streaming platform MHz Choice stepped into the gap last year, becoming the exclusive domestic home for the series.
Beta will tease the fifth season of Babylon Berlin at its presentation at the London TV Screenings market on Tuesday.