(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024) contains twelve chapters from different scholars—as well as an introduction coauthored by Smith and Baer—highlighting aspects of the show, set during the last years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, and its unique contribution to contemporary culture. Baer recently joined Smith for a campus in the .
Smith is a scholar of German literature, culture, gender, and sexuality, and Jewish studies from the late nineteenth century to today. Her current research focuses on the cultural legacy of the Weimar Republic, the period after the First World War when Germany was governed as a constitutional democracy for the first time in its history. This was brought to an end by the rise to power of the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler in 1933.
It's a subject Smith also visits in her upcoming book, The Afterlives of Weimar Berlin: Twenty-First-Century Literature, Media, and Visual Culture, due to be published by Camden House / Boydell & Brewer at the end of 2024.
She was, therefore, keen to check out the television series Babylon Berlin when it first appeared in 2017. “I was very excited to see a large-scale cinematic production on streaming television that focused on the Weimar Republic.”
It’s a period of German history that has been somewhat neglected in popular media, said Smith. Set during the latter years of the Republic, Babylon Berlin is a German-made “neo-noir” television series focusing on the exploits of police inspector Gereon Rath, an outsider from Cologne, and an amateur detective who also happens to be a woman.
“I was especially excited because the show’s main character is a type of woman that I've written about since I started my academic career,” added Smith. Charlotte (Lotte) Ritter is a police clerk and aspiring detective at the start of the series, engaging in sex work at night to support her impoverished family.
Ritter’s character really holds a mirror up to the many aspects that encompass Weimar Germany, a tumultuous episode in German history, noted Smith. “The country could have gone in any direction—could have become a communist state, could have lapsed into another type of authoritarian regime—but Germany became democratic for thirteen years, for the first time in its history.”
The show also explores another notable aspect of the Weimar Republic, namely the flowering of cultural expression, in art, literature, and sexuality, explained Baer, whose research interests focus on gender and sexuality in German film and media, among other things. “This was the first place that saw serious efforts at queer emancipation, both in print and in visual culture more broadly. We saw the artistic development of a queer community there, and I think that's a huge part of the appeal of the show to modern audiences,” she added.
Baer and Smith sought to explore Babylon Berlin’s unique contribution to contemporary visual culture when putting together the book. “The aim,” said Baer, “was to have an interdisciplinary set of fields represented in the book. The show is so rich in its many dimensions that we really wanted to bring experts on different areas together to write in more specificity and detail about those topics.”
The book includes essays from scholars of Jewish Germany, art and visual culture, contemporary media, fan culture, and musicology, as well as from historians of fashion, journalism, and queer culture.
A Guest Speaker
Immediately following Smith and Baer’s book launch was an featuring one of the three creators of the Babylon Berlin series.
Berlin-based film director Henk Handloegten came to campus on September 12 to lead a screening and discussion of select scenes from the fourth season of the show.
“We were struck by what Handloegten had to say about the show’s commitment to emotional realism,” said Baer, meaning “how the show aimed to present the historical reality of characters in the 1920s but in a way that would resonate emotionally with audiences of today.
The example he gave was the music they used in the series, which often had a contemporary edge and so could be quite different from the sounds of the 1920s,” she explained.
“While the makers of the show were careful to try to maintain historical accuracy regarding the depiction of political and legal issues, I think in terms of the broader artistic context—the acting styles and the soundtrack for example—there was much more of a ‘mash-up’ aesthetic, mixing the old and the new,” added Baer.
Handloegten’s visit was sponsored by the Departments of Art History, German, History, Music, and Theater and Dance, the Programs in Cinema Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies (GSWS), the Blythe Bickel Edwards Fund, the Office of the President, and the German Embassy’s “Germany on Campus” Initiative.
