The final season of “Babylon Berlin” tells of Hitler’s rise as Germany prepares for crucial elections

“Babylon Berlin” began by drawing audiences into the hedonistic chaos of 1920s Germany. Now its fifth and final season will culminate in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, arriving in the same week that Germany faces a major test in regional elections.

The timing is a coincidence, the creators insist. Yet the series’ story of the Weimar Republic has long felt uncomfortably prophetic. Over 13 years of production, democracies from the United States to Hungary and South Korea came under pressures the German creators said they could not have imagined when they started.

Liv Lisa Fries, who plays Charlotte Ritter, said the danger no longer felt distant. “We are now inside the volcano,” she said, contrasting the present with the earlier period of cultural experimentation and sexual liberation before the fall into fascism. Her character rises from secretarial work and underground sex work to become Berlin’s first female police detective.

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We are now inside the volcano.

Volker Bruch, who plays Gereon Rath, said the political parallels were obvious but rejected simplistic comparisons. “History does not repeat itself, it rhymes,” he said. His character is a traumatized First World War veteran whose struggle with shell shock runs through the crime drama.

The boundary between the series and contemporary politics has sometimes seemed almost surreal. Part of the third season was filmed at the neo-Baroque Villa Adlon, which in November 2023 hosted a real secret meeting involving AfD officials and neo-Nazis. The meeting reportedly discussed a plan for “remigration”, including mass deportations if the party came to power.

The AfD, founded around the time production began, now leads opinion polls. It could seek its first outright majority in Saxony-Anhalt’s regional election on September 6, while two weeks later it could overtake its opponents in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In Berlin, polls place it close to the far-left Die Linke. The series has always revealed how its story ends, but viewers have continued to hope that history might take another path.

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History does not repeat itself, it rhymes.