The essays in this collection address the German television series Babylon Berlin and explore its unique contribution to contemporary visual culture.
Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital.
Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts—Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts—the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture.
Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.
Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction, Hester Baer (University of Maryland, College Park, USA) and Jill Suzanne Smith (Bowdoin College, USA)
Part One: Babylon Berlin, Global Media, and Fan Culture
1. Quality TV Drama with Transnational Appeal: Industry Discourses on Babylon Berlin and the Changing Television Landscape in Germany, Florian Krauß (University of Siegen, Germany)
2. Defective Detective Meets Sassy Secretary, Plot Ensues: Babylon Berlin, TV Tropes, and the Cultural Implications of Pop Narratology, Doria Killian (University of North Carolina, Asheville, USA)
Part Two: The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin
3. Fashion for a Global Audience: 1920s Glamour and Grit, Mila Ganeva (Miami University, Ohio, USA)
4. Liquid Space and Digital Aesthetics in Babylon Berlin, Michael Sandberg (University of California, Berkeley) and Cara Tovey (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
5. Recreating the Soundscape of Weimar: Sound Technologies, Trauma, and the Sonic Archive, Abby Anderton (Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center, USA)
6. From Kahn to Kollwitz: Exploring the Significance of Art and Visual Culture in Babylon Berlin, Camilla Smith (University of Birmingham, UK)
Part Three: Representing Weimar History
7. “Modernity in Babylon: The Media as Proponents of Modern Life in Babylon Berlin,” Jochen Hung (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
8. Journalists and the Media as Proponents of Modern Life, Javier Samper Vendrell (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
9. Reading Queerness in Babylon Berlin, Darcy Buerkle (Smith College, USA)
Part Four: Weimar Intertexts
10. Blood May Footage and the Archive Effect: The Political Ambivalence of Babylon Berlin as Appropriation Film, Sara F. Hall (University of Illinois, Chicago, USA)
11. Glitter and Post-Punk Doom: Babylon Berlin through the Lens of 1980s West Berlin, Julia Sneeringer (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, USA)
12. Siegfried, Screen Memories, and the Fall of the Weimar Republic, Carrie Collenberg-González (Portland State University, USA) and Curtis L. Maughan (Pomona College, USA)
Afterword: Hester Baer and Jill Suzanne Smith
Index
About the Author :
Hester Baer is Professor of German and Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Maryland, USA. She is the author of Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language (2009), German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism (2021), and a volume for the series German Film Classics on Ula Stöckl’s The Cat Has Nine Lives (2022). She currently serves as co-editor of The German Quarterly.
Jill Suzanne Smith is Associate Professor of German and a contributing faculty member in Cinema Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Urban Studies at Bowdoin College, USA. She is the author of Berlin Coquette: Prostitution and the New German Woman 1890-1933 (2013) and a volume editor for the Bloomsbury series A Cultural History of Prostitution.
Review :
The book is a rich collection for everyone watching the series with an interest in interdisciplinary discourses around Babylon Berlin and in closer examination of the series as a product of its manifold cultural intertexts.
Required reading for any discerning fan of the television show or student of the culture, history, and politics of late Weimar. Hester Baer and Jill Smith have brought together an impressive group of scholars to show the critical potential of interdisciplinary work in film and media studies.
Babylon Berlin has brought international attention to German series productions. This volume helps us understand why. Exploring all aspects of the production: from the crime novels that serve as inspiration, to the tourists who search Berlin for their favorite location; from the images to the funding, Baer and Smith unite a transdisciplinary group of scholars whose focus on Babylon Berlin sets new standards in film and television scholarship.
