Hitler’s name is heard only once in all sixteen episodes Nazi Brown Shirts first appear in one of the last. The show plays as part period drama, part police procedural, and part mystery thriller, but there is always an undercurrent of foreboding, drawing on our knowledge of what’s to come.
Throughout, we see the capital as a spectacle of contrasts: at night, elegant Berliners fill a debaucherous cabaret as poverty persists nearby cosmopolitanism exists alongside outright bigotry and citizens cling either to a tenuous status quo or to dreams of revolution. Without revealing too much, among the rich ensemble of characters and story lines are a hijacked freight train, police factions, Soviet agents, organized-crime figures, Communist revolutionaries, and élite reactionaries. Gereon and Lotte soon discover conspiracies and intrigue on a shocking scale. His unlikely partner is Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a typist, nighttime reveller, and aspiring homicide detective eager to escape the hardships of her impoverished neighborhood and to succeed despite the sexism of the police world. “Babylon Berlin” follows Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police inspector on assignment from Cologne, who arrives in the German capital committed to repressing his traumatic past. (Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party would come to power in 1933.) The show-the most expensive non-English-language one to date, with a budget of forty-seven million dollars-is adapted from the best-selling detective novels by the German author Volker Kutscher, and is set in the Berlin of 1929, in the twilight of the Weimar Republic.
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The film's café scenes were shot at the Delphi in Berlin-Weissensee, a former silent movie theater.Recently, I began the German series “Babylon Berlin,” on Netflix, and proceeded to finish all sixteen episodes in less than two weeks. The name combines "moka," which is Greek for coffee, and Efti, the first two syllables of the last name of the man who ran the café, Giannis Eftimiades. In the series, the band performs at the famed Berlin café and dance hall of the same name, which was destroyed during the war.
They were booked in clubs, concert halls, operas, philharmonic orchestras and on various festival stages. A year later, they were on tour, not because the series needed the promotion, but because people wanted to hear the music live, says Borkowski. The band performed its first concert in May 2018. The ensemble of 14 musicians was founded in 2018 especially for Babylon Berlin. The latter has been onscreen music supervisor to the series since 2016. The series is set in Berlin during the latter years of the Weimar Republic, beginning in 1929. It is created, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten, based on novels by German author Volker Kutscher. The album Erstausgabe should work well on its own, detached from the series, says saxophonist and arranger Sebastian Borkowski, adding that the band aims to establish "a pop act of their own." The band has two more composers, Mario Kamien and Nikko Weidemann. Babylon Berlin is a German neo-noir television series. The Moka Efti Orchestra also integrates in their works klezmer, a Jewish folk music tradition. In order to capture the musical spirit of the Roaring Twenties, it was important to directors Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten and Achim von Borries to cover a wide range of tunes, from swing, blues and jazz to ragtime, Charleston and chansons. The band's repertoire mainly includes songs from the series' soundtrack. Three weeks later, the Moka Efti Orchestra's debut album was released, aptly named Erstausgabe (First Edition).
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On January 24, the series' third season was launched on the pay TV channel Sky. Without the soundtrack, it would not have been possible to capture the vibrant mood of an entire era on screen. The music is one of the reasons for the success of the Babylon Berlin TV series.