SILVER SCREEN

BABYLON BERLIN: AN EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW OF SEASON 6

JAKOB LIEBKNECHT

October 29, 2026

“Babylon Berlin” follows detective Gereon Rath and aspiring investigator Charlotte Ritter through the last years of the Weimar Republic, when Berlin combined extraordinary cultural freedom with poverty, political violence, and an impressive number of people willing to murder someone over a piece of bread. Beginning in 1929, the series moves between police headquarters, crowded tenements, industrial fortunes, and nightclubs where the choreography is considerably better organized than the government.

---

The TV show Babylon Berlin, the most expensive television series ever produced in Germany, is based on Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels, although its creators have taken considerable liberties with characters and plots. One major difference concerns how far the story travels. Whereas season 5 ends in 1933, the books continue into the Nazi era, reaching 1938 in the final volume. Season 5 became available in Germany on September 10, 2026, and arrives in the United States in February 2027 on MHz Choice. Industry speculation points to a sixth season in 2028, subject to financing, cast availability, and certain revisions to German history.

Season 6 opens in late 1936 with Charlotte returning from a self-imposed exile initiated in 1933. She had fled to Switzerland, but has decided that safety, clean air, and reliable trains cannot compensate for living in a country where everything closes early. She arrives in Berlin carrying a small suitcase and a firm intention to stop allowing historical events to interfere with her private life. Within five minutes, someone is dead.

Wilhelm Böhm, now available for private inquiries. General inquiries are discouraged.

Wilhelm Böhm has been dismissed from his position as senior detective in Berlin’s homicide division for calling a superior an idiot and declining an opportunity to clarify that he meant this metaphorically. He opens a private detective agency above a shop selling orthopedic appliances. Charlotte, who worked with him before, becomes his partner after establishing that “partner” means equal pay and her name on the door. Böhm agrees because she is the only person who can answer the telephone without frightening potential clients.

Their first case concerns a celebrated tenor found dead inside a locked rehearsal room. Every member of the opera company had a motive, including the conductor, three former lovers, and a stagehand obliged to hear him rehearse daily. The police suspect Bolsheviks. Charlotte suspects the understudy. Böhm suspects everyone involved in opera. The solution turns on a substituted throat lozenge and a billing dispute. The murderer is arrested during a performance, allowing the understudy to finish the evening, to excellent reviews. The management asks whether further arrests might also be scheduled during the second act.

Charlotte returns from Switzerland, where the scenery had begun to feel like a threat.

Gereon Rath, Charlotte’s lover and former crime unit coworker, remains professionally useful yet emotionally difficult to reach. Nevertheless, this season introduces an innovation: He explains himself. When Charlotte asks where he has been, he answers in complete sentences. When something terrible happens, he tells her about it before disappearing for three episodes. The improvements to his communications skills are initially mistaken for a neurological condition.

Rath and Charlotte marry in a modest civil ceremony attended by friends, colleagues, and Böhm, who complains about the expense despite contributing nothing. The reception contains no assassinations, coded messages, or revelations concerning a supposedly dead relative. Rath dances. Charlotte laughs. The scene is allowed to continue.

Marriage also brings a change in their domestic arrangements. Charlotte insists on an apartment with a bathroom, while Rath considers this an extravagance until she explains that washing at the office does not constitute a housing policy. They find a suitable place through a landlord who claims to welcome detectives, provided they do not investigate him. Their first serious marital disagreement concerns a cupboard Rath keeps locked. Charlotte suspects weapons, drugs, or evidence of another family. It contains unopened correspondence. She considers this worse and purchases a letter opener.

Böhm visits once, identifies three building violations, and is never invited again.

The ruthless Colonel Gottfried Wendt, head of the Political Police, discovers that helping establish a dictatorship does not guarantee a satisfying position within it. With Heinrich Himmler taking control of the Gestapo, Wendt is transferred to a regional administrative office responsible for drainage, agricultural permits, and a disputed footbridge. His secretary is unimpressed by his menace. She has worked there for twenty-seven years and has seen men like him routinely fail to operate the filing cabinet. His efforts to return to Berlin require approval from an office he himself abolished. In episode 4, he threatens a district official, who asks him to put the threat in writing and supply two duplicates.

Wendt on his way to inspect a footbridge. The driver has been instructed not to ask.

Despite expectations, season 6 spends less time with the Nazi leadership and gets back to the peculiar crimes of a large city. An astrologer is murdered in his consulting room. Among his papers are twelve letters predicting his death, each on a different date. Rath spends some time with these before Charlotte discovers that the astrologer has sold his client list to twelve different people. A department-store mannequin is found in a coffin intended for a train conductor. His family cannot explain the substitution, though his sister admits that she thought he looked better than usual. The manufacturer wants the mannequin back, preferably before the burial.

There is also trouble at a boarding house, where tenants receive replies to letters they have not written. Most concern debts or family quarrels, until a woman receives condolences for her brother while he is having breakfast downstairs. Böhm traces the letters to a retired postal clerk on the third floor. He has been reading everyone’s correspondence for years and has begun answering it himself.

Police photographer Reinhold Gräf spots the same man in the crowd at five unrelated crime scenes. Brought in for questioning, the man turns out to have photographs of his own, including four of Rath outside buildings where murders have taken place. Rath cannot remember what he was doing there.

Reinhold Gräf photographs the crime scene before Rath can forget being there.

At the department store Tietz, a man enters a revolving door and disappears. His briefcase comes around again, then his hat. Management allows the police to question the doorman but objects to closing the entrance during the January sales. The missing man turns out to have designed the store’s security system. Charlotte goes to see the personnel director, who has rejected his pension claim six times and would now like to settle.

Tietz, where a gentleman may lose himself in the January sales. His hat is available for collection.

Underworld boss Edgar Kasabian, better known as the Armenian, has adapted to the new regime with disturbing efficiency. The proprietor of the Moka Efti nightclub, he has considerable experience accommodating men with uniforms, appetites, and flexible principles. The business possesses an immaculate license, and many officials attend the club while insisting they are conducting inspections. It continues to be a hub for gambling and smuggling. Men who publicly condemn decadence turn out to be very specific about their champagne. But Kasabian’s accommodations have limits. When a patron demands the dismissal of a Jewish musician, Kasabian arranges for him to be discovered in circumstances incompatible with his public devotion to family values. The musician stays. The patron takes an extended holiday.

Gradually, the cases expose a network of corruption and officials collecting evidence against one another. Charlotte finds the connections. Rath obtains the documents. Böhm supplies names remembered from decades of disliking people. Kasabian provides transport and declines to issue receipts.

By 1937, the accumulated evidence finally convinces an opposition capable of cooperating. Social Democrats, Communists, trade unionists, and conservative opponents agree to postpone their arguments until they have removed the people arresting them. Leading the coalition is Marie-Luise Seegers, also known as Malu, a general’s daughter, law student, and committed Communist, whose politics once complicated her relationship with Wendt. After season 5, in which she seemed to have misplaced her invitation, she returns intending to take over the government.

Marie-Luise Seegers asks the German left to agree on something before lunch.

Malu is remarkably young for someone entrusted with rebuilding Germany, though she notes that the older men have had their opportunities. During Ernst Thälmann’s imprisonment, she somehow inherits his leadership of the Communist movement and persuades it to cooperate with the Social Democrats.

The uprising succeeds through strikes, defections, and the seizure of communications centers. Political prisoners are freed, including Thälmann, who discovers that Malu has already arranged an election. To everyone’s relief, he becomes her mentor rather than attempting to run the government. He gradually learns that meetings can end without every participant delivering a speech. Malu’s coalition wins. Civil liberties are restored, and prosecutions begin. Wendt requests permission to explain his position. He is banned from public office but later becomes mayor of a small Bavarian town near the Austrian border, where he discovers that his new power does not extend further than changing the opening hours of the municipal swimming pool.

Industrialist Alfred Nyssen, whose death in season 5 initially appeared to limit his involvement, returns from the grave after learning that the restoration of democracy will require steel. He announces that he supported parliamentary government throughout, although principally through investments made abroad. His proposed monument to the uprising is rejected when the committee discovers that the monument resembles him. Asked to explain his resurrection, he refers inquiries to his accountants, who describe his death as a temporary restructuring.

Most of the Nazi leadership escapes to Paraguay, establishes a settlement governed by strict regulations, and immediately begins disputing who is in charge. Little is subsequently heard from them. Goebbels, however, is arrested in a Rio de Janeiro nightclub while persuading a chorus line to perform a revue about his achievements. Traveling as José Gritador, he attracts attention by demanding that the spotlight follow him even when he is seated. His identity is confirmed after he submits a fourteen-page complaint about being billed beneath an act involving two parrots.

Goebbels returns to Germany, is briefly imprisoned, and attempts a career as a stand-up comedian. His routine consists mostly of complaints about his treatment under the new political leadership and is interrupted by audiences asking when the parrots will arrive. One club begins advertising the hecklers rather than the act.

Meanwhile, Hitler has died in Paraguay. Himmler preserves his brain in a pickle jar, hoping that future technology will permit its implantation into another person and the return of the Führer. The project suffers a setback when the jar enters a communal refrigerator, and Göring accidentally pours out the contents.

Charlotte and Rath notice that Böhm’s business improves with every murder. So does his mood.

Berlin celebrates. Exiles return. Newspapers reopen. Charlotte and Rath sit outside at a café on Kurfürstendamm, discussing a larger apartment. Böhm arrives with another case: A man has vanished after going out for milk. Charlotte finishes her coffee. There is work to do.

Jakob Liebknecht was born in Berlin’s Wedding district in 1974 and is the great-grandson of Karl Liebknecht, a family connection that has earned him several speaking invitations and almost no paid work. He studied history and film at the Freie Universität Berlin and writes about political violence, German television, and the difficulty of telling them apart. He lives in Weder, where he is working on a history of political catastrophes initially dismissed as temporary.

Babylon Berlin 2017–ongoing (perhaps)

Runtime: Approximately 45 min. per episode—enough time for a murder, a conspiracy, and a change of evening wear.

Country: Germany, during a particularly unsuccessful attempt at being a republic.

Language: German, with Russian, Yiddish, English, and the universal language of blackmail.

Release date: October 13, 2017—too late to warn anyone.

Directors: Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten. Three men supervising a city with no supervision whatsoever.

Writers: Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten; based on Volker Kutscher’s novels and Germany’s regrettably extensive source material.

Music by: Johnny Klimek, Tom Tykwer. The republic may be collapsing, but the orchestra has been paid.

Cinematography: Frank Griebe, Bernd Fischer, Philipp Haberlandt. Almost everyone looks magnificent under investigation.

Genre: Crime, Historical Drama, Neo-Noir, and the persistent belief that the next government cannot possibly be worse.

Cast:

Volker Bruch: Gereon Rath

Came from Cologne to investigate a case and has spent the intervening years becoming one.

Solves murders through intuition, insomnia, and information he could have shared three episodes earlier.

Has married Charlotte, bringing at least one qualified investigator into his private life.

Would discuss his feelings, but fortunately another body has been found.

Liv Lisa Fries: Charlotte Ritter

Solves the case while her male colleagues establish whether she should have been allowed into the room.

Has worked in nightlife and homicide, finding the clientele broadly similar.

Returns to the police with renewed determination and a husband who requires occasional forensic attention.

Her superiors would call her indispensable if they thought it would not encourage her.

Benno Fürmann: Gottfried Wendt

Considers democracy a nuisance, chiefly because it allows other people to have careers.

Has the manners of a diplomat and the instincts of someone who has already selected your replacement.

Demotion has deprived him of authority without producing any corresponding reduction in appointments.

Will accept whatever government Germany chooses, provided Germany is not consulted.

Saskia Rosendahl: Marie-Luise “Malu” Seegers

A general’s daughter who has taken her father’s objections to communism as a reading list.

Believes private property should be abolished, although the coat can presumably be dealt with later.

Finds the revolution slow, its meetings interminable, and certain reactionaries inconveniently attractive.

Has enough compromising information to bring down a government or make Christmas unbearable.

Christian Friedel: Reinhold Gräf

Photographs the evidence before someone important explains why it does not exist.

Knows where the bodies are buried, having been asked to bring a tripod.

His private life attracts official disapproval from men whose public lives should attract prosecution.

Remains discreet, although an unfortunate number of people have given him reason to order extra prints.

Udo Samel: Ernst Gennat

Retires in the first episode, making him the season’s earliest confirmed case of sound judgment.

Leaves homicide to colleagues who have always preferred their own theories to his solved cases.

His absence is felt immediately, although several senior officers mistake it for an improvement.

Appears here out of respect, and because nobody at headquarters has worked out how to remove him from the telephone directory.

Lars Eidinger: Alfred Nyssen

Inherited an industrial empire and mistook this for a favorable assessment of his abilities.

Wants to be loved, feared, and consulted on Germany.

Every personal disappointment threatens to become a subsidiary.

His advisers have learned that the most expensive words in German are “Herr Nyssen has an idea.”

Mišel Matičević: Edgar Kasabian, “The Armenian”

Runs a nightclub where the service is excellent and complaints tend to be withdrawn.

Offers Berlin music, champagne, and several compelling reasons to forget whom you saw upstairs.

Believes violence should be discreet, purposeful, and kept off the upholstery.

Finds the new political climate vulgar. Formerly, a man needed references before being entrusted with that many thugs.

Cover image: Charlotte and Rath dance through an entire scene without receiving bad news. Critics question the historical accuracy.