First trailer for series three of Babylon Berlin released

We enjoyed series one and two of German-language series, Babylon Berlin, and now we’re waiting eagerly for the third instalment.

Based on the books by Volker Kutscher, it tells the story of Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), a police inspector on assignment from Cologne who is on a secret mission to dismantle an extortion ring, and Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a young stenotypist who is aspiring to work as a police inspector. With stories set in Weimer-era Berlin, it’s a good-looking, delicious noir.

And here’s the first trailer.

According to Deadline, series three kicks off in the autumn of 1929, during the tumultuous weeks before Black Friday’s stock market crash, the latest series sees inspector Rath and Ritter assigned to investigate the violent on-set death of an actress, only to realise that the film industry is as rotten as the underworld.

In the meantime, the Black Reichswehr are regathering their forces for their next attempt to bring down democracy and use all the opportunities they can to provoke more clashes with the Communists.

Interestingly, looking at the trailer, a few of the characters from the first two series survive into this one.

Deadline also says that even though it will premiere in Germany at the end of this year, series three will be broadcast by Sky Atlantic in 2020.

BOXSET REVIEW: Der Pass (Season 1)

The Bridge does Deutschland.

BOXSET REVIEW: Dark (S2)

The German time-travel crime drama returns.

Netflix’s Dark will end after series three

Netflix’s German-language series Dark is due to start its second series on 21st June.

But we’re hearing that the streaming giant has not only commissioned a third series, but that third run will be its final instalment.

Showrunner Baran bo Odor took to Instagram to confirm the news.

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READ MORE: Netflix reveals Dark series two trailer and transmission date

Dark‘s season 1 followed the story of four families in the fictional German town of Winden, as they investigated the disappearance of two young children and a mystery that linked back to the same town in 1986.

Series two will open with scenes set in 1921, along with a new modern-day time period of 2020.

READ MORE: Our review of series one of Dark

 

Netflix reveals Dark season two trailer and transmission date

German-language series, Dark, was a huge hit for Netflix, and it was good news when we found out it was coming back for a second series.

It centres around a missing child, and sets four families on a frantic hunt for answers as they unearth a mind-bending mystery that spans three generations. The series first season followed a teenager struggling to cope with his father’s suicide, a police officer whose brother disappeared 33 years earlier, and a police chief caught in the middle.

While the story begins in 2019 but spreads to include storylines in 1986 and 1953 thanks to a little time travel, courtesy of a wormhole in a cave beneath an old nuclear power plant, which is under the management of a wealthy, influential family. During the first season, secrets begin to be revealed that ties all of these families together, and their lives start to crumble as the ties become evident between the missing children and the history of the town and its citizens.

Here’s the trailer for series two:

Dark (series two): from Sunday 2nd June

TO READ OUR REVIEW OF DARK CLICK HERE

Walter Presents teases German series Bad Banks

Bad Banks sounds like it’s a very topical financial thriller, full of twists and turns set within some enormous financial institutions.

The six-part German series is coming to Channel 4/All4 thanks to Walter Presents, and has won a stack of awards in its native Germany.

After being wrongly fired, young and ambitious Jana is quickly recruited by a top competing bank in Frankfurt, thanks to the unexpected help of Christelle Leblanc, her former boss. Leaving her family behind, she moves to Germany where her drive and ambition quickly pay off and she manages to impress her new team and most crucially her new boss, banking supremo Gabriel Fenger. Despite this upwards trajectory and swift success, she soon realises that Leblanc has secretly been manipulating her, to her own advantage. Will Jana survive this merciless power play?

Here’s the trailer…

Bad Banks: Thursday 4th April, 11pm, Channel 4 (and then all episodes on All4)

The Bridge inspires new German series from the producers of Dark

The tentacles of Swedish series, The Bridge, are still extending far and wide, it seems, even after the show’s final, fourth series ended last year. So far we’ve had Bridge spin-off series in the UK, the US and across Asia. Now we have another European series that takes its cue from Hans Rosenfeldt’s global success.

Der Pass (Pagan Peak) is an eight-part series produced by Epo-Films for Sky Germany, and numbers Dark’s Max Wiedemann and Quirin Berg as producers.

The story has subtle but intriguing differences to the original Bridge (as it should): when a gruesomely staged body is found exactly at the German-Austrian border in the Alps, both countries are sending one detective each to investigate. For German detective Ellie Stocker (Julia Jentsch), this is the first real challenge of her career; her Austrian counterpart Gedeon Winter (Nicholas Ofczarek) though seems to have lost any ambitions in his job. Very soon they find more crime scenes with symbolically posed victims. Ellie finds herself under increasing pressure to understand the killer’s motives so she can stop him. The hunt leads them ever deeper in the dark valleys and archaic Alpine customs – and the paranoid world of the killer.

No word on whether Sky has picked this up for the UK yet, but the fact it’s airing on Sky Germany (like Babylon Berlin did) means that it’ll be a pretty good bet it’ll appear here at some point in the future.

Mismatched detectives solving crime in the stunning Alps? Definitely count us in for this one.

Netflix reveals trailer for German series Dogs Of Berlin

And we have another German-language Netflix series incoming.

Dogs Of Berlin is a cop show that has been described as ‘gritty’ and is coming to our screens in a few weeks’ time.

After the death of a renowned German-Turkish soccer player, two very different cops each face off against the German underworld, and each is forced to face their own criminal activities. Fahri Yardim plays policeman Erol Birkan, and Felix Kramer plays rival cop Kurt Grimmer.

Here’s a trailer:

The series will premiere on the streaming service on 7th December.

REVIEW: 54 Hours – The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis (S1 E2/2)

There’s a very famous horror movie called Cannibal Holocaust that caused a huge amount of controversy on it’s release in the director’s native homeland of Italy. Ruggero Deodato had set out to make an exploitation movie about exploitation itself – inspired by the Italian media’s coverage of the Red Brigade murders of the 1970s, where garish footage of victims would be broadcast nightly. The film deliberately blurred the line between reality and fiction – to the point Deodato was put on trial and had to display his actors to prove the film didn’t depict real murder. The film itself is naturally horrific to watch but has some sharp and salient points to make on modern media’s obsession with the macabre.

The same kind of horrific content was on display in the concluding episode of Gladbeck. There wasn’t any gore of course, but the attitudes and behavior of the people in the show were sickening enough. Whilst the initial episode had focused on the growing incompetence of the police leading up to the bank robbers being able to hijack a bus full of passengers with impunity, this episode’s lens was firmly set on the press themselves and their abhorrent behaviour. Whatever the gathered journalists were thinking at the time, whether they felt these criminals wouldn’t cross an unseen line and harm anyone or simply they were doing their jobs to report the news is to all extents largely unknowable, but the ensuing collective madness they perpetrate – with the knowledge this was reality, with human beings at stake – is hard to watch.

The episode draws in on two journalists as our guides through this mass insanity – press photographer Peter Meyer (played by NSU German History X’s Albrecht Schuch) and Udo Röbel (Dark’s Arnd Klawitter). Meyer is presented initially as a bit of carefree spirit – literally driving up to the bus in his sportscar, blasting some 1980s rock music – before Rösner adopts him as the conduit between himself and the press and police. The initial chaos that follows the hijacking is mind-boggling in itself to watch unfold, as a handful of senior detectives stand around the square utterly powerless to act and none of the apparatus required to deal with the crisis anywhere near being available.

Eventually Peter Möller, the rather reluctant head of operations in Bremen, has enough marksmen in place around the bus to execute a kill shot simultaneously on all the fugitives. A large debate breaks out at headquarters about the veracity of the order. Germany’s post-war history overshadows the dialogue wholly as they argue the order cannot legally be carried out without threat to life being apparent. Even at this stage, nobody considers the hijackers to be murderous.  This is evident in Meyer’s behaviour as he switches from boarding the bus and taking photographs of the victims to rallying the police to find a better car for the hijackers. It seems like a game, albeit a surreal game – and the volume of people around the scene seems to lower the level of threat, as Rösner makes grandiose statements to the press with the faint hope of romanticizing his criminal actions as he talks of committing suicide and a life spent in hardship.

However. This atmosphere is practically sucked out of the story instantaneously in the next scenes, when a clumsy and ultimately thwarted attempt to arrest Rösner’s girlfriend Marion at a petrol station leads Degowski to flip out and shoot teenager Emanuele de Giorgi in the head. It’s a singular moment portrayed without any flair or embellishment and as a result is an absolute punch to the gut, designed to recreate the murder without any sensationalism to the credit of the director. What follows next is hard to watch. Emanuele’s body is dumped on the pavement, barely alive and covered in blood. Rather than help him, the pack of journalists move in to take their footage. One asks the other “can you tilt his head so” to get a better shot of the body. At this stage, Emanuele is still alive but bleeding out. Nobody thinks to call an ambulance. I feel physically ill.

Meyer’s gradual repulsion in this scene, as he pulls away from the crowd and finally gravitates back toward reality from the mass hysteria gripping his colleagues, is mirrored in Möller‘s dawning realization back at police headquarters that he never even thought an ambulance would be necessary in this situation, uniting both in the clear fact nobody was prepared for something like this to happen. And yet when the criminals briefly pass through the Netherlands on their way to Cologne, the Dutch police are the very model of cold professionalism. They prevent any journalists passing their border. When they negotiate with the trio, they barter successfully for the exchange of some of the women and children on the bus for an escape car. When Rösner accidentally shoots Marion in the leg, the Dutch police deal with the issue calmly. A German police officer warns his Dutch counterpart about the situation back in Bremen. The cop says “That was your disaster” acidly. It’s a pointed juxtaposition to show how things might have worked out differently all the way back at the bank, if somebody had took real authority of the situation rather than trying to pass the buck. And yet strangely, the German officials are desperate to end the situation on German soil to avoid national embarrassment, despite that ship having set sail long ago.

Udo Röbel enters the scene when the trio dump the bus in favour of a car carrying hostages Silke Bischoff and Ines Voitle back into Germany through Cologne. The scenes showing the car swamped by journalists, police and public is hard to compute through a modern lens and this sense of surrealism follows through in the detached and dreamlike dialogue Silke has with the surrounding press (“how does it feel to have a gun on you?”,”do you think you’re going to die?”) as they repeatedly ask Degowski to hold his gun up to her throat so they can get a better photo. With the criminals running high on amphetamines and low on patience, Röbel senses imminent danger in this worrisome theatre and befriends Rösner with coffee and kind words. When Rösner decides to escape onto the motorway out of Germany once and for all, Röbel offers to tag along and provide directions. Throughout the crisis, Silke is portrayed as somewhat detached from proceedings, but the truth is shown in a key scene when she breaks down in a petrol station rest room under the impassive gaze of Rösner.

The final scene where the German police take an opportunity to ram Rösner’s car and spray it with bullets is filmed in as perfunctory way as possible to avoid becoming a thrilling or entertaining chase, not least because everybody survives bar Silke, shot through the chest in the ensuing chaos by Rösner. Once again her corpse is fodder for television as journalists descend on the scene, cameras ready. There is barley any epitaph or explanation to follow this closing scene, which presumes anybody watching this would be German or have a fair knowledge of the incident, and that’s a shame. One thing it was certainly not is entertainment – or ‘sensational’ as the BBC continuity advisor crassly called it ahead of airing (oops).

One thing the show did do respectfully well was it’s handling of the victims stories – Emanuele’s father Aldo de Giorgi (played by Romanzo Criminale’s Vinicio Marchioni) has perhaps the most fully realised journey through bewilderment to grief, compounded by the incompetence of the police. The scene where he realises he needs to clean his son’s brains off his daughter’s skirt is absolutely heart-breaking in it’s smallness and intimacy. Likewise the unraveling of Silke’s grandparents as they live out their grief through graphic television reports, impotent and powerless, is similarly tough to watch, with Heinrich’s choked tears involuntarily watering my own eyes. What’s remarkable perhaps in comparison to the industry of grief counseling these days is the lack of state apparatus to pick these people up in the aftermath of such a situation – nobody greets Aldo at the hospital, nobody is there to support him in his hour of need. It’s another silent piece of commentary that runs through this dramatization without feeling preachy or judgemental.

Due to it’s length there wasn’t a lot of time to dig into the minutiae of the incident, and I would have liked to have learnt more about the fate of some of the key players involved. Meyer and Röbel for example, might not have benefited directly from the tragedy but it certainly didn’t harm their future careers either. We barely got any time with Silke’s boyfriend, nor either of the bank clerks post-release. The German release of the film included a documentary after it’s airing and it feels absolutely missing here, especially by presenting this dramatization in an entertainment slot. Maybe that’s indicative of its resonance in Germany but not elsewhere – like every country they all have their national shames to live with, but we can all learn a lesson from them.

Andy D

FOR OUR EPISODE ONE REVIEW CLICK HERE

REVIEW : 54 Hours – The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis (S1 E1/2)

A few years ago the UK was gripped by the manhunt for Raoul Moat, who had gone on the run after shooting his former partner and her new boyfriend. Rolling coverage of the investigation reached fever pitch when Moat was thought to be holed up somewhere near a small town called Rothbury and the media duly descended, filling the airtime with impressive aerial shots of nearby woodland and puff-piece psychologist interviews determining the fugitive’s state of mind. The press were desperate for anything they could lead with, and in among all this was Sky News’ anchor Kay Burley – who had been airlifted in by helicopter no less – and was on the hunt for some suitable soundbites from the local population. Thrusting her microphone into the face of a sweet little old lady minding her own business in the town, she dramatically asked “Aren’t you SCARED?”, expecting the pensioner to clutch her pearls and give her a trite response of the terror this hunt has surely caused her. “Oh no’, the lady calmly replied, ‘Not at all. I’ve led a long life and seen many things in my time. I’m not scared at all.” CUT! Interview ends.

It’s an amusing anecdote but one I recall when discussing how the press are as guilty of wanting to bend the facts to their own narrative just as much as politicians or the police (and not least also proof of the indomitable spirit of British pensioners). In this post-truth age, the world requires instant gratification and that need affects how we digest our news too – opinion is more polarised than ever but lacks the nuance to actually be informative given the short attention span that is required for a 24 hour news cycle. Therefore we’ve been reduced to becoming almost passive vessels for every new outrage or crisis that emerges and the result is people are becoming more disconnected than ever with the world around them in a bid to cope, with the sinking feeling that they feel their own voices aren’t heard or valued as much as they hoped.

This phenomenon didn’t start overnight. Post-Watergate, the world and how it was reported was changing. Investigative Journalism took huge leaps forward and shone a light on those in power. But somewhere the integrity within journalism got lost along the way. Newspapers were failing in the wake of the golden age of television, much like they would struggle in the age of the internet. Papers were bought and sold and began to reflect more candidly the views of their owners rather than the views of the people. The scale of institutional scandals like Hillsborough, Orgreave or the Battle of the Beanfield would remain hidden for decades thanks in part to the complicity of newspapers. Some have still yet to be fully exposed.

People’s views on the organs of authority were also changing – police, government, media – and that view was they were not to be trusted, that they represented big business, or that at the very least it was money that began to dictate policy over societal change. From these seeds the age of the conspiracy grew, but despite the colorful and inventive semantics that sprang from that, conspiracies were only ever the dull desperation of powerful men covering up the official incompetence of other powerful men. This era saw more incompetence than most in the changing faces of society, and all of this waffle is what really informs the background of 54 Hours – The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis.

Before we can talk about the incompetence that led to one of the blackest marks in post-war Germany criminal history, there is a lot of hindsight that colours the characters involved. The 1970s saw huge change in the country, not least the rise of political terrorism with the actions of the Baader-Meinhoff gang and the Munich Olympics hostage drama having a massive impact on the country’s psyche. The legacy of these events were very evidently present in the decisions and frustrations of the officers and officials involved in the Gladbeck case.

Unfortunately for 54 Hours – The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis this isn’t really examined in any great detail at all. German television is usually fantastic at surgically examining its own past without bias, as seen in the excellent Netflix drama NSU – German History X which unflinchingly showed the incompetence of the police in capturing the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground for over a decade. Instead, the Gladbeck film plays like a traditional TV movie with an accurate telling of the facts, but with little comment made on the nature of this crime that had such an impact on German society.

For the most part, this first half plays like a prologue to the most famous aspect of the case – the hijacking of a bus full of passengers which will be focused on in the final episode. Instead, we get to see what leads to that situation and the keyword is frustration throughout – at the characters choices, at the police, at the press, at the gawking crowds of public – until it’s almost unbearable to watch. One sleepy Sunday morning in August 1988, two career criminals Dieter Degowski and Hans-Jürgen Rösner decide to rob a bank. But they don’t do it well or quietly and it’s not long before they are in a stand-off with police with two clerks as hostages. With a ninety minute running time I would have expected some depth to the characterisation around this quartet and their behaviours – but instead we barely got to know them, with the focus being more on the interchangeable cast of hostage negotiators and their disastrous attempts to try and coax the kidnappers out of the bank.

This task isn’t helped by the media, who are seen setting up their cameras right next to snipers, calling the criminals in the bank for interviews and generally getting in the way of a live hostage situation. But there isn’t much made about this by the director beyond showing it. Compared to the subtle commentary against the press in the similarly-themed 6 Days, which replayed the events of the Iranian Embassy siege, it feels like a missed opportunity. Admittedly this isn’t fiction, and most of those involved are still alive so a light touch might have been the prevailing choice by the film-makers – but real-life crime drama can still take risks with its subject matter if it’s to tell us anything prudent about the wider picture these incidents create.

Ultimately Degowski and Rösner escape the bank with the two clerks still held hostage, and the remainder of the episode follows their erratic journey to the border pursued by both police and press. This whole situation should be fraught with tension, but is weirdly lacking in any – even when the hostages are left on their own by their kidnappers and you think they might make a break for it there is little to no excitement involved. Instead we witness two incompetent criminals bumble their way through Germany as officials fret over their ‘zero risk strategy’ – a virtually impossible scenario where they can take both kidnappers out of the picture without harming the hostages. This scenario is tested repeatedly in every new situation with diminishing results, as the varying officials involved seem desperate not to have the authority to agree a kill shot or to make any type of move at all. In one scene the original negotiation team pass responsibility to the national crime squad and the audible sigh of relief from them speaks volumes.

With little to no time spent on exploring the characters involved in the kidnapping, we do get some leaden direction introducing two people who so are clearly doomed that even if you have no knowledge of this case it is plainly obvious they are marked for death. Little is made of them as actual people – we just get a window into their daily lives as young Emanuele looks after his sister and muses on the girl who’s just dumped him or spirited Silke who works at the crown court and dreams of the day she can marry her boyfriend. Both are unfortunate enough to get on the ill-fated bus, and both are unfortunate enough to have their fates almost telegraphed to the viewer in the ill-advised trailer for the following episode.

There is much to dislike about 54 Hours – The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis, but the worst thing is it feels like a missed opportunity hurriedly issued to mark the 30th year anniversary of the case. Nobody involved is afforded the time to feel settled in their role and thus characters come and go with little to distinguish them, especially on the police side of things. The press are portrayed flatly as having little disregard for their own lives, chasing after men who are quite happy to shoot at them and the public. But we don’t get to focus on one journalist and understand their motives better, they are just represented as a mass of people doing a better job than the police of tracking – and in some cases even aiding – the criminals escape. For such a hugely important case it feels like a poor epitaph to those involved and inexcusable in the era of German television that can afford us excellent historical drama like Deutschland 83, Babylon Berlin or The Same Sky.

Random Thoughts

• People in 1980s Germany seem remarkably calm in the face of a man shooting a gun in the street – everybody just carries on as if it’s not happening
• EVERYBODY smoked in 1988
• Apparently a sausage in a bun isn’t a thing in Germany
• This show was gold dust if you like boxy 80s cars
• I bet the guy who delivered the cash in his undies wished he hadn’t worn bright red budgie smugglers that day
• The BBC were very impressed with themselves ahead of the show starting. “BBC4 – The Real Home of International Drama” they said breathlessly – prove it and give us a Trapped S2 air date then.
• For a terrifying true story along the same lines dig out the Brazilian documentary Bus 174
• For a film that actually has something to say about journalism and voyeurism check out the excellent Nightcrawler

Andy D