The first look at season five shows Volker Bruch as Inspector Gereon Rath in silhouette against a dark and ominous background (see above).
The final season's plot, based on Volker Kutscher's fifth Gereon Rath book The March Fallen, reunites Gereon with Charlotte Ritter (Liv Lisa Fries), a flapper turned investigator, for one final case.
After Gereon disappears without a trace, Charlotte single-handedly investigates a series of murders of former frontline soldiers. She begins collecting evidence that points to a link between the murders and Gereon's past, as well as that of the Empire's new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler.
The final, eight-part season takes place over a period of five weeks, from January 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, to March 5, 1933, when, after a violent and murderous campaign against his political opponents, he held the elections that would ensure him absolute power.
“In those five weeks, the whole country was turned upside down,” Tykwer tells THR. “Suddenly [Hitler’s stormtroopers] numbered in thousands, they became the police and were allowed to shoot and arrest socialists and communists. The first camps were opened, the whole of society was threatened on a massive scale, and at the same time, there was this promise that everything would be transformed.”
In the five weeks leading up to the election, every person in Germany, and every character in Babylon Berlin, is faced with a fateful choice: adapt, fight, or flee.
“There’s always this cliché that all the Germans couldn’t wait to become Nazis. That’s not true, the reality was society was torn apart,” says Tykwer, “there were hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets almost every day to protest Hitler before he was elected…. Every character [in the series] will have to take a stand.”
The fate of Babylon Berlin S5 was briefly in doubt after one of the show’s main backers, Comcast-owned German pay-TV network Sky Deutschland, shut down its local originals department. But public broadcast group ARD Degeto, Tykwer’s production company X Filme, and world sales group Beta Film committed to a final season, noting the show’s global success — it has sold to more than 140 territories worldwide — as well as its local hit status, where it has drawn more than 100 million digital views on the streaming service of German public broadcaster ARD.
