Counterpart

Counterpart Season 1 Trailer | Rotten Tomatoes TV
Rotten Tomatoes TV
We started watching this series the other night based on Roberta's recommendation. It's set in Berlin, which is a good start as Babylon Berlin was set there, and Berlin is is Germany, which won WW2 in the The Man in the High Castle. Both of those shows were great, so we'll give it a shot.

It is pretty great. The best part is the actor J. K. Simmons. He plays two characters, one from this world and one from the alternate world, a world almost identical to this one but just slightly different. In this world he is a mild mannered, inoffensive office drone. In the other world he is a man-to-be-dealt-with. The difference is striking, all the more so because the differences are so subtle. I think it must be because of the way he carries himself and the way he moves. It is just phenomenal.

One aspect of the show involves a flu pandemic that killed five hundred million people in the other world. Naturally, people on that side of the divide are very conscientious about preventing infection. It looks a lot like the USA does now with everyone wearing masks.

The atmosphere on the other side looks a lot like East Berlin during the Cold War: big guys in heavy coats and soldiers with machine guns everywhere you go. I can kind of understand it in both cases. During WW2, Russia suffered horrific losses and when they finally defeated the Germans they were not going to let that happen again, hence their iron rule. Likewise, the other world has been devastated by disease and they are taking all possible precautions to prevent it happening again.

Update August 2022 replaced missing video

Update March 2023 replaced missing video

Germany's Secret Air Force

Germany's Secret Air Force Mark Felton Productions
The title on this one intrigued me because I've run into Germany's Secret Air Force before when I was checking up on Babylon Berlin.

There were two kinds of radial engines used in early airplanes. There was the kind where the engine block is bolted to the airframe and the crankshaft rotates and turns the propeller. Then there is the Rotary engine where the crankshaft is bolted to the airframe and the entire engine block rotates and turns the propeller. There aren't too many of those around anymore, so I was intrigued to see some tinkering being done on a Rotary engine at the 5:30 mark.

Junkers CL.I

I was very surprised to see the all metal Junkers CL.I monoplane (at the 5:50 mark). I didn't think monoplanes appeared until around 1930. Germany really emphasized engineering. We didn't beat them in WW2 because we had sharper swords, we beat them because we had a thousand times as many war clubs. Alternately you could say we beat them because we all worked together, whereas German was busy destroying a significant portion of their population.

Babylon Berlin / Gustav Stresemann

1923-29: Stresemann's Strategy | GCSE History Revision | Weimar & Nazi Germany
Season 3 of Babylon Berlin begins and ends with the stock market crash of 1929. Midway through the last episode Gustav Stresemann's state funeral reminds Dr. Litten of an old bit of case law that can save his client, and a few minutes later Lotte's frantic run to deliver a crucial document runs afoul of the same funeral procession. So who's this Stresemann?

Gustav . . . was a German statesman who served as Chancellor in 1923 (for a brief period of 102 days) and Foreign Minister 1923–1929, during the Weimar Republic. He was co-laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.

A couple of black & white clips of the original funeral were included in the show.

I hadn't really considered that the Great Depression might have given a boost to Hitler. I mean, the Great Depression was something that happened in America, and Hitler happened in Germany. There couldn't possibly be a connection, could there? But now that I think about, it's pretty freaking obvious that there was a connection, wasn't there?

Babylon Berlin - Season 3

Babylon Berlin - Staffel 3 - Official Trailer - Sky Show [HD]
We started watching season 3 of Babylon Berlin this weekend. It's pretty intense. We took a break from watching dramas for about a month, and it's been a couple of years since we watched the first two seasons, so jumping back into this story was a bit of a shock. The stock market crash of 1929 is looming and Nazi thugs are making their presence known. Plus the local mafia has a traitor in their midst and our hero is carrying something of an albatross around his neck. Not a very happy state of affairs.

Before we started season 3, we went back and watched parts of a couple earlier episodes. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the story but I was surprised by how much stuff I had forgotten.

Previous posts about Babylon Berline here.

Dr. Jazz

Babylon Berlin

The Atlantic has a great story about Dr. Jazz. Reading through it I encountered a bunch of songs and a couple of movies. I had never heard of most of them. In any case, I looked up what I could find and put them in a YouTube playlist.

Here's are links to some relevant Wikipedia articles:

• Artie Shaw
• The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
• Breathless (1960 film)
• James Bond Theme

The introductions, at least, make some interesting reading.

Babylon Berlin has appeared here before.

Via Borepatch

Babylon Berlin

Babylon Berlin is a great show, it's got guys and dolls and heroes and villains and murder and mayhem. But it's also great because it portrays a country going through very trying times, struggling to find its way. And that, I think, is the more important part. It's entertaining and subconsciously instructive.

A bunch of stuff gets mentioned in the show which sound like they might be real things, but who knows? Maybe it was all made up, so I did a little checking, and it all turned out to be true. Okay the dates might not align perfectly, but they all happened in the period between World Wars 1 and 2, so close enough for the purposes of this story.

In the foreground we have vice cops chasing after pornographers and blackmailers, while in the background the nationalists are building a secret army.

Black Reichswehr was the name for the illegal paramilitary formations promoted by the German Reichswehr army during the time of the Weimar Republic; it was raised despite restrictions imposed by the Versailles Treaty.

Secret German airbase in Lipetsk Russia

A reporter claims that hundreds of people have been murdered by the nationalists. Pushed to extremes, or maybe just encouraged by demigogues, people resort to violence.

Schloss Drachenburg

Some of the conspirators have ties to large industrial firm that holds their board meetings in a fabulous castle (above). The place looks almost too perfect, too fabulous to be real, but it is not someone's CGI fantasy, it is a real castle.

There is an attempted coup in the show, which sounds a whole lot like the Küstrin Putsch. In the show, the coup revolves around assassinating French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand and German Foreign Minister Stresemann, who were both real people.

The assassinations are to take place at Theater am Schiffbauerdamm during a performance of Brecht's Threepenny Opera.


die moritat von mackie messer from the 1931 film

Songs from The Threepenny Opera have been widely covered and become standards, most notably "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" ("The Ballad of Mack the Knife") . . . 

The song "Mack the Knife" was witten by Kurt Weill for his wife Lotte Lenya. The leading lady of Babylon Berlin is called Lotte, short for Charlotte.

Phosgene WW2 Warning Poster

The evil princess Svetland Sorokin conspires with some anti-Stalinist conspirators to smuggle a fortune out of Russia disguised as just one more railroad tank car of Phosgene gas. The conspirators hook their treasure car onto the back of the train in Novorzhew, now in Russia, formerly part of the Soviet Union (map). Phosgene is some nasty shit.

In May 1924, eleven tons of phosgene escaped from a war surplus store in central Hamburg. Three hundred people were poisoned, of whom 10 died.

The Visit Berlin web site has a page devoted to some of buildings used in the show.

Redkino, Russia

Police surround a home in the small Russian town where Sergey Egorov shot and killed nine people on June 4. Dmitry Vinogradov / Sputnik / Scanpix / LETA

Babylon Berlin is just amazing. It's got all this weird stuff going on and I'm wondering how much of it is real. I start with Svetlana Sorokin just because she's such a stand out and, no, I don't find an heiress to a secret fortune in gold. I find it's a fairly common name. But wait, what's this at the bottom of the page, a story about a murder? Well, there is plenty of murder going on in the show, let's see what we've got. What we've got is guy losing his shit and killing a bunch of his neighbors. A horrible story, but I don't think I've ever seen a news report of this kind from Russia. I mean I am sure Russian media has horror stories just like we do, but I don't read Russian, so I don't know. But this story is in English, and it's not just a brief press release, it's a real story. Don't think I've ever seen the like. I hear English is common in Western Europe, so maybe it's making inroads to the East.

Streetview Cameraman, Redkino Russia

So I'm looking at a map of Redkino and I wonder if Google has recorded it with the Streetview cameras. It doesn't look like it, but zoom out and we find that a nearby highway has been recorded, and the nearby town of Tver, and hey, it seems a small part of central Redkino has been recorded as well. I zoom back in and find a short stretch of a blue line, so I take a look. It's a section of path a couple of dozen yards long that runs next to a railroad track. Looking around I see an industrial neighborhood, a couple of people walking, and the top of the guys head who is holding the camera. I'll be durned, Russians got hair on the top of their heads just like we do. I was kind of expecting horns.

Babylon Berlin

Babylon Berlin

We started this series tonight and it's pretty great. Hollywood Reporter sums it up nicely:

Based on a series of novels by German writer Volker Kutscher, the Raymond Chandler-esque crime story follows German detective Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch), who is sent to Berlin to investigate a porn ring run by the Russian mafia. The period epic — with a reported budget of $45 million, Babylon Berlin is the most expensive German-language TV series in history — is set against the social and political upheaval of Germany in 1929, when the world’s most modern and progressive society is threatened by rising right-wing extremism and a world economy teetering on the brink.

I looked for a trailer, but they were either in German, sans subtitles, or dubbed, which sucks, or in German with non-English subtitles, which don't do me any good. On Netflix it's in German with English subtitles, which suits me fine.