Volker Kutscher: The man who brought Weimar history into Germany’s living rooms

The German author, whose series of detective novels set in Weimar Berlin has been adapted into a popular television show, speaks to Christopher F Schuetze about the alarming parallels between Germany in the 1930s and today

Volker Bruch as Inspector Gereon Rath, the flawed hero of 'Babylon Berlin' (Netflix/Babylon Berlin)

Like many people, Volker Kutscher reads daily newspapers to keep up with things. What’s less usual is that the two papers he relies on, the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Tageblatt, have been out of print for more than seven decades.

In the papers – which he reads front to back on microfilm in the city’s old state library, weeks’ worth in one sitting – he finds news of violent demonstrations, rising rents, traffic accidents, robberies and murders. He finds reviews of risqué cabarets, modern theatre and promising new media (talking films). And in federal politics, there is endless news of weak coalition governments that take far too long to form.

To modern Germans, all this “news” would seem eerily familiar.

The ritual is part of a painstaking research effort that has led to a series of seven best-selling detective novels and Babylon Berlin, a blockbuster TV series based on them. The books and the TV show, set in the Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s, have fed into a national discussion about the Weimar Republic, the roots of German democracy, the rise of the Nazis and the pressing question of whether history might be repeating itself.

Kutscher has sold more than 1.7 million books in Germany, while tens of millions have watched the TV show there. Three of his books are available in translation, and Babylon Berlin has been subsequently broadcast in the UK, the US and elsewhere.

“His trick is ingenious,” says Tom Tykwer, the co-creator and co-director of Babylon Berlin. “He’s created a portrait of an era through the lens of genre fiction.”

Having spent a good part of his professional life immersed in the two tumultuous decades between two world wars, the former journalist, born in 1962, has found success as Germans have increasingly become fascinated with the era.

By bringing an American-style detective story to Weimar Berlin – a city Kutscher describes as the most American European city – he has helped popularise an era that has remained shrouded in Germany because of the monstrosities and guilt of the Nazi era that succeeded it. His novels have become almost essential reading in a German discussion about the creation of the modern democratic state, founded 100 years ago.

And with the contemporary rise of populist nationalism and the perception that – despite a booming, culturally blossoming era – chaos is at the doorstep, the era is one that many Germans recognise as a mirror, if a warped one, of their present-day country.

Volker Kutscher: creating a portrait of an era through the lens of genre fiction (Alamy) (Alamy Stock Photo)

“I’m very much against direct comparisons: to say that we live in the Weimar Republic again is not – luckily – true,” says Kutscher, before gamely pointing out the key differences.

The modern German economy is humming, whereas in 1929, the year Kutscher’s first novel is set, the stock market crash had shaken a nation already traumatised by hyperinflation. The current populists, the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, who entered Parliament in 2017 for the first time, are not the National Socialists.

“But when I started writing, I would not have thought that we would once more live in a time where democracy is similarly endangered,” he says.

Daniel Schönpflug, a historian of the era, has praised Babylon Berlin for its historical accuracy and for making the era accessible to a wide audience.

Kutscher has done this in part by giving his characters modern habits and placing well-known brands in the story.

“Some of my characters shower almost every day, which wasn’t normal then, but I wanted them to be relatable,” he says. “They are just much cleaner than their brethren.”

Kutscher admits that part of his success is luck. His works became best-sellers at a time when Germans were ready to re-examine the Weimar Republic. Tykwer, of Babylon Berlin, concurs.

“We started writing the script in 2013,” he says, “and it was almost uncanny how the real world around us seemed to want to conform to the era we were describing.”

Besides the £36m TV show – the most expensive ever made in Germany – the books have spawned radio theatre, a comic book, a podcast and walking tours. Kutscher created one picture book with Kat Menschik, a well-known illustrator, that tells the back story of one of the characters in his world without being part of the detective series.

Like his main character, dogged and ethically compromised police inspector Gereon Rath, Kutscher is actually not a Berliner, but a longtime resident of Cologne.

£36m

Babylon Berlin’s budget, the largest ever for a German television show

He grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in Wipperfürth, a small market town in the west of the country, far from the Berlin hustle. After college, where he studied German literature and history, he landed a trainee position at the Kölnische Rundschau, a regional paper. He was offered a full-time job after graduation, but it came with a catch: he would have to cover his hometown, the very place he was trying to leave.

“It was like being the priest or the mayor, maybe less important, but you were visible and had to be responsible,” he says.

Kutscher’s love for Berlin and the Weimar era came through its literature (which because of his novels is experiencing renewed popularity). In the mid-1980s, he started regularly visiting the city, going to East Berlin to follow the footsteps of writers Alfred Döblin and Erich Kästner. He draws on his memories of the greyness he experienced there in imagining Berlin in the 1920s, he says.

“The city was much less colourful then,” he says during our interview, in a hip Berlin hotel situated on the spot where a fictional tobacconist introduces Inspector Rath to Camel Cigarettes in 1931.

After seven years as the local editor of the paper, he quit to focus on his project: a series of books that would document the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Nazi era. Since he had written only three relatively unknown local crime thrillers (a relatively new genre in Germany at the time), finding a publisher to consider such a hefty project took nearly two years. By the time Kiepenheuer & Witsch signed on for the first book – with options for the following manuscripts – he had almost given up and was looking for his next job in journalism.

“The goal really was just to be able to do this full time,” he says. That was assured after his third book, Goldstein, came out in 2010 and made it onto the German best-seller list (the third of his books translated into English).

His latest novel, Marlow, yet to be translated, is set in the city after the Nazis have come to power. In it, the Vossische Zeitung has closed after a more than two-century run, while liberal Berliner Tageblatt, in Jewish hands since its founding in 1872, has been taken over by the Nazis.

Kutscher still forces himself to read it, to know what his characters, navigating Berlin in 1935, would have read.

“It’s just awful now,” he says.

© New York Times