It is to take place in 1933 which makes me wonder if the producers are going to skip over The Fatherland Files, which takes place in 1932, and go directly to The March Fallen. Maybe the show will use elements of both.
While I enjoyed the fourth season, I am ambivalent about the derivations from the source novel. It seems that they wanted to emphasize the rise of the Nazis whereas I recall that, in the novel, they were a growing cancer but a small tumor largely relegated to the background. Plus, I recall that Goldstein's identity and motivations remained obscured for much longer than the TV show.
Regardless, I am looking forward to see how the show ends and am hoping that Lunapark gets an English edition.
I enjoyed The Signal, on the whole. The ending was done well as it was rather neat and explained a mystery or two while others were left unsolved. But getting there was something of a mixed bag.
I'm trying to find a nice, concise way to explain the element or elements that left me less impressed. How's this: The Signal is a mix of sci-fi first contact a la Contact and some paranoid conspiracy thriller and the first one that comes to mind is Enemy of the State. Nothing wrong with that but I wish that it had been more of the former and less of the latter.
The enigma of the signal itself was downplayed - even got lost, at times - in favor of Earthly conspiracies and betrayals and the story of a family. I wish the events on the space station hadn't been shown so explicitly in the same way that what happened on the plane was kept shrouded in mystery for most of the show.
I guess I wanted to be tantalized by the signal itself more and see less of Sven and Charlie running from authorities.
The March Fallen provided one of the odder experiences I've
had with regards to reading a book. On the morning of 6 January I read the chapter
in which the Reichstag was torched in 1933 only to see later that day that rioters/insurrectionists
stormed the Capitol in Washington D.C. I had to wonder if those who took the
Capitol to stop the election certification would attempt to burn the place
down. Luckily they did not.
This is the fifth book in the Gereon Rath series
by German author Volker Kutscher. The first two books, Babylon Berlin
and The Silent Death, have been adapted for TV as Babylon Berlin
and is available on Netflix for those of us in the States. The books take place
in Weimar Germany beginning in the spring of 1929 and my understanding is that
the series will continue until the start of World War II in September 1939 when
Germany invades Poland.
Rath is a police detective who has fled his native Cologne
for Berlin after he accidentally kills a man. He is given a ribbing by his
new co-workers for being a country bumpkin in the big city. Berlin was and
still is, from what I gather, the hedonistic capital of Germany. Perhaps even of
Europe more generally. You can really let your freak flag fly there. During the
1920s there was cabaret, various erotic clubs where transvestitism was often
not frowned upon, drugs, prostitution – a place of decadence and transgression.
Rath is a good Catholic boy in a den of sin.
This time around Rath is investigating the death of a World War I veteran whose body is found underneath a rail overpass. It being February 1933, he now he has to contend with a police department that is becoming ever more politicized as the police chief is a Nazi.
The Nazi presence/menace has been around since the first book and gotten more prominent with each succeeding one. With The March Fallen they have stepped out of the background and into the light. It's early 1933 so Hitler is chancellor, not dictator, but he is a polarizing figure for the characters. Swastikas are to be found hanging in public and the SA, a Nazi paramilitary organization, roams the streets having basically been deputized in service of the police. Some are dyed in the wool believers in the Nazi cause while others, like Rath's fiancé Charlotte Ritter who is trying to break the police gender barrier, are adamantly opposed. Others join the Nazis out of sheer self-interest or just to stay out of their crosshairs. Germany has begun dancing on the edge of the volcano. We the readers know how things pan out and so the political backdrop adds more layers of tension beyond the murder mystery at the heart of the story.
While Rath is an angel in contrast to the Nazis, he is far from perfect. Earlier in the series he was addicted to morphine as a result of his experiences in the war. Here, he continues his relationship with the Berlin mafia, the Ringvereine, and, in one scene, he and Charlotte dispose of some evidence, shall we say. Plus he engages in a little blackmail.
One of the neat elements of these books is how Berlin itself
is almost a character akin to London in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. It's quite the milieu of rich and poor, exotic dancers
and construction workers, communists and democrats, and so on. Rath's work
takes him all around Berlin and Kutscher rattles off all kinds of places that would
have been or are familiar to Berliners – Alexanderplatz, the Ku'damm (think
State Street, my fellow Madisonians), the ginormous KaDeWe department store (I
thought of the Marshall Fields on State Street in Chicago), and so on. The
variety of locations makes the city come alive on the page which makes for wonderful
reading even if I have to look up many of the locations.
While there are eight books in the series thus far, only the first five have been translated into English. And, sadly, only the first three have been published in the States so you may need to find an independent bookseller abroad to get volumes 4 and 5. But do take the plunge.
A stash of previously unknown fairy tales collected in the 19th century have recently been uncovered.
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
No collection of fine Teutonic fairy tales is complete without some ultra-violence.
For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch.
You can read one of the tales, "The Turnip Princess", here.
