There is one experience we in Germany can all find mildly satisfying this autumn, as we watch the dark and terrifying final season of the hit TV series Babylon Berlin. We know everything those fearless (a few of them) or frightened (many more) and opportunistic (the majority) people on the screen do not. We know their future.

Made by the public broadcaster ARD, Babylon Berlin has run for over 10 years, brilliantly fictionalising how Germany sleepwalked into nazism and the second world war. The fifth and last season begins in January 1933 with Adolf Hitler appointed Reichskanzler.

Our funny and beautiful police detective superheroine Charlotte Ritter and the also beautiful, less funny and slightly more dubious detective Gereon Rath – both fictional – are still arguing and falling in and out of love as they chase criminals and Nazis, who are becoming synonymous. Berlin is still singing, dancing. loving. Newspapers are still being printed. Trains still run. The Jewish lawyer Hans Litten – a historical figure – still believes in German laws and German integrity (the real Litten ended up killing himself in Dachau in 1938).

Watching the show 93 years after the events being depicted, I constantly want to shout at the screen: turn left here – you can kill Hitler at this dinner, and the Reichstag won’t burn, and it will all end differently. Wake up, I want to scream at the opportunistic majority – don’t you understand what is happening?

They don’t, of course. They turn the other way and fail to kill Hitler. Because facts are facts. The dramatists are accurately describing February 1933 as the month in which German society was radically torn apart at an extraordinary speed because of mistakes made by party leaders and others who could still have stopped it all. ⁠

The timing could hardly be more apt. Babylon Berlin began streaming in 2017, the year the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) entered the Bundestag for the first time with 12.6 % of the vote. Nine years on, the AfD has become my country’s dominant political force. In September it won 44% of the vote........

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