Cinema and Media Studies

Since its inception in 2017 the series, a neo-noir thriller set in Berlin in the final years of the Weimar republic, has reached audiences throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas and has been met with both critical and popular acclaim. As a visual work rife with historical and contemporary citations Babylon Berlin offers its audience a panoramic view of politics, crime, culture, gender, and sexual relations in the German capital.

Focusing especially on the intermedial and transhistorical dimensions of the series, across four parts-Babylon Berlin, Global Media and Fan Culture; The Look and Sound of Babylon Berlin; Representing Weimar History; and Weimar Intertexts-the volume brings together an interdisciplinary and international group of scholars to critically examine various facets of the show, including its aesthetic form and citation style, its representation of the history and politics of the late Weimar Republic, and its exemplary status as a blockbuster production of neoliberal media culture.

Considering the series from the perspective of a variety of disciplines, Babylon Berlin, German Visual Spectacle, and Global Media Culture is essential reading for students of film, TV, media studies, and visual culture on German Studies, History, and European Studies programmes.

In Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 film Fire at Sea, the haunting duality of Lampedusa—an idyllic island off the coast of Sicily—unfolds. By day, a slingshot-wielding local kid named Samuele explores woodlands, blissfully unaware of the migrant crisis that engulfs his home. By night, navy warships patrol dark waters, their radios echoing the desperate pleas of migrants lost at sea. Lampedusa, once serene, has become a primary transit hub for those fleeing Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Their perilous journey across the Mediterranean, often on overcrowded makeshift boats, is the deadliest migration route globally.

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the figuration of migratory movement in A Seventh Man (1975), a photo-essay reportage produced by the writer John Berger and the photographer Jean Mohr, and Transit (2018), a film by the German director Christian Petzold. It seeks to make sense of the curious figure of the migrant one finds in Petzold’s film (based loosely on Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel by the same name about World War II refugees). As a close reading of the film shows, Transit rejects the coherence of the history or period film genre, plays with multiple generic forms, uses incongruous modes of narration, and introduces a protagonist who pretends to be someone else and whose time is therefore someone else’s time. In these ways, the film ties the figure of the migrant to an experience of time that is essentially one of discontinuity and crisis—time as a superimposition of discordant temporalities. To set in relief the historical novelty of such a migratory figure, the chapter approaches Transit through a reading of A Seventh Man, a text that relates the temporal discord of migratory movement to the Marxist historical schema of combined and uneven development. What is new about Transit, and what the film offers as a distinct problem for the figuration of migration in our own situation, is precisely the waning or even the absence of any such historical schema or shared temporal horizon. Based on this diagnosis, the chapter argues, the task of the figuration of migratory movement today lies in reinventing a shared sense of temporal existence, a collective time that would allow the figure of the migrant to not only inscribe the crises of our present moment but also prefigure future forms of emancipation.