Hendrik Handloegten

The best idea in Babylon Berlin (2017) is that nobody in it knows what we know. It is Berlin in 1929, the Weimar Republic has four years left, and everyone carries on as if it had forty. Hendrik Handloegten created the series with Tom Tykwer and Achim von Borries, adapting Volker Kutscher's crime novels, and the three of them share the writing and directing. If Handloegten has a signature, it is this: history told through the people standing in it rather than from above, and he has said as much himself. "We always tell the story from the perspective of our characters, and we stick to things that actually happened."

He came out of the Berlin film school, the dffb, with Paul Is Dead (2000), then wrote and directed Liegen lernen (2003), about growing up in the 1980s. The same year he co-wrote Good Bye, Lenin (2003) for Wolfgang Becker, in which a son hides a political upheaval from his mother. Our review found it funny and affecting, kept believable by Daniel Brühl and Katrin Sass, and noted that the story stretches further than the premise comfortably allows, which is a note against the script and so, in part, against him. He co-wrote Love in Thoughts (2004), made Summer Window (2011), and directed episodes of Tatort and Polizeiruf 110, the kind of crime television that teaches a writer how a procedural moves.

Then came the trio. Handloegten has worked with von Borries six times and Tykwer five, and the way they build Babylon Berlin is to divide scenes by location or point of view while passing the scripts between them. That makes his contribution hard to pick out, and we will not pretend to. What we can say is that the programme's virtue is the city, rebuilt in sets and costume and music, and we sat through sixteen episodes, delivered as two runs a month apart in the autumn of 2017, and did not want to leave a place we knew was doomed; there is a particular dread in watching people plan for a future we know they will not get. The fault is the plot, which wants to be a police procedural, a political thriller and a portrait of a city at once and asks the viewer to hold more than it can carry. Liv Lisa Fries holds it together; the scripts do not always help her.

The one reservation anyone raises about the series is whether three writers and directors can keep the quality up across so many episodes, and on our evidence the answer is: mostly. Fritzi Haberlandt, who has appeared in four of his projects, is the actor he returns to. Next he has co-written Fatherland (2026) for Paweł Pawlikowski, about Thomas Mann's return to Germany in 1949. Another year the country would rather skip, then, and another set of people who cannot see round the corner. He seems to like it there.