The (Trans)national Appeal within 'Babylon Berlin?'

Abstract

This article examines Sky Atlantic’s 'Babylon Berlin' (Tom Tykwer, Henk Handloegten, Achim von Borries, 2017–), exploring national and transnational constructions in order to understand the series’ international appeal from the British perspective, in what Tim Bergfelder identifies as an “imaginary idea of the foreign”. This article analyses the series by applying Lawrence Venuti’s hermeneutic approach, adapted from translation studies. It treats the novels by Volker Kutscher on which the series is based as a source text, and the TV series as a target text, examining the discrepancies and interspaces between them, revealing an interplay between the national and the transnational. However, this is not immediately apparent to the viewer as notions of the transnational are buried and reframed in constructions of the national. It is this approach which enables the series to travel. 'Babylon Berlin' both plays into and profits from the universal appeal of the national.