From Kahn to Kollwitz: Exploring the Significance of Art and Visual Culture in Babylon Berlin

Far from simply representing Weimar’s modernist inventions, art and visual culture—old and new, international and national, high and low—jostles for the viewer’s attention in Babylon Berlin. It shapes both the narrative action and mise-en-scène. Fritz Kahn’s infographics depicting machinist physiologies inspire the filmic resolution in “Dämonen der Leidenschaft,” whereas abstract prints by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, and landscapes by German romantic painter, Carl Blechen, reveal the Weltanschauung of characters. In a republic that enshrined freedom and equality as basic rights of the individual, close analysis of posters by artists Josef Fenneker and Käthe Kollwitz, uncovers the conflicting realities with which protagonists Helga Rath and Charlotte Ritter are confronted.

The series demands that viewers look at artworks from this period not as socially detached objects in galleries and museums, but rather seek to reinsert them back into many of the lived, social spaces in which they would have been originally encountered.