Lee Heidhues 7.5.2023
We are going back to Berlin for the first time in five years later this year.
A good way to get the feel for how the spoken German sounds and explore what attracts the German viewer is to stream.
Two series.
One about the underside of the German banking system. Bad Banks.
Another about German law enforcement and its intersection in politics and the migrant community. Sleeping Dog.
Watching these German dramas is also a nice way to escape the hum drum offered by the American entertainment industry.
Viewing the photography of Berlin and Frankfurt (in Bad Banks) shows me places we saw on previous visits and puts on display sites we may want to visit later this year.
Bad Banks
Excerpted from Goethe Institut USA
MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND… AND DOWN THE TUBES.
The opening of Bad Banks comes on like a disaster movie, only the calamity here is financial: as a TV news broadcast warns of a banking collapse that’s “five times worse than the fall of Lehman Brothers,” an angry crowd swarming around an ATM discovers there’s no cash left and starts rioting in the streets of Frankfurt’s financial district, the Wall Street of Germany. Anyone in a suit and tie is assumed to be a banker and a fair target for the enraged mob. Even with tear gas and barricades, the police can’t contain the uprising.
A lone figure in a hoodie skirts the violence to slip into a side entrance of an office high-rise. This is young investment banker Jana (Paula Beer), and as she navigates the debris-strewn hallways of her firm, a shell-shocked colleague blames her for causing the disaster.
The show then backtracks eight weeks to the day Jana is fired from her gig at a prestigious Luxembourger firm, apparently for upstaging a grossly sexist executive. In a milieu where getting fired is akin to death, she’s humiliated, devastated. But then comes a surprise offer to work at a powerhouse investment bank in Frankfurt, the rival to her previous employer. The near-apocalyptic opening teaser thus sets up an intriguing mystery: how could quietly competent Jana be the one to cause so much havoc? Millions of viewers have succumbed to this irresistible narrative hook and binge-watched the first season of Bad Banks.
https://www.goethe.de/ins/us/en/kul/tec/sef/21475491.html
Sleeping Dog
Excerpted from Heaven Horror
SLEEPING DOG is a new Netflix series in the crime and thriller genres. It’s from Germany (org. title: Schlafende Hunde) but the series is actually based on the 2016 series The Exchange Principle from Israel. In fact, this is a remake with just a few changes.
There are six hour-long episodes in the series and there’s a huge mystery looming over everyone and everything from the very beginning. It’s very much a character-driven story and it works very well. Nobody seems to be entirely good or bad, which results in many gray areas!
Top photo – Paula Beer takes a star turn as the amoral ethically compromised banker in Bad Banks
Lee's Perspective 