Newly arrived from Cologne’s police department, our morphine-addicted hero and shell-shocked World War I veteran Inspector Gereon Rath (Volker Bruch) is in Berlin to track down and destroy an incriminating p*rnographic photo and film reel of family friend, Dr. Adenauer. During his search, he accidentally stumbles upon plots and plans not knowing what they might lead to.
The real Dr. Konrad Adenauer (1876-1967) was a pious Catholic, family man and was Mayor of Cologne from 1917-1933. Later he was President of the Prussian State Council focusing on Germany’s post-WW II economic recovery by restoring West Germany’s market-based liberal democracy. A staunch anti-Communist and anti-Nazi, he became the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union whose political party became the dominant force refusing to recognize the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). While he was Chancellor (1949-63), West Germany joined NATO and signed the Treaty of Rome (1957). He is a Founding Father of the European Union.
Rath’s arrival in Season 1 coincides with Germany’s “Goldene Zwanziger:” an era that ushered in world-wide gains in cultural and historical progress, economic prosperity, popular entertainment (jazz clubs, cabarets, dancehalls; silent films and talkies); technology (radio, automobiles, telephones, electricity) and the culmination of the women’s suffrage movement (voting rights; short dresses and hair). The Golden Twenties in Germany also saw an extremist reaction against the socio-economic deprivation and political turmoil resulting from WWI (1914-1918) following the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm V and Germany’s surrender to the Allies under Weimar-elected President Paul von Hindenburg (1918-1933). Von Hindenburg’s constitutional federal democracy — established in the Weimar Assembly – led to a politically and economically weakened Germany hampered by restitution payments, hyperinflation, high unemployment, territorial surrender, social and political unrest fueled by political extremism and anti-Semitism.
The 1925 Treaty of Versailles called for Allied withdrawal from the Rhineland. However, Germany’s noncompliance with disarmament provisions resulted in financial and diplomatic damage inflicted by France and Britain. Moreover, under the 1925 Locarno Treaty, Britain and Italy guaranteed the borders of France, Belgium, and Germany by formalizing the post-War territorial settlement between the Western European Allies and the defeated German Reich (Weimar Republic) resulting in the creation of the new Central and Eastern European states. German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann negotiated the Locarno Treaty hoping to restore Germany’s reputation and prestige as a leading European nation. The Treaty also forbade Germany from going to war with the other countries; the western border was guaranteed by the Locarno Treaty, but Germany’s eastern borders with Poland could be revised.
