It’s the global hit TV series that pulled audiences straight into the chaotic hedonism of 1920s Germany, dramatising the brilliance and brittleness of a newly built democratic system with unprecedented ambition.

But in the 13 years that the German makers of Babylon Berlin have worked on the show, modern democracies from the US to Hungary to South Korea have come under pressure in ways the creators say they could never have imagined when they started.

Now they are preparing to unveil the fifth and final season, culminating in Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the same week that Germany will face one of the biggest tests of its postwar order in a watershed state election.

The timing, they insist, is pure coincidence, but is fitting for an ambitious programme set a century ago during the Weimar republic that has always felt eerily prescient.

As the team gets ready to sign off, the inexorable end of the story is now upon the familiar characters of the noirish police procedural, with its lush period sets and frisson of impending doom.

“It’s no longer a dance on the rim of the volcano,” said lead actor Liv Lisa Fries, using a German idiom for the explosion of avant garde culture and sexual liberation in the 1920s before the descent into fascism. “We’re in the volcano itself.”

Fries plays the series’ intrepid working-class heroine Charlotte Ritter, who works her way up from secretarial duties and underworld sex work to become the first female detective on the Berlin police force.

Her co-star Volker Bruch is Gereon Rath, a shellshocked first world war veteran whose eventful odyssey through the trauma of his era bears a resemblance to Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster, The Odyssey.

But the more striking parallel is Germany in 2026.

(...)