Babylon Berlin

X Filme Creative Pool secured the film rights to Volker Kutscher's best-selling novels (over one million copies sold) in 2012, with the first planning for the series beginning in October 2013.

Novelist Volker Kutscher saw the series as being in the tradition of successful US shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under and Boardwalk Empire, which brought horizontally-told stories to television.

Babylon Berlin was Tom Tykwer's second television production after the Netflix series Sense8.

Casting for around 5,000 extras took place in April 2016, alongside roughly 300 speaking roles for the first two seasons.

Instead of splitting episodes between the three directors, three separate teams each handled a specific filming location, so every episode of the first two seasons was made under the joint responsibility of all three directors, who had also co-written every scene together.

On Sunday 19 June 2016, Alexanderplatz was completely closed off for filming; the production used the Berolinahaus and Alexanderhaus buildings even though, historically, their construction had not yet begun at the time the story is set.

A vacant classicist Deutsche Bank office complex on Mauerstraße, empty for renovations in 2016, provided around 30 filming locations, including all interior scenes of the police headquarters ('Red Fortress'), the Moka Efti cellar, the Köpenick print shop, and hotel rooms.

The show's massive backlot set 'Neue Berliner Straße' (international name 'Metropolitan Backlot') at Studio Babelsberg was finally built thanks to the TV production, after previously being shelved in 2014 due to liquidity problems.

With a budget of about €40 million that rose to €55 million due to reshoots, Babylon Berlin became the most expensive German television production and the most expensive non-English-language drama series ever made.

Composers Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer had their orchestral pieces recorded by the MDR Symphony Orchestra under conductor Kristjan Järvi in July 2016, while the club numbers were performed by the newly formed Moka Efti Orchestra.

British pop singer Bryan Ferry made a guest appearance as a nightclub singer in episode ten, and bands Meute and LaBrassBanda also contributed songs and cameo performances.

The title 'Babylon Berlin' alludes to the ancient city of Babylon and the biblical allegory of the 'Whore of Babylon,' reflecting how 1920s Berlin was often compared to the ancient metropolis, from Jugendstil architecture to the naming of the Babylon cinema that opened in 1929.

The opening title sequence, designed by Saskia Marka, evokes the expressionist and Dadaist works of Walter Ruttmann and Hans Richter, and the end credits are overlaid with excerpts from Ruttmann's film Opus 2.