Babylon Berlin

THE BASIS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TV SENSATION BABYLON BERLIN "Cabaret on cocaine...captures the dark glamour of a briefly exhilarating time between the wars." --NPR Babylon Berlin is the first book in the international-bestselling series from Volker Kutscher that centers on Detective Gereon Rath caught up in a web of drugs, sex, political intrigue, and murder in Berlin as Germany teeters on the edge of Nazism. It’s 1929 and Berlin is the vibrating metropolis of post-war Germany—full of bars and brothels and dissatisfied workers at the point of revolt. Gereon Rath is new in town and new to the police department. When a dead man without an identity, bearing traces of atrocious torture, is discovered, Rath sees a chance to find his way back into the homicide division. He discovers a connection with a circle of oppositional exiled Russians who try to purchase arms with smuggled gold in order to prepare a coup d’état. But there are other people trying to get hold of the gold and the guns, too. Raths finds himself up against paramilitaries and organized criminals. He falls in love with Charlotte, a typist in the homicide squad, and misuses her insider’s knowledge for his personal investigations. And as he gets further entangled with the case, he never imagined becoming a suspect himself. “The first in a series that’s been wildly popular in Germany is an excellent police procedural that cleverly captures the dark and dangerous period of the Weimer Republic before it slides into the ultimate evil of Nazism.”—Kirkus Reviews “Conjures up the dangerous decadence of the Weimar years, with blood on the Berlin streets and the Nazis lurking menacingly in the wings.”—The Sunday Times (London) “James Ellroy fans will welcome Kutscher’s first novel and series launch, a fast-paced blend of murder and corruption sent in 1929 Berlin.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From CWA Gold Dagger winner Mick Herron comes a shocking, twisted novel of psychological suspense about one woman's attempt to be better than ordinary. Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice. Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk. Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero—if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.

THE BASIS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TV SENSATION BABYLON BERLIN “[Kutscher's] trick is ingenious...He's created a portrait of an era through the lens of genre fiction.”—The New York Times Volker Kutscher, author of the international bestseller Babylon Berlin, continues his Gereon Rath Mystery series with The Silent Death as a police inspector investigates the crime and corruption of a decadent 1930s Berlin in the shadows the growing Nazi movement. March 1930: The film business is in a process of change. Talking films are taking over the silver screen and many a producer, cinema owner, and silent movie star is falling by the wayside. Celebrated actress Betty Winter is hit by a spotlight while filming a talkie. At first it looks like an accident, but Superintendent Gereon Rath findsclues that point to murder. While his colleagues suspect the absconded lighting technician, Rath’s investigations take him in a completely different direction, and he is soon left on his own. Steering clear of his superior who wants him off the case, Rath’s life gets more complicated when his father asks him to help Cologne mayor Konrad Adenauerwith a case of blackmail, and ex-girlfriend Charly tries to renew their relationship—all while tensions between Nazis and Communists escalate to violence.

The Basis for the International TV Sensation Babylon Berlin One of CrimeReads's Favorite Crime Books of the Year (Selected by Paul French) Volker Kutscher, author of the international bestseller Babylon Berlin, continues his Gereon Rath Mystery series with Goldstein as a police inspector investigates the crime and corruption of a decadent 1930s Berlin in the shadows of the growing Nazi movement. Berlin, 1931. A power struggle is taking place in Berlin's underworld. The American gangster Abraham Goldstein is in residence at the Hotel Excelsior. As a favour to the FBI, the police put him under surveillance with Detective Gereon Rath on the job. As Rath grows bored and takes on a private case for his seedy pal Johann Marlow, he soon finds himself in the middle of a Berlin street war. Meanwhile Rath's on-off girlfriend, Charly, lets a young woman she is interrogating escape, and soon her investigations cross Rath's from the other side. Berlin is a divided city where two worlds are about to collide: the world of the American gangster and the expanding world of Nazism. “[Kutscher's] trick is ingenious...He's created a portrait of an era through the lens of genre fiction.”—The New York Times

1933: A homeless veteran is found dead under railway arches in Berlin, apparently killed by an army dagger. Gereon Rath is brought onto the case just as the Reichstag mysteriously burns down. Unsettled by the Nazis’ tightening grip, he and Charlotte Ritter must also contend with their political colleagues. The new Germany is frightening, but police work must go on even among book-burning and marching, rising paranoia and fear.

1932: A drowned man is found in a freight elevator in the giant pleasure palace on Potsdamer Platz, far from any standing water. Inspector Gereon Rath’s hunt for a mysterious contract killer has stalled, but this new case will take him to a small town on the Polish border and confrontation with the rising Nazi party.

This seductive sourcebook of rare visual delights from pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture, inspiring hip club goers, filmmakers, gay historians, graphic designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson. This expanded edition includes “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan cults and their often-bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” Mel Gordon is professor of theater at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also the author of Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Feral House).

During the late nineteenth century the city of Berlin developed such a reputation for lawlessness and sexual licentiousness that it came to be known as the "Whore of Babylon." Out of this reputation for debauchery grew an unusually rich discourse around prostitution. In Berlin Coquette, Jill Suzanne Smith shows how this discourse transcended the usual clichés about prostitutes and actually explored complex visions of alternative moralities or sexual countercultures including the "New Morality" articulated by feminist radicals, lesbian love, and the "New Woman." Combining extensive archival research with close readings of a broad spectrum of texts and images from the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, Smith recovers a surprising array of productive discussions about extramarital sexuality, women’s financial autonomy, and respectability. She highlights in particular the figure of the cocotte (Kokotte), a specific type of prostitute who capitalized on the illusion of respectable or upstanding womanhood and therefore confounded easy categorization. By exploring the semantic connections between the figure of the cocotte and the act of flirtation (of being coquette), Smith’s work presents flirtation as a type of social interaction through which both prostitutes and non-prostitutes in Imperial and Weimar Berlin could express extramarital sexual desire and agency.

Challenges the notion that Weimar Jews sought to be invisible or indistinguishable from other Germans by "passing" as non-Jews

Call of Cthulhu 7th edition Sourcebook and scenarios.