‘Babylon Berlin’ Is Coming to an End — Finale Date, Time & Preview Revealed

Few series have captured the slow unraveling of a democracy quite like this one has over the past decade. For nearly ten years, audiences have watched Weimar-era Berlin lurch from decadence toward disaster, and that long, unsettling journey is now just weeks away from its conclusion.

‘Babylon Berlin’ first premiered in 2017 as one of the most ambitious non-English-language productions ever attempted, following detective Gereon Rath and his partner Charlotte Ritter through a city teetering between glamour and chaos. Over four seasons, the show built a passionate global following while chronicling Germany’s descent from the wild optimism of the late 1920s toward the darkness that would soon consume it.

That descent finally reaches its endpoint this fall. All eight episodes of the fifth and final season will land on German public broadcaster ARD’s on-demand platform on September 10, with the show also airing on television in two four-episode blocks on September 19 and September 25.

The final season picks up in January 1933, immediately following Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, and carries the story through the aftermath of the Reichstag fire in late February. It’s the exact historical turning point the series has been building toward since its very first episode, and it finally puts Rath and Ritter directly in the path of the regime’s earliest, most violent power grabs.

Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries are both returning to close out their roles as Rath and Ritter, joined by a deep bench of returning cast members that includes Benno Fürmann, Lars Eidinger, Christian Friedel, and Martin Wuttke, among others. New additions to the ensemble for this final chapter include Clemens Schick, Ulrich Noethen, and Devid Striesow.

Series creators Henk Handloegten, Achim von Borries, and Tom Tykwer are once again handling writing and directing duties, closing out the story they’ve been shaping since the show’s inception. When the season was greenlit, the trio described February 1933 as a period when German society was torn apart faster than almost any other moment in the country’s history, framing the final season as an exploration of the impossible choices facing ordinary people caught in that collapse.

Getting to this finale wasn’t a guarantee. The show’s future was thrown into doubt years ago when former partner Sky Deutschland pulled out of scripted programming entirely, leaving ARD, Beta Film, and X Filme Creative Pool to commit to finishing the story on their own. That leap of faith paid off, and the final season was ultimately produced through ARD Degeto alongside regional broadcasters WDR, SWR, HR, and Radio Bremen.

‘Babylon Berlin’s’ path to American audiences has been rockier than its domestic success might suggest. After Netflix carried the first three seasons and then dropped the show, it found a new home in 2024 on the boutique streamer MHz Choice, which premiered season four last year and is expected to bring the finale stateside in early 2027.

The ending isn’t the only way fans will get to revisit this world. Alongside the final season, the creative team is rolling out a ‘Babylon Berlin’-themed video game developed with SWR X Lab, a behind-the-scenes documentary from director Christian Jakob, and an audio drama series set within the show’s universe.

For a series that has spent ten years dramatizing how quickly a fragile democracy can collapse, ending on the days surrounding the Reichstag fire feels less like a plot device and more like the only place this story could ever have been headed. What are your hopes for how ‘Babylon Berlin’ wraps up its decade-long story? Share your thoughts in the comments.