Berlin Station

Perhaps the best thing that has happened to a spy thriller since the first seasons of the Homeland and the Americans.

The series is good not only as a psychological game that keeps a viewer in suspense, and not only grâce à pleiad of excellent actors.

The central question of the series: how far can you go in an attempt to protect the state interests? And at what point does the pursuit of security become the source of this very danger?

This theme is consonant with the book I am currently reading: Save civil rights: freedom and safety by Gerhart Baum.

Baum is a German politician and lawyer. His tenure as a Federal Minister of the Interior coincided with the pick of activities of the infamous RAF, Rote Armee Fraktion. So he was obliged not in theory, but in practice to carry out the massive counter-terrorism campaign – and in the same time to guarde the constitutional rights of citizens, not to allow security measures to infringe civil freedom.

In the series, German workers of BfV (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution), as well as their American counterparts, very often violate the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable (to be fair, it is sometimes very blurred). And this leads to grave and unpredictable consequences.

So I recommend this series not only as entertainment, but also as a food for reflection.  It is especially relevant in our time, when the war on terror becomes more and more extensive.