Volker Bruch keeps things back. His Gereon Rath in Babylon Berlin hides a tremor rather than show it, and Bruch plays the man that way throughout. It makes him a dependable anchor for a large cast and a lead who is easy to look past.
Fi1m perspective
Watch his hands. In Babylon Berlin (2017) Gereon Rath comes from Cologne to recover a film reel, and the first thing Bruch tells us about him is not what he wants but what he is hiding: his hands shake, and he covers it with morphine rather than let anyone see. That is the performance in small. Bruch plays men who keep things back, and he plays Rath so consistently closed that for long stretches he is the least interesting person in his own story. That is an odd thing to say about a lead, and in this case it is partly the design of the series.
The career has been almost entirely twentieth-century Germany. After small television parts, 2008 put him in the ensembles of The Reader, The Baader Meinhof Complex and The Red Baron, where he was Lothar von Richthofen. The breakthrough was Generation War (2013), the miniseries about five friends in the Second World War, with Bruch as Wilhelm Winter at its centre. Then Rath, a part he has held across five series through 2026 and which has given him an audience abroad. Philipp Kadelbach has directed him twice. The English-language work, The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018) and Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia (2024), has so far been a sideline.
What works is the stillness. A cast the size of Babylon Berlin's needs someone who does not compete for attention, and Bruch lets a scene happen around him and registers it a beat late, while Liv Lisa Fries's Charlotte Ritter does the moving. Most actors cannot bear not to be watched; he can. We were more affected by those hidden hands than by anything Rath says aloud, because Bruch never asks us to notice them. We caught him at it, and felt we had seen something we were not meant to.
The same reserve is the cost. Over a long run we cannot always tell whether Rath is closed because there is something inside or because that is what the actor has brought, and the series around him is so busy that the question can go unanswered for an hour at a time. Bruch has said of the part that "Viele Wege führen zum Absturz", many roads lead to the fall, and the writers have given him a good many roads. He walks them all at the same careful pace.
He is a period actor by habit as much as by casting, and the hats and coats suit him. We would like to see him in the present day, in a part where nobody lets him hide his hands.
Biography
Volker Bruch is a German actor. He was born on 9 March 1980 in Munich and trained at the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna from 2001 to 2004.
Bruch is best known for his leading roles as Wilhelm Winter in the 2013 television drama Generation War and as Inspector Gereon Rath in the series Babylon Berlin (2017–present). He has appeared in films including The Reader (2008), The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) and The Girl in the Spider's Web (2018). For his work in Babylon Berlin, he received a 2018 Grimme-Preis.
