Heaven or Helgoland
In Helgoland 513, the survivors of a deadly pandemic must live together under barbaric rules that mean the population can never increase. Creators Florian Wentsch and Veronica Priefer and executive producer Oliver Ossege discuss the very modern roots of this dystopian drama.
Ten years in the making, German drama Helgoland 513 unfolds in a dystopian future where a deadly pandemic has decimated humanity.
It’s 2039 and the island of Helgoland is home to 513 residents who have escaped the horrors of the mainland. But resources are scarce, and to ensure there is enough to go around, a strict rule is in place to keep the population under control – namely that for every baby born, another resident must give up their life.
To determine who should sacrifice themselves in the event that no one volunteers, every member of the community is given a ranking in terms of their performance. Usefulness sees them climb the order of importance, while missteps may prove fatal.
Helgoland’s only doctor, Marek (Alexander Fehling), is high on the list, while others face a fight for survival under the leadership of island chief Beatrice (Martina Gedeck). Meanwhile, another battle is taking place on the mainland, where the virus remains unchecked and marauding gangs rule the streets.
Blending elements of Dark, The Rain, Black Mirror and fellow German pandemic drama Sløborn, the series comes from creators and writers Florian Wentsch and Veronica Priefer, who first met in film school a decade before the show was released on Sky across Europe earlier this year.
Wentsch approached Priefer about partnering on a series he had an idea for, and as the project developed, they teamed up with producer UFA Fiction and Robert Schwentke (Flightplan), who is the director and lead writer. NBCUniversal Global Distribution handles international sales.
“When we started, it was in 2014, 2015, when Germany society was changing a bit because of the ‘refugee crisis,’ as it was called in Germany,” says Wentsch, speaking at the Monte Carlo TV Festival where Helgoland was screening in competition earlier this year. “It affected us. We were thinking, ‘Everything’s totally fine for us but there are people dying on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.’ This was probably the first image we had in mind [for the series]. The theme is, ‘What happens to a society that is mostly driven by fear?’ This image was the starting point.”
Reflecting the refugee crisis further, Priefer says the titular 513 is just an arbitrary number comparable to the number attributed to the quota of how many refugees a particular country might accept.
“It is always arbitrary. It could be any number. It could be 10,000 more,” she notes. “That was something that was also fascinating, because it’s human lives. It just always felt so inhumane somehow to think about it this way. That was one thing that inspired this rigid number. One of the main characters, Beatrice, says, ‘We have our rules and, because of our rules, we survive.’”
It’s notable then that at the end of episode one, during a tense island meeting, Beatrice tries to bend the rules when someone close to her is at risk of being sent to an untimely death. Viewers then get their first glimpse of the mainland in episode two, with a parallel storyline that takes place 15 years after the onset of the pandemic.
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“As the show develops, we move away from the conventions of post-apocalyptic series and we really go into the characters and understand why we are where we are,” Priefer says. “I guess we can say that later on, there’s one episode that jumps back to the beginning, and the aim of this was to show the audience that everything that developed came out of real problems. It’s not that these people are crazy. These people acted out of self-preservation, but they lost somehow their moral compass on the way.
“The special thing about Helgoland is that this [type of] purely post-apocalypse future is always some kind of commentary about today, about modern times, about how we live, and Helgoland very much takes this road as an outline. We want to highlight universal human behaviour, traits and structures, and we use the post-apocalyptic genre to do that.”
Working with Schwentke was a “great” experience for Priefer and Wentsch, who finished university at the end of 2014 and were developing the series themselves before partnering with UFA and the director in 2016.
“It was like taking a masterclass,” Priefer says. “He had been working for 20-plus years in Hollywood and we had just come out of university. It was clear he was head-writing, showrunning it, directing it, but it was a lovely cooperation.
“We were all really interested in the way society works. But when we started working with Robert, we went back a step and said ‘OK, what is this world about? Let’s get away from plotlines, let’s really think about this world.’ We wrote a world bible and [asked ourselves] how did this whole island function and what are the laws. We spent a lot of time doing that. It was a very unusual way to do this, because we just took our time thinking about this world.”
“But it’s worth it because you feel there’s this very dynamic world. It’s not just the effect of the virus,” notes executive producer Oliver Ossege. “It’s a new world you created, and you feel it in every scene, so it’s worth it.”
Featuring an ensemble cast that also includes Kathrin Angerer, Samuel Finzi, Antje Traue, Tobias Resch, Maja Schöne, Markus Gertken and László Branko Breiding, filming took place in Berlin, Hamburg and on the islands of Sylt and Amrum, off the north-eastern coast of Germany.
Numerous green screens were used to create the world of Helgoland 513, while the island itself was stitched together from multiple locations, as the crew were unable to take over either of the real, populated islands to film the series.
“A dystopian world you don’t find in the real world,” Ossege says. “Logistically, for shooting a movie or a series, you couldn’t do it [on the real islands]. So we had to stitch together our Helgoland from Sylt, Amrun and Hamburg. That was quite challenging. These are completely different locations. I couldn’t imagine this would really feel like one Helgoland, but it does.”
Hamburg, the nearest major city to the fictional North Sea island of Helgoland, also plays itself in the seven-part drama, though visual effects have been used to transform it into a rundown city 15 years into the future.
“We go to the city of Hamburg, which, I would say, are our money shots,” Wentsch says. “It’s quite a famous skyline – for Germany, it’s very well known – and we see it 15 years later. It’s quite impressive.”
Though the rules of the island might seem brutal, the writing team – which also includes Yves Hensel, Matthew Wilder and Marcus Hug – always returned to the present day when creating the world of the series. In fact, the decision to rank the islanders on usefulness comes back to social media and the phenomenon of ‘likes.’ It also relates to the quota system many countries employ to determine which migrants are more desirable than others depending on their profession.
“It was just really coming from reality. We were saying, ‘We have like this locked room and there are these 513 people and they don’t want to let anyone in because they can only feed 513 people, so what happens when the baby gets born? What would they do?’ It is a problem, and then it gets really dark.”
“For a long time we were saying, ‘Do children count? Do they not count? Do they start counting when they’re 16? We were really working with a system,” Priefer says.
And while island life might seem barbaric in some ways, in Helgoland 513, it’s not always clear who’s right or wrong. “The rules on the island make you think these are the good guys, and the bad guys are on shore,” she adds. “Maybe in seven episodes it changes. Maybe they aren’t the bad guys.”
tagged in: Florian Wentsch, Helgoland 513, NBCUniversal Global Distribution, Oliver Ossege, Robert Schwentke, Sky, UFA Fiction, Veronica Priefer