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Investment bankers straining at the leash after a decade on the naughty step following the financial crisis. An anxious board keen to move beyond the errors of the past. A looming shareholder meeting where discontent is expected, with possible consequences for those with corner offices. And finally, exasperated politicians and the perennial talk of a merger.

A snapshot of life right now at Deutsche Bank? Not quite. Just a quick sketch of the backdrop to the plot of Bad Banks, a German television series set mostly in the offices of a fictional outfit called Deutsche Global Invest, which has its headquarters in a pair of distinctive twin towers in downtown Frankfurt. Any resemblances to real life banking are no doubt entirely coincidental.

Finance is not a subject that usually animates Germany’s creative classes. While viewers in the US and UK can get their fix of homegrown pacy financial drama courtesy of the likes of Billions and McMafia, their German counterparts have largely had to look elsewhere. In a culture that takes a sniffy view of the ways of Anglo-Saxon “casino capitalists”, bankers and their associates are often rendered as little more than two-dimensional villains. So a splashy, primetime thriller that invites viewers to have some sympathy with financiers whose behaviour is anything but laudable has raised more than a few eyebrows.

Bad Banks tracks the story of Jana Liekam, an ambitious young woman working in structured finance, who has staked all on the seemingly impossible task of getting away a multibillion municipal bond offering for an east German city in record time. She must also, meanwhile, negotiate all the usual intrigue that might be imagined in the upper echelons of finance, much of which involves her manipulative patron Christelle Leblanc, a top executive at a rival house.

The series does not hold back on criticism or on some of the well-worn tropes of the financial drama genre. They are all there: the sharply dressed men with anger management issues; substance abuse; panic attacks; zombie relationships conducted by Skype. And, of course, the data manipulation and dodgy insider dealing that only goes to prove that the whole enterprise is rotten to the core.

Yet the drama also stands out for its strong cast based around two central female characters, a script that largely avoids the didactic tendencies of German public sector broadcasting (“now, dear viewers, we explain a credit debt swap”), and a glossy vision of life in Frankfurt. Forget snide talk of dull and sleepy. Think a hard-charging cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic crowd of kick-boxing, tattooed rocket scientists at the forefront of modern banking — “All-nighters are so 1990s” — whose sentences often start in one language and end in another.

It is perhaps something to warm the hearts of those City folk contemplating a post-Brexit transfer to the banks of the Main. In Germany the show was reasonably well-received by viewers and critics. A pundit from the hard-boiled weekly Der Spiegel, not usually a cheerleader for the financial sector, said it almost left viewers with the feeling that it was desirable to be a banker — before carefully hedging his judgment with another “almost”.

That is not a sentiment that is likely to be inspired by another fictional German investment banker, Victor, the central character of Hochdeutschland, the new novel by Alexander Schimmelbusch. Victor has made his millions and, unlike the main players in Bad Banks, now reflects on what a successful career adds up to. His conclusion is bleak: a country that bears little resemblance to the one that he grew up in, where the public realm is on the decline and inequality on the rise. His answer is to draw up a client pitch for national revival. It is a no-nonsense populist vision that finds favour with his friend, a German-Turkish businessman-turned-politician — and with voters.

Schimmelbusch, himself a former banker, has written an unflinching critique of the state of Germany in the age of financial capitalism. It is a subject that is likely to occupy German readers and viewers for some time yet. A second series of Bad Banks is already planned.

frederick.studemann@ft.com

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