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Representations of past ages in contemporary television serve more than the historian’s interests. In fact, these re-imaginings of the past shed light on the present out of which they emerge, negotiating today’s concerns against the backdrop of a bygone period. In the course of, as yet, four series, covering the years 1919 to 1926, BBC Two’s Peaky Blinders (2013-) traces the rise of Birmingham’s fictitious Shelby family in a decade that has recently sparked renewed interest: the 1920s. Notable examples on the television screen include HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), which invites further comparison with Peaky Blinders with regard to genre and style, and Sky 1’s Weimar Republic crime drama Babylon Berlin (2017-), whose director Tom Tykwer recounts in an interview that “whilst working on [the show], the present, so to speak, met us”, an experience he describes as “disquieting”. Tykwer draws parallels to contemporary “England, with Brexit or, more generally, the whole European sentiment, which has changed in the last five years”, and diagnoses “democracy again at stake – all of which is a topic of the series” (Metropolis: Danzig, my translation). More than any other decade, the 1920s chart a tension between traditionally entrenched and modern ways of life, with the First World War – as symbol and reality – constituting the most violent caesura between these forms of life. Its aftermath is elaborately staged in Peaky Blinders.

Created and written by Steven Knight, the show centres around the emerging criminal empire of the Shelby family, betting shop owners by trade, and the exploits of their eponymous Peaky Blinders gang, led by the brothers Thomas (Cillian Murphy), Arthur (Paul Anderson), and John (Joe Cole). The storyline sets in shortly after the brothers have returned from the traumatising and transformative experience of the war, whose challenge to the previous family dynamics is a major thematic strand in Peaky Blinders. Not only does the Great War in Peaky Blinders issue a warning against present-day belligerence, it more broadly symbolises the mechanisation and alienation definitive of the rise of industrial labour and capitalist production in the modern age. The transition from ways of life retrospectively idealised as organically rooted to the industrialised routines of modernity is epitomised by the head of the Shelby family, Thomas. We encounter him in 1919 as an unflinching, ruthless businessman, whilst before the war, “[h]e laughed, a lot” and “wanted to work with horses” (Peaky Blinders, S1/E6, 00:28).1 It is crucial that Peaky Blinders is set at this crossroads between old and new, tradition and modernity, for what allows the show to reflect contemporary concerns is a shared sense of crisis: “Then as now, people are afraid of the new”, the curator of a recent exhibition on “Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic” at Frankfurt’s Schirn Gallery has aptly reasoned (Pfeiffer, Metropolis: Danzig, my translation). Yielding such fear “of the new” as a result of profound disorientation, the firm grip of a dynamics of acceleration that seized the whole of modernity (see Rosa 274) has only intensified under the impact of globalisation in the late-modern 21^st century.

Almost one hundred years after the period covered by Peaky Blinders, propagated solutions to such fundamental uncertainties remain alarmingly similar. According to this narrative, the ills of modernity have conditioned the corrosion of communal bonds, the only remedy to those ills being the recovery of communities (see Delanty 10-1; Gertenbach et al. 54-6), which then bestow meaning and orientation onto modern existence. The basic misapprehension of such an over-simplification is not that modernity drastically changed the structure and organisation of social formations. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out, the expansion of capitalist manufacturing conditions in the wake of the Industrial Revolution has indeed displaced traditional forms of community, tearing apart pre-industrial, domestic work structures into disciplinable “human units” (27). The “promise of autonomy and freedom” which Hartmut Rosa has located at the “core and centre” of the “project of modernity” (272, my translation) entails the atomisation of individuals who abandon traditionally institutionalised communities on their quest for personal fulfilment. Community, however, is not naturally inherent in traditional or pre-modern forms of life and absent in modernity (see Delanty 30). Such a demonising view of modernity, tied to a conservative insistence on the preservation of tradition, erects an unattainable ideal of community, which endows community with a highly normative status (see ibid. 18-9). In his theory of The Inoperative Community, originally published in 1986, Jean-Luc Nancy emphasises that “we should become suspicious of the retrospective consciousness of the lost community and its identity”, given that “the thought of community or the desire for it might well be nothing other than a belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience” (10). Nancy’s deconstructionist approach thus reconceptualises community as follows:

Society was not built on the ruins of a community. It emerged from the disappearance or the conservation of something – tribes or empires – perhaps just as unrelated to what we call ‘community’ as to what we call ‘society.’ So that community, far from being what society has crushed or lost, is what happens to us – question, waiting, event, imperative – in the wake of society. (11, emphasis in original)

The major fallacy of a ‘loss of community’-narrative (Delanty 15; Gertenbach et al. 54), then, resides in the notion that community can be regained, since such community is an idealised projection of a totalitarian claim. “It has”, writes sociologist Gerard Delanty, “been the source of some of the greatest political dangers, giving rise to the myth of the total community that has fuelled fundamentalist, nationalist, and fascist ideologies in the twentieth century” (11). Community, according to Nancy, cannot be regenerated; it occurs.

And yet, the promise of community is most enticing in times of crisis (see Delanty 29; Gertenbach et al. 35, 54). The historical setting of Peaky Blinders does not incidentally coincide with a European-wide rise of fascism. 1919 alone was felt to be “a pivotal year for the country as a whole. […] [T]here were genuine fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution in the UK […] as well as the rise of the suffragette movement and the situation in Ireland” (Stubbs). This historical moment, as Tom Tykwer has noted, is not dissimilar to ours. The appeal of the resurging nationalisms of today lies precisely in the attraction of the nation as a community that fosters stability and belonging. A concept of community so redemptive is inevitably bound by normative rigidity, that of nationalism steering towards homogeneity and exclusion. Peaky Blinders prominently portrays two groups whose promise of salvation takes recourse to such a concept of community (see Delanty 18-20) despite their axiomatically diverging politics: the IRA and the Communist movement. The Peaky Blinders themselves, a criminal organisation, are exempt from such normativity. In particular, the Shelbys defy idealised conceptions of the family, which has undergone normative regulation more than any other form of community. Investigating the fundamentally modern experience of a growing tension between old and new, tradition and modernity, Peaky Blinders challenges the narrative of a ‘loss of community’ by dismantling the concept of a normative community. It thus unmasks ‘community’, as soon as yearned for, as a modern construct (see Gertenbach et al. 38), which only becomes what it is when it appears to be gone. Finally, when the family is read as a metaphor for the nation, the Shelby family represents a nation whose community is conceived non-normatively.