display

Before we dive into media theory about who is perhaps the most important jubilee of the year next to Beethoven, a few facts about the “crime scene”.

Since the body of little Christian Landsberger was discovered on November 29, 1970 in the “Taxi to Leipzig”, the very first case, at a rest stop on the transit highway in the GDR, a good 2,500 other people had passed away in the German living rooms during a current 1145 investigations to complain.

Most lost their lives by the sixth minute.

Most of them were shot.

The record of deaths - 51 in the end - is held by “Born in pain”, Ulrich Tukur's fourth case as Commissioner Murot.

A good 150 investigators took part in the murder hunt, their success rate is likely to be significantly higher than that of their colleagues in reality.

display

Almost 27 million - an audience record that even the people of Münster will never catch up - watched as Curd Jürgens was convicted in "Red - Red - Dead" by the incredibly boring Stuttgart inspector Lutz alias Werner Schumacher.

The first case: Inspector Trimmel (Walter Richter, r.) In "Taxi to Leipzig"

Source: picture alliance / dpa

In the meantime, the number of deaths has stabilized at a good one and a half per episode and the audience rating has leveled off at a good eight million.

After “Derrick” and “Der Alte”, “Tatort” is the most successful export product of German television.

ARD has not prepared any product on the Internet in this way.

There is nothing on German television that is so excited and discussed in real time on social media, and the media-guarding Reich citizen is not outraged about anything.

display

Which may also be due to the fact that in “Tatort”, according to Cologne media scientist Dietrich Leder, above all the “educated middle class, politically left-wing” recognizes itself.

Which brings us almost to media theory, the research into the causes of the success of the best-researched German television series.

People have already tried to hang various medals around the marathon killer mystery - amazed at its longevity: the last campfire in front of which the nation still gathers as it used to only before “Wetten, dass ...?”, The great German social novel , the moral institution of the nation, the cinematic mentality museum in Germany of the past half century - this is how one tried to interpret the phenomenon “crime scene”.

display

Maybe this is all nonsense.

Perhaps the longevity of the concept is not due to the constant self-reflection and latent self-hatred of a country, but to the fact that the rules are very simple.

Götz George as Horst Schimanski in "Der Tausch" with Yolande Gilot

Source: WDR

A “Tatort” should be about commissioners, “Tatort” inventor Gunther Witte said, about regionality and a conflict in society.

The “Tatort” is a police film in which, according to Germany's best police film filmmaker Dominik Graf, anything is allowed “as long as it tells a gripping investigation - also in a dramaturgical, experimental way”.

What stays in the memory is not the damned thesis paper "crime scenes", not the jokes and the jokes, the excursions to the limits of the genre.

But those cases in which everything comes together: society mirror, police work and a touch to all of our primal fears.

Cases after which we do not go into the week reconciled, but see our everyday life differently.

There weren't that few.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

We will be happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.