Zoom Image
Bless Amada and Johanna Wokalek (r.): »Can't you just be against capitalism!«
Photo: Hendrik Heiden / BR
"Can't you just be against capitalism?" Inspector Cris Blom (Johanna Wokalek) once moaned annoyed to the students of the Postcolonial Studies Institute. After the murder of a research assistant, the investigator was confronted with the new fields of research in the left-wing scientific milieu - "intersectionality, identity politics, anti-discriminatory language acts, interdependent power relations" - and sought to escape into words from the good old days, when one could still say "gypsy sauce".
In between, there was a lot of dancing, irony and polemicizing against today's university operation as a "wokestan" in this first »police call« with a newly formed team.
In our review, we wrote: "Is this 'police call' still campus satire at all? Or is it already a culture war? Of course, it is obvious to parody the language policy currently widespread at universities and to gain material for a milieu thriller from the distribution struggles and career options for the new, Anglo-Saxon highly jazzed up courses of study. But the fact that the justified confrontation with narrowed corridors of thought and language is used to really show it to the young university people, who have just been perceived as ›woke‹, ultimately only discredits the insistence on freedom of language and thought (...) Again and again, the criticism of the so-called ›cancel culture‹ turns into a kind of boomer Tourette's, through which the characters compulsively say things that are supposedly no longer allowed to be said.«
Johanna Wokalek has succeeded Verena Altenberger with the campus thriller, who only said goodbye to the Munich "police call" quite quickly in June of this year after six episodes. The Altenberger cases had been extremely different in tone and staging. It is quite possible that this is now also the case with the other Wokalek episodes.
A second production with her has already been filmed. It bears the title »Spark Summer«. Alexander Adolph, who had already directed the stirring episode »Morgengrauen« for Wokalek's predecessor Matthias Brandt, was responsible for writing and directing.
cbu