When the brightly painted sign with the inscription "Love and Peace" falls to the rain-soaked ground, the drama begins and the matter is thought to have been decided.

The grainy imagery at the very beginning of Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon shows a boy and girl arguing, the boy standing in a phone booth, the girl next to a car, and when the boy finally runs after her, the car is moving of that.

The two of them had actually wanted to hitchhike to Fehmarn, as the scenes that were cut in quick succession tell us, to hear Jimi Hendrix fifty years ago this September.

Instead, the boy and with him the Schleswig-Holstein police will look for Susanne Hansen, who has disappeared so suddenly, until the case is finally declared a "cold case".

While Klaus Borowski, the boy from back then,

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Between these two, the traumatized youth involved (August Milberg) and his older self, the inspector (Axel Milberg, August's father in real life), who probably no longer believes in slogans on colorful signs and meanwhile uses all possible forms of crime, the essence of this oppressive episode of "Tatort" in Kiel, which is brilliantly cast right down to the supporting roles, takes place.

It's hard to imagine how Borowski lived with the sense of guilt over the long years with no trace of his girlfriend, but now we watch him react to the discovery of a skeleton, one in the storm fallen tree has released - the facial reconstruction points to Susanne Hansen, the analysis of the bones confirms the suspicion.

Nobody should know that for him it is not a cold case, but rather the opposite, because then he should not be able to participate in the clarification.

And so he invents silly excuses not to visit the victim's father, at least not in the presence of his young colleague Mila Sahin (Almila Bagriacik).

It doesn't surprise him that she finds out about him in such a short time, and it's no wonder that she finally reveals his involvement to her superior after repeatedly urging him to come forward.

"I couldn't help it," she tells him as he's pulled off the case.

"I couldn't help it either," Borowski replies.

And when an actor like Axel Milberg plays his character with such restraint,

Borowski wrestles with himself and the case

We see a lot here from a dizzy distance (camera: Philipp Kirsamer) or horizontally at a distance, and just as Borowski is constantly struggling not to surrender himself to the case or to overlook something essential through the laboriously gained distance from the horrific event, so too changes for the viewer in every respect the panorama with the detail.

The inspector basically knows that it is possible to do both – to remember exactly and to deceive oneself enormously in the process, but to only apply it to himself is as difficult for him as it was for the fourteen-year-old he was at the time and whose activities he once saw in a “savage Strawberries" scene observed - the old man in the setting of his youth.

It's up to Mila Sahin to keep him in the present and her demands for investigation with professional skepticism and personal loyalty.

You can see that Borowski knows what he has in her, even if he defies her judgment often enough: "Witnesses are wrong, Borowski," says Sahin, "you know that better than I do." In his answer, you outline Facing the dilemma of this case: "Because I'm a witness, don't you trust me?"

The only fly in the ointment is the construction of the perpetrator, along with the widely scattered indications of how the monstrous crime could have happened - family and milieu shake hands, and there is also a genuine Bluebeard chamber.

Borowski then actually loses his nerve in the final encounter, a belated echo of the boy's statement fifty years earlier that he was "angry" at himself "for not fighting."

In any case, you can no longer blame him for that.

Tatort: ​​Borowski and the Shadow of the Moon

runs on Sunday at 8:15 p.m. on the first

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