Several times the topic of a ‘Tatort’ episode was so explosive that the producers got their fingers burnt. The viewers always found Schimanski to be a rather rough-and-ready detective, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the character was so popular that he made it onto the cinema screen twice. And the best known Tatort detective, Horst Schimanski (played by Götz George), has to be regarded as a separate phenomenon. The actress Maria Furtwängler, for example, plays chief commissioner Charlotte Lindholm – but not in a team – she brings the criminals to justice single-handed in the German state of Lower Saxony. Of course, occaasionally there are exceptions to the golden rule.
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One factor enhancing the popularity of the detective series abroad is the Goethe-Institut, which regularly organises ‘Tatort’ evenings where the public join in guessing ‘who did it’ – and why. The German way, of getting closer and closer to the perpetrator rather quietly and almost imperceptibly, goes down especially well in Asian countries, but there are also dyed-in-the-wool ‘Tatort’ fans in Italy, France, Brazil and Africa. This is also the largest difference from the other German detective series – that is also very popular abroad – called ‘Derrick’: chief inspector Stephan Derrick, played by the actor Horst Tappert from 1973 to 1998, investigated almost exclusively in the smart suburbs of Munich and proved to the ‘better off’, in just under an hour, that crime simply doesn’t pay. The plots are up-to-date and realistic the perpetrators and their victims are usually members of the lower to upper middle class.
Therefore they are constantly having ‘friendly digs’ at each other – and this special humour is very popular among viewers of the ‘Münster Tatort’.Īn episode of ‘Tatort’ on Sunday has to last exactly 88 minutes – generally the first victim must die after five minutes, and there are rarely more than three deaths.
For instance, the Tatort duo set in the German town of Münster consists of chief commissioner Frank Thiel and the pathologist Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne, two personalities that could not be more different. The team members often have a special relationship because they have been together for many years, but the relationship is not always one of friendship. Sometimes members of the team also have private problems, and some of them are weird characters or have particular human faults or quirks. Nowadays, however, even ‘Tatort’ on Sundays has more action, for example with the new Hamburg investigator Nick Tschiller, portrayed by the successful German actor Til Schweiger since March 2013.Īs a rule, ‘Tatort’ has a team of investigators who track down criminals in a certain town or region.
Since ‘Tatort’ was first broadcast, the producers have obviously oriented themselves more on the detective stories of successful English writers such as Agatha Christie – always with a restricted number of suspects, a single culprit and a lot of local atmosphere. So the German series is calmer, but by no means less exciting.
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Unlike many American crime stories with shootings every minute, today’s detectives on German TV always take things at a walking pace, talking constantly on their mobile phones. The ‘Tatort’ series on the German TV channel ARD at 8:15 pm on Sundays has become a ‘must see’ for fans of detective stories, ever since 1970 when Walter Richter became the first ‘Tatort’ detective inspector Paul Trimmel, taking a ‘Taxi to Leipzig’ (the title of the first episode). This happens not only in Germany, but all over the world. Some people like best of all to watch the programme on their sofa at home, while some watch it in the pub, and others organise events around the programmes.
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