This case from 2015 will be re-aired on Sunday 4th December 2022. We are therefore republishing the review.
A dead man lies on the banks of the Rhine, there are traces of blood in the hallway of an apartment building, so it needs to be clarified how involved the residents are. A house as a microcosm: a resident has locked herself in. A resident paints pictures and always disappears at night. An esoteric couple devours a dish of tofu, poppy seeds and barley. A hockey coach thinks about hockey practice and a little bit about life too.
Windows are opened or remain closed, doorbells are ignored, ears listen on doors, curtains rustle. Apartments can be caves or hells, while the hallway smells of floor wax and stuffiness, as Udo Jürgens already knew, who knew his way around strangers and strangers’ houses.
“Freddy tanzt” from WDR is a murder hunt in house number 77a, i.e. in a manageable area. The book comes from Jürgen Werner, whose Dortmunder crime scenes recently belonged to the strongest consequences. There he has the fabulously battered Inspector Faber at his disposal, who is even more broken than the world that surrounds him.
“Live fast, love hard, die young,” says the banker
In Cologne, however, the good gentlemen Schenk and Ballauf have been officiating for two hundred years, always wagging their forefingers and anxious to make the social claim of their adventures clear. So here: People in the anonymous world don’t care about each other anymore. While Faber is cunning enough to fraternize with Nazis if necessary, Ballauf remains the static moralist: “It would only have taken one person who was willing to help.”
Colleague Schenk, on the other hand, mews compliments in the rancid and most rancid price range to a resident in the voice of an old tomcat: “I’m not easily disturbed by anything – almost nothing.”
Everything painted a little thick, in house 77a and next door. Caricatures of young bankers step out of the wings and say: “Live fast, love hard, die young.” They say last night’s pick up gave them “a one-a-blowjob.” They tuck rolled-up bills behind each other’s ears.
A solid, but also very predictable crime scene, which occasionally surprises with foreign shame attacks.
ARD, Sunday 8.15 p.m.