Where were you on the evening of September 5, 1970?” Inspector Klaus Borowski asks a suspect at one point. This inquiry alone makes it tangible that a cold case in this Kieler crime scene the topic is. A long-ago homicide is thus thoroughly reopened. Such stories are attractive for the audience, but complex: For the history, here the seventies, you don’t just need the corresponding mustachioed equipment. And then the past has to be brought into contact with the present in a dramaturgically charming way. Two time levels, however, overwhelm the crime scene often, and in the end there is too much in it again.
In “Borowski und der Schatten des Mondes” by Nicolai Rohde (book by Patrick Brunken and Torsten Wenzel), on the other hand, everything is well balanced. The mustaches of the seventies fit, many other things also fit. The inspector himself is the bridge between then and now: as a teenager, Borowski (Axel Milberg) wanted to hitchhike with his girlfriend Susanne to the Love and Peace Festival in Fehmarn, where Jimi Hendrix would perform. But then it started to rain, the two up-and-coming hippies got into a fight, and young Borowski (played by Milberg’s son August) let his girlfriend get into a car and never saw her again. She was, literally, swallowed up by the face of the earth. Fifty years later, a corpse is found under an uprooted oak tree, and digital facial reconstruction reveals that the dead person is Susanne. And so, while he is investigating, Borowski also fights with the demons of his own failure: if only he had stayed with Susanne back then. That’s the story.
A philosophy about guilt and dealing with guilt, on par with similar pieces, the crime scene “The Deep Sleep” about or that police call “And forgive us our sins”. In Kiel, you sit in front of clear, shiny windows and stare helplessly into a world in whose more unfathomable layers the corpses have grown together with the roots. All the actors (Stefan Kurt, Lena Stolze) have been carefully selected, and Borowski is at his best in interaction with his colleague Sahin (Almila Bagriacik) anyway, when he is not chatty but laconic. Once Sahin says to Borowski: “You were Susanne Hansen’s boyfriend, weren’t you? I feel sorry for you.” Or: for her? It is not known whether her sympathy is with the inspector or with his childhood friend. And once, when Borowski meets Susanne’s deceased father at the funeral, wordlessness is the only appropriate soundtrack. There are moments when you can’t say anything. Depressingly worth seeing.
The first, Sunday, 8:15 p.m.
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