Some things between heaven and earth are unfathomable, and Ferdinand von Schirach does not know exactly how a nasty mother and a weakness for worn underwear are connected to full-fledged asphyxiophilia. But the case he’s in The diver rolls up is in any case a bit odd: A demure-looking lady goes to the Easter service in a Bavarian village, the next night she fetches the doctor because her husband is dead in bed. The doctor alerts the police because the man has been strangled with a rope. However, the lady does not want to talk about exactly how he died. That’s what the episode of the RTL series is about penaltywhich Oliver Hirschbiegel staged, based on his Hitler film The downfall even brought to Hollywood.
Six filmmakers have filmed Schirach stories for this anthology, in addition to Hirschbiegel there are also David Wnendt, Helene Hegemann, Hüseyin Tabak, Mia Spengler and Patrick Vollrath, who in his film Olli Dittrich watches how he slowly freaks out when someone shows him his lake property installed. Almost a decade and a half ago, Ferdinand von Schirach first conquered bookstores, then screens and theaters with treasures from his experience as a criminal defense attorney. At least at the beginning of his second career, he described quite matter-of-factly cases that he encountered in his own law firm – modified and probably also increasingly fictionalized with increasing fame. In any case, at the end of the story with the diving suit there is a solution that could have happened like this, but even a lawyer would not know for sure.
Ferdinand of Schirach.
(Photo: imago images / Future Image)
Schirach has also made a name for itself with special major legal projects – sometimes with one large-scale audience vote plus film on terrorism, then with a similar project on euthanasia, finally with a set of new ones Fundamental rights for the digital age, several of which were reflected in the coalition agreement of the traffic light government. The cases on which the series based on his short stories are based (there have also been fault at ZDF, with Moritz Bleibtreu as a lawyer), are of course tabloid press material – prepared for people who would like things to be a little less sensationalist and cannot even imagine in their nightmares going on a murder hunt themselves. One of the sad highlights of the overall true crime enthusiasm took place last year when crowds of amateurs took to Instagram to attempt to explain the circumstances of the crime of American vlogger Gabby Petito.
Schirach rode the true crime wave before it had a name
Measured against this, Schirach’s cases are pure subtlety. In the meantime he has written much more than reports on the experience of criminal defense lawyers anyway, his novel “The Collini case” (2013) is a piece of legal history, it was about the statute of limitations for crimes during the Nazi era, an internationally acclaimed book. In 2020 he published philosophical conversations with his lawyer colleague Alexander Kluge, he wrote about his own family history – his grandfather Baldur of Schirach was sentenced to twenty years for crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials.
Helene Hegemann directed “Subotnik” with Anca Mircea and Cosmina Stratan.
(Photo: Luis Zeno Kuhn/RTL / Moovie /tnik)
penalty but, published as a book in 2018, is simply true crime. You could say: Schirach surfed the true crime wave before it had a name, and in his own, very law-specific way – that’s what made him famous. The progenitors of all true crime podcasts and TV series like Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and “Case number XY unresolved” be – it remains Schirach’s peculiarity that he is less concerned with the crime itself and more with its punishment and shows all the moral hardships that entails. So he has become a kind of lawyer of the nation. Some of the stories in penalty actually illustrate principles of the rule of law: Mia Spengler’s episode is about The sheriff, who reacts too emotionally on her first court appearance, setting off an avalanche of events that erodes her peace of mind. In Helene Hegemann’s subotnik a young lawyer is confronted with a principle that she understands very well in theory but can hardly stand in practice: Even a brutal rapist has a right to a defense. Other episodes then tend to get stuck in the rainbow swamp, the story with the diving suit, for example, only has to do with law insofar as it also features a courtroom.
Why do we still watch true crime series? Maybe they help us to overcome our fears. We look into human abysses from a safe distance.
punishment, six films: The Alderman, A Light Blue Day, The Lake House, The Diver, The Thorn, Subotnik from June 28 at RTL + available. Premiere on June 27th at the Munich Film Festival.
You can find more series recommendations here.