Blue lights, siren, barking radio messages, an action-packed operation – far from it. “Please just focus on my fingertips,” says a firm, yet warm, approaching female voice. It is a therapist’s attempt to hypnotize a police officer.
The mission is already over in Niki Stein’s and Tatiana Nekrasov’s radio play patrol. It soon came to a fatal end for the hypnotized colleague. It wasn’t an action with a lot of tatütata either, but rather a sequence of several events that are banal in themselves, which, like the proverbial frog, for which the water in which it is sitting is slowly heated, comes to a fatal end. Without being able to say when the two unequal officials who hardly knew each other missed the moment when they could have averted fate.
Without explicitly naming it: the policewoman became a victim of the NSU. Stein, who also directed, and Nekrasov take the artistic liberty of interpreting the actual murder of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter in Heilbronn by the NSU in 2007 as a targeted killing of their invented surnamed character Rebekka. A policewoman on patrol who accidentally and privately recognizes the danger of right-wing murderers. Which they also become aware of. For the NSU it is important to eliminate a source of danger.
In patrol But the main concern is how the police apparatus works, how seriously it takes its own people, how much it protects them or not, how willing it is to consciously risk a pawn in the service of a greater cause. A speculation, more social drama and intimate play than crime thriller. About the fact that many things may not be right in this institution, which is supposed to monitor law and order.
First criminal, then criminal – a delicate change
Friedrich Schiller expressed himself far more clearly in his text fragment The police, on which the radio play of the same name by the author Björn SC Deigner is based. According to Schiller, it is an institution marked by conspiracy and crime. He refers to the newly formed Paris police force after the French Revolution as the nucleus of what was to become a modern police force as we know it to this day. The birth defect: Eugène François Vidocq, founder and first director of the Sûreté Nationale, had previously been a criminal who, after his change of sides, did not want to give up old methods.
Deigner now roams through the ages, remains in the “Third Reich”, he too ultimately ends up with the NSU. He is always driven by the question: Where are the police? When they arrest Jews just because they are Jews, employ dubious informants and tolerate radical right-wing structures in their ranks. The radio play is a ride through the dark night of this institution.
patrolARD audio library.
The policeDLF Culture, August 17, 10:03 p.m.