EActually, the “crime scene” was once intended as a celebration of federalism. As a nationwide educational model about the local abysses of the still fairly new Germany. With stories that should ideally be developed from the underground, scratched from the surface of the cities and regions in which they are set.
Stories that reflect something of the mentality and the current constitution. Which – a bit ex negativo, so to speak – should explain Lower Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate. And at some point somehow an overall social panorama could have been given over the years like a kind of German Historical Crime and Decay Museum.
The development of stories from the places and regions, however, has seldom worked out and recently increasingly less so. Currently, however, that seems to be changing. Is there a regionalization on the horizon?
This is how Commissioners Ballauf and Schenk disenchanted the Cologne myth of the Veedel on New Year’s Day. About what is called Kiez elsewhere and stands for everything that makes places worth living in. Cow warmth, mindfulness, caring, neighborhood.
For a life model that glows with nostalgia from every pore, that is inhabited by caregivers and shaped by care, by humanity, by Christian virtues. An urban concept of life that is being tugged at by all the forces of the current social restructuring in such a way that it is hanging in tatters. And exactly the kind of violence that it is supposed to prevent.
The neighborhood in which the re-localization of the “crime scene” continues is called Kreuzviertel. Located in the middle of Dortmund. There are chic houses from the Gründerzeit. One likes to live there. One likes to come there in the evening. Perhaps because of this, the social wrecking ball of gentrification is knocking on its residents’ doors. who have lived here for decades. Who were already there when the pubs opened. And the Engel hair salon, for example.
Heart of the Kreuzviertel: the salon of Martin Engel (Andreas Schröders)
What: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Thomas Kost
Of course, there is only in “You stay here”, the new Dortmund “crime scene”. But a hairdressing salon of this type is guaranteed in the Kreuzviertel. Time has stopped there. A remnant of miner’s pride still hangs in the thick air. The light breaks in a hint of coal dust.
The wallpaper from before is still stuck to the walls. And the women who had their hair curled here back in the 1970s are still sitting around in the chairs with coffee and cake.
Inspector Faber comes from there. His father still lives there. What one represses and the other just forgets. At its core, “You Stay Here” is a great lament for loss. And one about the underground.
The sadness in the soul
Let’s start with the loss. When it starts, Faber is living in the forest, he has tousled himself, nested in his manta and in his grief. Again he lost a wife – his mother (we’re only finding out now), his wife (that was the trauma he carried around with him until last year) – now Bönisch has died in his arms. In the last case it was. Then he and she had just confessed their love to each other. “You stay here” she had said.
Now the formerly greatest sociopath of the “Tatort” character runs through the woods, strips naked and jumps off a huge wall into a reservoir the size of a reservoir. The sky is blue. Faber is back.
That’s one loss. The story could also have been told in Herdecke or at Schalke. The one from the second loss only went in the Kreuzviertel. There is a risk of cultural loss. A real estate man buys that, makes it chic and disposes of his soul.
And that brings us to the underground. There aren’t just sewers under the West Park, under the streets, under the fancy houses and the churches. There are whole gang systems. The real estate man could have gone there.
A large pool of blood can be found at Westpark. The trail of blood stops somewhere. The real estate man is gone. Almost certainly dead like the teenage drug dealer who disappeared six months earlier. An avenger of the disinherited could be on the way in the Kreuzviertel.
Take care of each other: Peter (Jörg Hartmann, left) with his father Josef Faber (Wolfgang Rüter)
What: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Thomas Kost
But in the case that Jörg Hartmann, the man who is Faber, wrote specifically for himself, this background is of course double, triple, actually quadruple. Each of the commissioners has been carrying one around with them for some time.
Pawlak (Rick Okon) the secret of his child’s drug-addicted mother, Rosa Herzog (Stefanie Reinsperger) the relationship with her absconding mother, who is a member of the third RAF generation (which smells suspiciously of idea theft in Horst Eckert’s crime novels).
Because of the horizontal Dortmund narrative structure that Jürgen Werner invented, these plot caverns have to be regularly dug under the actual narratives. Which in this case, however, is somewhat superfluous and looks like it was carved into the story with a pickaxe. And distracts from what is actually happening.
If the father with the son
Between Pawlak, Herzog and Faber, who are all mourning, who are trying to cope with this investigation in their own detours and byways, and this is precisely what puts them at the very beginning as a team. Between the times that rub shoulders in the Kreuzviertel, the greedy present and the past that is getting lost under varnish, and that give birth to a lovable monster.
Above all, between Faber and his father Jupp, the man who has long since lost control of his past and is now losing his memory – how the two Kollerköpf gradually dig at each other through the rubbish of the years and silence, with not many words , but many gestures and looks. That touches you. That remains (above all Wolfgang Rüter’s meandering, desperately funny Jupp).
And so it could go on after the horizontal Dortmund narrative has gotten rid of all the chains that almost strangled it at the end – Faber’s archenemy is no more, the ever-building and declining love for Bönisch is buried halfway intact, the trauma calmed down – he won’t be ripping sinks out of the wall anytime soon.
Faber, from sociopathic Saul to empathic Paul. So the still incomprehensible farewell to Anna Schudt’s Bönisch would have something good after all.