Da stands the commissioner and just can’t believe it. Look at the corpse lying discarded in the crimson-brown brackish water. Someone abused her. Killed. discarded. She was 19 years old. Her name was Lara.
What Freddy Schenk can’t believe is that he’s been around for so long, standing in front of corpses and still being moved by such an image, such a death, that he doesn’t want to accept that something like this is happening.
We were there for twenty-five years. Since October 5, 1997 to be precise. “Welcome to Cologne” was the name of the “crime scene”. And Freddy Schenk was still a chief inspector in the cathedral city at the time. Max Ballauf, who has just drunk his career as a drug detective in Miami, is to become his new boss. A native of Düsseldorf, of all people.
There are reasons why the two are still together, that they have the highest average ratings after the people of Münster. And pretty much all of them can be found in “Trail of Blood”. Apart from the happy ending at the sausage stand on Cologne’s “schäl Sick” with a view of the cathedral from the wrong side of the Rhine, which often enough always came into play when one of the 85 cases before was not so special.
Ballauf and Schenk are the human face of law and order. And they are, so to speak, national bodies. You are us on the other side of the screen (as we want to be, maybe should be). Have your heart in the right place. Represent common sense, majority morality.
They show how both – despite the unshakable social, criminal and human investigative compass that guides both – are irritated and endangered. Through crime, evil that is never absolute but has its causes, its psychological or social history. They are our probes into the cracks of society.
Crazy: forensic technician Natalie Förster (Tina Fürst)
Source: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Martin Valentin Menke
Ballauf and Schenk are not Boerne and Thiel. What is given to them by the screenplay does not revolve around them, does not serve as fuel for a firework of crime comedy rockets and silly firecrackers constantly ignited between them, which outshines and drowns everything out. “Mer must och jönne could,” says the Cologne native.
This will possibly be one of the central entries in the WDR editors’ secret instructions for prospective Cologne “Tatort” authors. Ballauf and Schenk can treat themselves pretty well. They never face the case. They always take a backseat to history. They let the others play, they prefer to run after them, like we run after everything. They are virtuosos of reaction.
In “Trail of Blood”, Ballauf and Schenk take a backseat to two different stories. That of the dead drug girl in the brackish water and that of Natalie Förster. This is the forensic scientist, for whom Ballauf seemed to have taken an almost unballaufian affection. DNA is found, it could be that of the perpetrator. She is similar to hers. A trauma breaks out of her, a lifelong search could come to an end, a dark story could be solved.
The most flexible of all commissioners
Ballauf and Schenk have (almost) no private life. You don’t have a psycho quirk. For the oh so modern horizontal storytelling, they lack any story that was worth continuing. You are always momentary. Which is why they are perhaps the most flexible commissioners between Kiel and Munich. It shouldn’t be confused with lack of character either.
There is a special Cologne tone that has nothing to do with dialect. Klaus J. Behrendt and Dietmar Bär are responsible for that. Whose resources are not always used, who, when not required, bring in a similar expressiveness as tenors without a lead – so none. But when they have to, they’re brilliant. In “Trail of Blood” they only have minutes for this because their investigation is actually just the cement of two plot lines. They use them very well.
Ballauf and Schenk are Adenauer. Not because they were as old for “Tatort” commissioners as the former mayor of Cologne in his late phase for Chancellor (Bär is 61, Behrendt 62), not because sometimes, when the light is unfavorable to them, like drafts for a Mount Rushmore for “crime scene” investigators look. But because a reassuring trait of non-experimentation runs through their cases. You don’t have to have an extended understanding of crime films to feel at home in Cologne.
Aesthetically, narratively radical, Ballauf-Schenk films that the WDR editors always let into the nine million German living rooms are quite rare. The genre boundaries are respected. A murderer is being hunted, not the next Grimme Prize. This is, for example, downright balm for the souls of the community tortured by horror and witch cases this month, but it shouldn’t be confused with boredom.
“Trail of Blood” is actually a nice example. This begins as a Cologne version of the “Children from the Bahnhof Zoo”. Lara and her friend and roommate Kim dance through town, play tricks, give each other tattoos, butterflies, because everything could be so easy. Then they stick needles into their veins against the pain and against everything. sinking into unconsciousness. A campfire crackles on a poster on the wall. The poster sets the crammed girls’ booth on fire. Bad omen. An insane effect.
Kim and Lara go prostitution. But director Tini Tüllmann and the two authors Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf, who have won several awards for the RTL series “Club der rote bands”, didn’t want her to be the fallen girl that is customary in crime films, as mere accessories. A lot of space is given to them – like later the story of Natalie Förster, which was also repeatedly illuminated with flashbacks and gradually unfolded. For the emotional and also aesthetic deepening of the investigative framework, which is told relatively conservatively as always.
Who is the mysterious caravan hirer: Tinka Fürst) and Josef Hader
Source: WDR/Bavaria Fiction GmbH/Martin Valentin Menke
From there, images and sequences explode again and again, which just won’t let you go. Like the ones from the burning poster. Like the one from Cologne’s edge canal, where the city’s sewage drains away. And suddenly it looks like the Rhenish version of the Los Angeles River. A concrete river, empty, gray, until the water comes, almost reddish, poisonous, and shoots ahead powerfully, empties into a lake. Rusty brown, still he lies there. You can see it calmly from above after you’ve eddied along with the sewage. With a white spot. lara
Ballauf and Schenk are great hosts. That actually also falls under “jönne could”, but it has to be mentioned separately because they too – like most of their “Tatort” colleagues are only as good as the opponents who cast them and the screenwriters in be put in the way.
Things got off to a good start with “Welcome to Cologne”. There they played against Thomas Thieme and Anna Loos. The “trail of blood” leads the two past a cranky caravan rental company, among other things. Quite a dear apparently, gives guys who have had trouble with the law a second chance. It would be filed under “unsuspicious” (it is only briefly touched upon at first by the rather clever book) if it weren’t given to Josef Hader. That alone is worth watching.
However, we still have to say a word about the Bratwurst booth, which does not exist in “Trail of Blood”. It belonged to Ballauf-Schenk-Köln, which was otherwise generally dialect-free, like the Rhine. Placed on the “schäl Sick” – the right side of the Rhine – so that the camera could have a good view of the Hohenzollern Bridge and Cathedral and the “crime scene” customer did not forget where he had just been, the inspectors stood in a last cathartic act together for Kölsch and sausage before the credits roll.
Ballauf and Schenk didn’t like each other at first: Scene from “Welcome to Cologne” from October 1997
Source: picture alliance / obs / Kerstin Stelter
They argued a bit about what had just happened and the state of the world. “Wurstbraterei” was written above the car. It was colourful, lanterns shone like the cathedral.
What was also necessary, the cases in which he offered a cozy last stop before falling asleep at the end of Krimi-Deutschland were on average the most Adenauer-like of all (if you think of Deniz Yücel’s comparison of the German PEN with a bratwurst stand, you’re not wrong so wrong).
That’s history, the place. It has been in the Eifel, in the open-air museum in Kommern, for two years. Max and Freddy urgently need to find another warming room. A Kolsch pub would be great. The two of them (Bär comes from Dortmund, Behrendt from Hamm) and actually their cases have less of a dialectal local color.
But that’s generally the case with the “crime scene”. As a rule, the secretaries (as in Ludwigshafen) have to serve as representatives of the local location. And you don’t need a hand for the number of actors who actually come from where their commissars dig through the dirt of the respective city society. But that’s another story altogether.
We congratulate Ballauf and Schenk on their twenty-fifth. And wish them a few good screenwriters, directors, cameramen and opponents. Up to the statutory retirement age for the average television viewer. Maybe. Maybe we’ll meet up in Kommern in the museum at the Wurstbratbude. It’s nice there.