Dhe Lusatia, which is hard to imagine today, has to be imagined as a paradise landscape. In ancient times it was like that. Legends tell about it. Legends of the Sorbs. Created by God on a pretty good day. And then – so the legend goes – the devil came and buried the coal under the Lausitz.
And then came the excavators. They kept getting bigger. Like dinosaurs, they still stand there today in south-east Brandenburg, in a traumatized landscape that looks like it was shortly after the meteorite impact. A landscape in which German history and the present can be told like probably nowhere else, the history of the turning point and change.
A landscape as an ideal projection surface for historically deep murder stories, for stories about traumatized guys, for stories about women who are choked to breathe, dusty stories.
“Abyss”, the new German-Polish “Polizeiruf 110”, the last one with Lukas Gregorowicz as Commissioner Adam Raczek, is such a dusty story from Lusatia. And the only problem she has is that less than a quarter of a year ago there was a commissioner there, with the excavators, on the lakes that are being renatured and are supposed to attract tourists and bring the country a future.
“Lauchhammer” was the name of the mini-series. Misel Maticevic was the commissioner. As a renegade from Lusatia, he immersed himself for four and a half hours in the cracks and dust of Lusatia. Girls died there too because someone took their breath away. Here, too, the past of a system in which there were no murderers mobilized against the present. Was it about the past pride of an area in having brought warmth to an entire country?
And what’s left of the pride in a post-fossil world where coal is from the devil. Of a wide landscape with narrow hearts. Even then you learned to avoid the excavators and the men who guard them, who explain them.
The inspector can’t be helped
Lausitz is the perfect mirror for Adam Raczek. For a man whose chest has become tighter and tighter in recent years. A traumatized, disturbed person. whose colleague was murdered. Who no longer knows why he is actually doing what he is doing because nothing changes.
Because the devil rules the world and coal, and a commissioner is just one who runs after the devils of the world. Who saves nothing.
Raczek takes pills. Raczek is shaking. The wind of fear keeps blowing him across the country. A pale sun hangs over Lusatia. In Fehlow is Raczek, which is a fictional but archetypal village. A Polish geologist is dead.
On the site of a former lignite mining area
Source: rbb/Christoph Assmann
Who suffocated her. She should do a soil survey. Judging whether the shore of the artificial lake is suitable for tourism, for building. Fehlow is worried. It has invested. It hopes. Tourism is the future. The only one they’ve had since the world’s largest moving work machine was reduced to a skeletonized open-air museum.
“Abyss” begins like a horror movie. A woman walks through a dark forest. A hand scratches at a tree in agony. Someone is breathing heavily. “Abyss” remains a horror film. He just gets quieter. He pulls out horror from under Fehlow like excavators pull out coal.
The method is ancient. Raczek and his colleague Vincent Ross, the first reasonably gender-fluid investigator on German television, come out of the city like aliens. In fact, they want to leave right away. But get stuck – another body is found, a woman who could have loved Adam disappears. It might not have been necessary for her name to be Ewa. Raczek and Ross will be our probes into the seams of the past and the secretive present of the closed village.
In their book, Peter Dommaschk and Ralf Leuther bring to light what “Lauchhammer” also brought to light. Skeletonized, more sketchy, they don’t have that much time and they also have to give a credible farewell to a commissioner.
But they also tell of the socialist past that doesn’t want to end, of the turning point and cultural change and what it does to the people who stayed because they couldn’t leave. From the new structures in a structurally weak area. They tell the landscape and the landscape in the people.
Above all, they tell of two boys with whom something could have happened. Cool, taciturn Adam, whose skin is thinner than he lets on. And Vincent, who is walking through Lusatia with a faux fur collar, green sweater vest and pink shirt on shoes that are not necessarily suitable for the landscape. They snap at each other, mother each other, teach each other, there’s always something going on between them. A strangeness, a near distance.
The most exciting crime duo dies
I would have loved to have watched this game more. Adam and Vincent were the most interesting team in the Sunday evening thriller, alongside the expandable Saarland “Tatort” duo. Now, at the end of “Abgrund” – spoilers are allowed – Lukas Gregorowicz fled the dust over Lusatia. And André Kaczmarczyk’s Vincent sets out alone to hunt for murderers in the German-Polish border area.
He can. Kaczmarczyk’s kajal-tipped detective is a fabulous, shimmering character. And the matter-of-factness with which he plows through the cases, with which he is allowed to live his being in “Polizeiruf” is perhaps a bigger success for the LGTBQ+ movement than the gendering in the “daily issues”.