You hurt me, so I’ll kill you
Dangerous woman: Mira (Julia Koschitz) with a submachine gun
Source: ZDF and Petro Domenigg / FILMSTI
The mini-series “Amschlag” tells the genesis of the rampage in a Viennese shopping center. The six-part series shows how mental poisoning can turn people into perpetrators. There are no two common narratives for triggering a rampage.
Dhe man has muscles, but they don’t support him. His name is Georg. His uniform holds him together. Georg is supposed to make Sunshine City safer. This is the shopping mall in Agnes Pluch’s miniseries “Amschlag”.
It is in the middle of Vienna. Everything is colorful there. You know each other a little. Runs past each other. Fates cross.
Until shots are fired like five years ago at the Munich Olympic shopping center, where nine people died when an 18-year-old right-wing extremist German-Iranian targeted people who looked like migrants at random.
Georg is one of ten people whose lives Agnes Pluch knots in her “Round Dance of Insults”. Six episodes long. Each episode is dedicated to a character. With each episode you get a little closer to the attack, with whose media explosion everything begins. You see the usual videos, you see the news, you see armored troops securing Sunshine City.
One hears a psychologist whose name is Reinhard Haller and who actually exists, his book “The Power of Offense” is the basis of Agnes Pluch’s fabulous book. The man says that people who commit such an attack are always deeply offended personalities.
People at the attack. Agnes Pluch lights them up. All the injuries, all the little poison received every day that accumulates in the soul and eventually explodes.
Georg, for example. A big guy with a small ego. He wants to be a team leader, he needs the money. He wants to make Eva happy. She’s been blind since an accident. If she weren’t blind, they wouldn’t be together anymore.
You both know. They despair of each other. Whatever they say goes wrong, is full of microaggression, full of reproaches, undertones that can wear down a person.
No social class is immune to the virus of hurt. There is no vaccination against it, and education does not help either. And neither Islamism nor right-wing radicalism are basic prerequisites for a blindly furious outbreak of violence like the one whose origins “Amschlag” is investigating.
The visitors to the “Sunshine City” flee after shots have been fired
Source: ZDF and Petro Domenigg / FILMSTI
There is the indebted, single female doctor whom everyone has trampled on for so long that she can only survive with gin and tonic. The young ex-con who loses his heart and head over the impossible love for Sunshine hairdresser Saschi.
Which in turn is in a fatal relationship with Georg’s vicious security colleague and competitor. Or Mira, the project manager whose mother she despises and who is thrown away by her beloved boss when she threatens to overshadow him.
It’s always about power. It’s always about toxic relationships. Agnes Pluch and director Umut Dag observe their staff from approximately the same distance. Anyone of them could become the gunman.
They let Julia Koschitz, Murathan Muslu, Johanna Wokalek, Antje Traue and all the others calmly transform dramaturgical units into people.
There are no supporting roles. No escape either. For a long time, German television has not managed anything better than this series.
.