“In February”. “The beautiful Jens”. “Porn Peter”. This “crime scene” conjures up old GDR times in rustic Stasi poetry, when West German business people believed that they could get cheap materials and nights of love in East Germany for a few West Marks.
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The highlight of the pairing and trading season was therefore the trade fair time in Leipzig. The Stasi not only watched the goings-on in Saxony benevolently, but also actively interfered with Romeo and Juliet informers on site in order to procure foreign currency for the clammy state.
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The astonishing thing about this »crime scene«: In order to call attention to the last days of the GDR including the East-West love nights in Leipzig, his action hardly has to leave the city limits of Cologne. The thriller lets the bygone era emerge exclusively through pointed dialogues and suggestive camera work in front of the audience.
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Sex services and chemical accidents
The current crime plot on the events of the past is clear: After an old lady was found hanged in her room in a luxury hotel in Cologne, the suspicions of the inspectors Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) and Schenk (Dietmar Bär) are directed towards the hotel manager Bettina Mai (Ulrike Krumbiegel). Before reunification, she and the dead woman had apparently been connected with each other across corners: Leipzig and Bitterfeld, Stasi services and dissidence, sex services and chemical accidents, all of this is connected here without being able to explain these connections at first.
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In order to trace the who-with-who-why-constellations, the filmmakers rely on a daring narrative construction: They let the hotel manager Mai take Inspector Schenk hostage and both get closer. A particularly severe case of Stockholm Syndrome, but believable. Ossi Mai, Stasi-IM during the GDR era, Wessi Schenk deciphered the libidinal and political interplay of yesteryear as detailed as it was dry from the passenger seat or on the hotel bed.
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Language, looks, a few colorless photos: that’s enough to create the historical context. Author Wolfgang Stauch and director Torsten C. Fischer – have previously worked together for the risky and disturbing Magdeburg “police call” about a transsexual murder suspect – avoid all public law history didactics. There are neither the usual flashbacks to the Saxon Stasi horror regiment, nor are traumatic scenes from the walled state laboriously recreated.
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“Porno-Peter” is supposed to become a minister in North Rhine-Westphalia
Instead, the filmmakers place disturbing connections in the present; a few criminal and amoral figures from back then also reappear. What is »Porno-Peter« doing today? He has had a career in politics and is set to become Minister of Economics for North Rhine-Westphalia.
The focus, however, is today’s hotel manager and former prostitute Mai, who lets actress Krumbiegel talk about the old days in a sensational balancing act of sarcasm and sentiment. At one point, her figure soberly sums up her survival strategy from her time in Leipzig: “Fucking for the fatherland”. In her remarks, dryly and touchingly, she conjures up the former GDR sell-out, in which people were literally degraded to grave goods.
The bitter statement of this in many ways disturbing »crime scene«: The fact that the end of real socialism dragged on was also due to the fact that it was kept going by vodka, Westmark and fluffy BRD bigwigs.
Rating: 9 out of 10 points
»Crime Scene: The Death of Others«, Sunday, 8.15 p.m., Das Erste
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