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Adam Raczek (Lucas Gregorowicz) with Zvi Spielmann (Dov Glickman): "How do you live with that?"
Photo: Maor Waisburd / rbb
The body of a woman is found in Slubice, Poland, lying among the asbestos leftovers. With the corpse, indications of guilt and injustice from the time of the "Third Reich" were supposed to disappear. The dead woman was a civil engineer and was involved in a difficult project in Cottbus, Brandenburg, which involved an old house that had belonged to a Jewish family. The engineer may have old documents about the house.
At first glance an incredibly complex case, which the Polish commissioner Adam Raczek (Lucas Gregorowicz) has to solve almost single-handedly after the departure of his German colleague Olga Lenski (Maria Simon).
It must be determined between Poland and Germany, between victims and perpetrators, between yesterday and today.
Motorcyclist Raczek is accordingly agile between all the places and times;
if it has to be particularly fast, he takes the bike.
But the speed with which historical crimes and individual guilt are ultimately to be resolved in this "police call" is unfortunately also his main problem.
More on that later.
First a little praise: The fact that the creators of the film (book: Mike Bäuml, director: Dror Zahavi) focus on a Holocaust survivor in the course of the plot is a strong twist;
The Jewish perspective is mostly only sketched out in television crime novels on the subject or left out entirely.
Here she is taken over by the character of Zvi Spielmann (Dov Glickman): the old man with heart disease returns after decades with his daughter from Israel to Cottbus to fight over the house where he lived as a little boy until his entire house Family was deported and murdered.
Real estate shark with a crushing jaw
Now the property is to become part of a luxury square. Behind the project is an investor who, with his crushing jaw, more than deserves the name real estate shark. The disgust had the old minstrel tracked down through the Jewish Claims Conference, which represents compensation claims for Holocaust survivors - but with the plan not to compensate him adequately, but rather to pull him over the table.
Apparently there is a kind of deed of donation from the time of the »Third Reich«, which makes Spielmann's German friend from early childhood the owner of the property: Elisabeth Behrend (Monika Lennartz) once lived in the neighboring apartment and played on the street with Spielmann.
Today she is the official owner of the house that is now being targeted by the real estate shark.
And he exhausts all legal and probably also a few illegal means, including dinner with the responsible judge.
Once the real estate agent yells at the Holocaust survivor: "Fuck your ass!" According to Spielmann, this is how the concentration camp guards always raged.
The real estate shark as today's Nazi watchdog?
Commissioner as a trauma companion
In order to clarify the difficult ownership situation, the old man from Israel has to go deep into his repressed traumas - and the Pole Raczek becomes his trauma companion. Raczek once asked the question about Spielmann's family, who were wiped out in the concentration camp, "How do you live with it?" kidnapped and executed - is still a big issue in the family today. "
The clash of the Jewish victim with the legal system of the country of the perpetrators is cushioned here by quickly and without consequences writing a victim identity in the biography of the Polish police officer, which he can then use to approach the suffering of the Holocaust survivor.
It doesn't hurt so much to come to terms with it.
The confrontation between the old minstrel and old Behrend, who played and wrested together as children, is written and staged even more discouraged.
The two indulge in the old days, the woman asks the man for absolution.
Can the memory of childhood happiness make people forget the break in civilization?
Some very similar Sunday thrillers have recently shown how culpable entanglements from the Nazi era can be painfully manifested in the present with a tight, precise line.
In the Berlin episode “Tatort” “A few words until midnight”, for example, the face of an old lady was enough to reflect the guilt she had incurred in her youth.
Guilt that doesn't go away.
The new "police call", on the other hand, tries to get a conciliatory exit into Sunday night despite blatant exaggerations and with dramaturgically dubious support from Poland.
Inappropriate on the big issue.
Rating:
4 out of 10 points
"Police call 110: Hermann",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., Das Erste
