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Actress Lisa Bitter (l.), Ulrike Folkerts (middle) and Ursula Werner: vodka, cigarettes and Miles Davis
Photo: Benoît Linder / SWR
The scenario:
Vodka haze, cigarette smoke and the grueling burden of unpunished Nazi crimes: Commissioner Odenthal (Ulrike Folkerts) receives a visit from her aunt (Ursula Werner), a public prosecutor who once gained a reputation as a Nazi hunter and spends excessive evenings talking about her struggle to come to terms with the past .
Meanwhile, Odenthal and his colleague Stern (Lisa Bitter) investigate a death in a nursing home, where a patient was mistakenly pronounced dead after an insulin overdose, only to be cremated in the crematorium.
Was that murder?
Is the dead man a Nazi criminal?
And did his aunt have a hand in his cruel death?
The highlight:
Optimizing costs for elderly care, concentration camps during the Nazi era: the construction of this atonement thriller is risky, since the parallel presentation of the barracks of elderly people in need of care and the establishment of concentration camps in the "Third Reich" could invite relativization.
The plot wobbles once or twice, but in the end it is resolved as clearly as correctly.
The picture:
SS henchman with power cable.
At the center of this »crime scene« is a concentration camp guard who is said to have tortured and killed camp inmates as »the snake from Natzweiler«.
Only one blurred image exists of the man from that time.
Inspector Stern tracks it down at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp memorial.
The dialogue:
Inspector Bitter asks the doctor at the nursing home about his employer's cost planning over dinner:
Commissioner: "Is it actually worth it for a home like this if the care classification is increased?"
Doctor: »Of course there is a financial difference. Between care levels 2 and 5, 16 times that. That's when a home really starts to earn money.«
Inspector: "Could it be possible that the home bribed the doctor?"
Doctor: »Every health insurance company has its own experts, they should all be corruptible.«
Inspector: "So if I wanted to raise the level of care, would I have to manipulate the patient? What would I have to do to really lower the level of the patient so that he can no longer be spoken to during the examination by the panel doctor?"
Doctor: "You scare me!"
The song:
Yesterdays by Miles Davis.
The ballad continues as the aunt tells her niece at the smoky kitchen table how she became a Nazi hunter - and how the statute of limitations prevented her from completing her mission in the 1960s.
Miles plays the blues, the aunt ponders the futility of all pursuits of justice.
The review:
7 out of 10 points.
Cruel, sarcastic, correct: Crime with a memorial effect.
The analysis:
Please read on here!
"Crime scene: Lena's aunt",
Sunday, 8.15 p.m., the first