New “crime scene” from Franconia: Every beginning has a plum quark dumpling

The 1900s were a wild time: with a Facebook group and audience mail, fans of Pollesch actor Fabian Hinrichs forced a “Tatort” series with him as the main character. The whole thing was preceded by a guest appearance with Batic and Leitmayr (RIP) in Munich. There Hinrichs played the overzealous, annoying and lovable new assistant Gisbert Engelhardt, who died in the same episode. The BR gives and the BR takes. And then says again: After a “We want Gisbert back!” campaign, a Franconian “crime scene” with Hinrichs was announced. Since 2015, Hinrichs has been investigating not as Gisbert, but as Felix Voss, but no longer as an assistant but as chief inspector.

The good news: He's doing this again in his eleventh year. And now, after Dagmar Manzel's departure in 2024, she has been given a new colleague, Emilia "Emmy" Rathgeber, played by the Munich actress Rosalie Thomass. Film character Rathgeber is empathetic and emotional, where Voss is stubborn, and getting to know each other is undramatic by “crime scene” standards. Nobody is having a secret affair, there is no jockeying for status. Instead, people sniff each other and tell each other about their favorite dish, plum quark dumplings. You could almost say: finally normal people.

In tranquil Franconia, the case is responsible for the tension in an old-fashioned way. This time it's about a male corpse in a Nuremberg love hotel. So far, so cinematic cliché. The victim appeared on stages in Franconia in drag as Stella, but continued to live privately as Elias Schaller and was receiving psychiatric treatment. And already a disturbing feeling sets in: Can't a genderqueer person in a German police crime drama just live their life in peace? Apparently not. However, even in real life, people who live outside of gender binaries are not left alone. This was demonstrated just last weekend by a raid on Berlin's Casa Kuá during the meeting of the transfeminine group “Dolls of Berlin”.

In “Crime Scene,” victim Schaller is spared police harassment, but we get to know his titular home of Gottesgarten, his childhood friends and his parents, who deal with the drag artist’s death very differently. In the end, the crime at the beginning turns out to be a smokescreen and the real monster is either rejecting parents, abusive confidants or a legal situation that offers loopholes for sexual predators. Whether police crime or real life: “Protect the Dolls” should be more than just a slogan shirt.