The crime series ZERV, together with an informative documentary, is dedicated to some of the consequences of the fall of the Wall.
Frankfurt – We have big plans, someone says. And elsewhere he says: The bush allowance has to be earned.
But first of all, chaos reigns: telephones and fax machines won’t work until tomorrow at the earliest, the moving boxes haven’t been unpacked yet, and the premises don’t look particularly inviting. The first days of the ZERV are not exactly promising. ZERV is the abbreviation for the Central Investigative Agency for Government and Association Crime, founded in 1991. It is said that it was mainly in the old GDR, and they do not want to repeat the mistakes that were made after 1945 with the old rope teams, they say.
Wait a minute: mistake? Alright, let’s leave that aside as a side issue.
ZERV on ARD: “Besserwessi” meets former GDR citizens
In any case, it was not Hitlerism that ended here, but the SED era. The alert, correctly dressed Peter Simon (Fabian Hinrichs, who we also know as a Franconian crime scene inspector) has come from Bremen and, together with his western colleagues, is starting work at ZERV in Berlin: a better-than-usy man like him in the Beech stands and specializes in white-collar crime. He considers the inhabitants of the former GDR to be stupid or twisted and is not always wrong. But the Wessis make the first big mistake. They take a man who wants to make a statement less seriously than their own chaos and put him off. Shortly thereafter he hangs from a tree.
Karo Schubert (Nadja Uhl) is the East Berlin murder investigator, Peter Simon makes her life difficult and talks a lot of nonsense. But anyone who has ever seen a series, no matter what genre, on German television, no matter what channel, suspects: the two cannot, but have to work together, and they will do it wonderfully successfully and never without conflict.
The first episode of the ZERV crime series on ARD is full of clichés. Well, more than three decades after the disappearance of the double adjective German-German from political vocabulary, you might find that funny. For example, when asked if there was anything else to eat, the East Berlin hotel porter said to the Wessi: “Bockwurst. But it’s cold.” To the logical question of what to drink, the logical answer is: “Beer. But that’s warm.” So much for the smile factor of the first episode.
ZERV: German crime series starts in the ARD program
As is usually the case in German crime fiction, the murder is the event that makes things clearer. So there’s someone hanging, the murder investigator puts forward a few clever theses that put state security in the vicinity of the mafia. You now know what you are arguing about, what you are looking for, why everything is so difficult. The old rope teams are still powerful and enormously capable of acting, although they are Ossis, who actually seem quite conservative and tolerable. Because a white-collar criminal and a homicide detective have to work together, it is a crime complex in which both are closely intertwined. Once there is even a real big explosion with old Eastern explosives, respect!
ZERV. time of reckoning
Episode 1: Different times. Tuesday, February 22, 8:15 p.m., Episode 2: Take Cover. February 22 at 10:05 p.m. The other episodes of the first season in a two-pack on Wednesday, February 23rd and Thursday, February 24th.
In addition to illegal sales of weapons from NVA stocks, there are always really human issues: love and leisure time, the consequences of fleeing the Republic, arrests, entanglements, relationships, government re-education measures and the omnipresent jungle of power.
Will Karo and Peter get each other in the end? That would be kind of a disappointment. It’s not that easy to avoid the mistakes of the past.
In addition, the mdr has created a multi-part informative and material-rich documentation that is definitely worth looking at. (Hans Jürgen Linke)
The new dark and bad-ending Dortmund crime scene “Love me” on ARD tells of emotional coldness and its devastation.
