Can you describe political upheavals in a TV thriller? In this case it works very well. The story and the actors are believable.
Berlin – The dissolution of the East German operations by the Treuhand after the fall of the Wall in 1990 is far from being dealt with in its contradictions. The résumés and hopes that were shattered at the time remain a bitter legacy of recent German-German history, which was not a success story for everyone.
The two new episodes of the “Stralsund” thriller on ZDF tell of this open wound. A complex case that goes far beyond the usual TV crime level, spread in many facets with top-class cast. The first episode “Stralsund – The Manifesto” runs on Saturday at 8:15 pm in the second, on Wednesday (September 1st) the sequel “Stralsund – Medusa’s death” follows at the same time.
A pile of dusty files leads like a tunnel into the past that simply does not want to pass. The young Dominik Euler (Leonard Carow) finds the incriminating documents with his mother, who kept them in the closet. When he tries to confront the business lawyer Kellermann, who at the time made a fortune by privatizing shipyards, Dominik witnesses the murder of the unscrupulous turning profiteer.
Dominik can flee from the murderer, but has to go into hiding and quickly becomes suspicious of himself. He finds refuge with a group of strange organic farmers who practice target practice in the barn at night. Then an ominous manifesto emerges in which revenge is announced for alleged machinations of the trust.
Investigators Nina Petersen (Katharina Wackernagel, Karl Hidde (Alexander Held) and Karim Uthman (Karim Günes) grope in the dark for a long time, especially since the self-confident Petersen is busy working on her relationship with her superior Thomas Jung (Johannes Zirner) is personally involved, a bygone love of his has previously written articles against the turning necks.
This time the screenwriters Andreas Kanonenberg and Olaf Kraemer, directed by Alexander Dierbach (“Tannbach – Fate of a Village”) really had time to develop their characters. “In our two-part series, Andreas and I had the chance to tell a political story and its effects from” below “- without the suits and glass towers in the capital, which are usually used for meeting, but from the point of view of those who carried the load “, So Kraemer according to the ZDF press release.
Manfred Wolf (great: Axel Werner) was such a painter. Before the fall of the Wall, he welded Russian fish trawlers together at the shipyard, then his operation was closed and the workforce sorted out. Now he’s standing at the bar of his daughter’s shabby pub and quarreling with his son Dieter, played by Peter Schneider, one of the new inspectors from “Polizeiruf 110” from Halle.
The intelligent son of the once proud worker went to the Western, failed there, came back and now only sees losers around him: “1989 was actually like 1945, except that the winners came from their own country, and the winners always have the authority to interpret “, Is his gloomy conclusion of the turning point in the east.
Is the smart, disaffected Dieter Wolf behind the militant manifesto? After the first episode, most of the questions remain unanswered. Instead, we experience a film that looks almost like a collective psychogram: the children and grandchildren still seem to be suffering from their parents’ injuries. We can therefore look forward to the second part of this special “Stralsund” thriller. dpa
