Wolfgang Stauch
Carolin and Moritz Seitz were once known as a successful couple of actors. But today she is considered the wife of a murderer: Four years ago, Moritz Seitz was convicted of killing the former theater star Thore Bärwald after an excessive New Year's Eve party. Now Ole Stark turns himself in to the police. He is also an actor and claims to be the real killer. The public prosecutor's office cannot initiate new investigations, but they give the Cologne inspectors Ballauf and Schenk a week to find out what is true of the story that is being served up to them.
The gas station attendant at a Mainz gas station was shot. This is the second assault in two weeks, but this time it's fatal. The only witness is the blind law student Rosa Münch, who still lives with her parents and longs for a life beyond the overprotective control of her father. Chief Inspector Ellen Berlinger and her partner Martin Rascher investigate the traces of the two perpetrators and follow the indications of the blind: The smell of an expensive perfume, the voices of suspects, the details heard and felt by Rosa at the crime scene. The commissioners want to put the vulnerable witness under police protection, but the young woman refuses. On the contrary, when another unknown young woman, whose voice sounds familiar, tries to contact Rosa, she keeps it to herself. The experienced investigators suspect that Rosa knows more than she says, and have to continue investigating without their support and resort to unusual methods to prevent further deaths.
Polizeiruf 110 is a long-running German language detective television series. The first episode was broadcast 27 June 1971 in the German Democratic Republic, and after the dissolution of Fernsehen der DDR the series was picked up by ARD. It was originally created as a counterpart to the West German series Tatort, and quickly became a public favorite. In contrast with other television crime series, in which killings are practically the primary focus, while Tatort handled homicide cases, the cases handled in the GDR TV's Polizeiruf were more often the more frequent, and less serious, crimes such as domestic violence, extortion, fraud, theft and juvenile delinquency, as well as alcoholism, child abuse and rape. Contrary to Tatort, which concentrated on the primary characters and their private lives, police procedure was the center of attention of Polizeiruf, especially in the earlier episodes. The scriptwriters attached particular importance to representation of the criminal and his state of mind, as well as the context of the crime. Many episodes aimed to teach and enlighten the audience about what does and what doesn't constitute appropriate behaviour and appropriate thought, rather than just to entertain. Polizeiruf was one of the few broadcasts by GDR media in which the real problems and difficulties of the supposedly more advanced socialist society could be displayed and discussed to some extent, albeit in a fictionalized and pedagogicalized environment.
Tatort is a long-running German/Austrian/Swiss, crime television series set in various parts of these countries. The show is broadcast on the channels of ARD in Germany, ORF 2 in Austria and SF1 in Switzerland. The first episode was broadcast on November 29, 1970. The opening sequence for the series has remained the same throughout the decades, which remains highly unusual for any such long-running TV series up to date. Each of the regional TV channels which together form ARD, plus ORF and SF, produces its own episodes, starring its own police inspector, some of which, like the discontinued Schimanski, have become cultural icons. The show appears on DasErste and ORF 2 on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. and currently about 30 episodes are made per year. As of March 2013, 865 episodes in total have been produced. Tatort is currently being broadcast in the United States on the MHz Worldview channel under the name Scene of the Crime.
