By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
BERLIN - The new season of “Law & Order” that begins this month will be its 20th, making it America’s longest-running prime-time drama show. Here in Germany, where a police drama series called “Tatort” has been around nearly four decades, 20 years can seem as ephemeral as a high school romance.
“Tatort” (it translates as “Crime Scene”) is one of those modest popculture symbols and longstanding common experiences that can be hard for outsiders to translate, but that speak to, and of, a nation. First broadcast in 1970, the show is a thoroughly German variation on the age-old formula of a pair of detectives solving a murder.
It was wildly popular from the start. At one time three-quarters of German television viewers tuned in. Now, with cable channels fragmenting the viewing public, more than seven million people still get together on Sundays at 8:15 p.m. to catch the show at home or in bars, some of which receive advance DVDs so fans can pause the action before the killer is unveiled and collectively try to guess who did it.
Violent crime isn’t common here. The killing of four people by a gunman who went on a rampage near Dusseldorf last month was all the more shocking for being exceptional. With a population of 82 million, Germany had 864 homicides in 2007; there were around 20 times as many in the United States, where the population is not quite four times as big.
Crimes happen in distinctly German locales like the little city garden plots called schrebergarten, where nature-loving Germans grow their own tomatoes and show off their odd taste for plastic gnomes.
The regional divisions of ARD, the German public broadcasting system, produce 15 versions of “Tatort.” There’s a Leipzig “Tatort,” a Frankfurt “Tatort,” a Bremen “Tatort,” a Stuttgart “Tatort” and even a Vienna one, made by Austrian television.
Each makes something of its regional roots. Germans talk about their favorite “Tatort” roughly the way they do about their local soccer teams. The “Tatort” from Munster plays for laughs. Hamburg stars a hunky, James Bondlike Turkish detective who works alone; Han over, a beautiful, clever female detective, also a loner.
An episode about incest among Kurdish and Turkish Alevi provoked thousands of protesters to take to the streets in Cologne and Hamburg; the producers responded by agreeing not to show it in repeats. “We air some 30 new episodes a year, and so there are inevitably protests from time to time,” Rosemarie Wintgen, the producer of “Tatort” in Berlin, said with a shrug.
“Tatort” plays down graphic violence in favor of character development. Over more than 700 episodes, it has featured 70 detectives. They’re almost invariably glum characters, mired in bad relationships or alone - ordinary people, which is how this country tends to like its stars.
Or as Ms. Wintgen put it: “Its detectives stand for the dreams of the people. The plain-looking guy or the middle-aged blonde who in the end solves all of life’s problems and finds the murderer. That’s our kind of hero.”
“Tatort,” an enduring crime drama on German TV, is made in 15 regional versions. Hanover’s stars Maria Furtwangler.
