The first picture already outlines the whole Horst Schimanski. We see a strong back in a red t-shirt. The man looks out of his bedroom window at the chimneys of Duisburg. From the radio on the windowsill, the Shangri-Las sing “Leader Of The Pack”: “They told me he was bad / But I knew he was sad.”
The man goes into the kitchen, checks a pan, sets it aside, takes two eggs from the fridge, cracks them open in a glass and drinks them with a shudder. Then he takes a bag of garbage and leaves the apartment. In the next scene we see him in a bar, where he takes half a roll and yells “Schimanski!” into the phone: He can be reached here for the next hour.
“Duisburg-Ruhrort” was the first “crime scene” in 1981 with Götz George as Schimanski and Eberhard Feik as Christian Thanner, written by Horst Vocks and Thomas Wittenburg, directed by Hajo Gies. Hansjörg Felmy, previously the commissioner in the WDR catchment area, had signaled that he was tired of his duties and complained about the bad scripts. Horst Vocks offered him two books which he could not accept. This is how Eberhard Feik came into play, who was to embody a new, proletarian type of commissar.
The director Ilse Hoffmann, who was soon to be the first woman to direct a “crime scene”, brought up another actor whom she had admired since the Karl May films in the 1960s and who had never become famous. Götz George, unlike his character, was a touchy pedant who chose jeans and a beige military jacket for Schimanski. In the end, Feik played the antipode, the staid, respectable bailiff Thanner.
WDR has restored the first five years of the Schimanski “crime scenes” in HD – and fortunately everything looks as musty and desolate as before. A sentence on discriminatory language was added. When you see him again, you realize what a cute character this Schimanski is, driven by his emotions, and that Thanner is always just a grammatical twist away from sheer aggression.
The local color and idiom are overwhelming. The names Poppinga and Petschek. The pubs, the inland shipping, the snack bars, the offices. Schimanski drinks beer with the wife of a prison suspect in her apartment and flirts with a bartender. From time to time he stays in Thanner’s apartment, whose wife Sylvia thinks he’s a guest too often. Schimanski sits down at the breakfast table in his underpants.
More columns by Arne Willander
A bankrupt barge, drug smuggling to Rotterdam and arms deals by a Turkish gang form the picturesque criminal milieu. Director Hajo Gies remembers the narrative problem that everything is told through Schimanski. And Thanner says, “Horst, you’re getting lost. Because now you’re taking it personally.”