27. Tatort
Ask them for the reason why they moved to Berlin, the usual explanation given by Auslanders and elite German people alike is that they felt a strong urge to break free from the confinement of their original surroundings to live the unconventional life of an artist in what they believe to be a more laid-back, non-conformist, and artistically inspiring place.
The tried and tested way for anyone who strives to live like an unconventional, creative part of the Boheme is to adjust their lifestyle, looks, and attitudes to exactly match those of the people who moved to the place earlier. The mission objective is to be different in the same way everybody else is. As soon as you set foot on the stomping grounds of your adolescent dreams, you are automatically an avant-garde Bohemian, and you must act the part without any self-doubt. Getting a neon-colored leotard at American Apparel and growing a messy beard will buy you some time. But as German people take great pride in acting authentic, being an artist is not just a style thing. Well, on second thought, it is mainly just a style thing, yet elite German people like to think of themselves as non-conformist intellectuals who never even once stoop down to the shallow levels of pure aestheticism, so they constantly feel a certain peer pressure to have a true interest in intellectual matters.
That’s where they usually run into obstacles. Even the most progressive, city-slicking, counter-culturally versed, avant-garde, nonconformist German people are at heart country bumpkins with the very same unsophisticated cravings they constantly ridicule normal people for. Regardless of how much time they appear to spend on creating improbably brilliant music, design, fashion, art, or literature, for some reason they always seem to have a lot of free time for “networking” in cafes, dive bars, or the Berghain toilet.
The chasm gaping between their struggle to meet the stiff demands of bohemian Germany and the worldly desires their regrettably conventional upbringing irreversibly etched into their genes, inevitably leads to cognitive dissonances. It is fair to say that elite German people’s social interactions are driven by nothing but them. The behavior, attitudes, fashions, and ideologies that constitute Berlin-Mitte are nothing but manifestations of the raging inner conflict to resolve these very cognitive dissonances.
Unaware of the German way to tackle this problem, your approach would probably be to start working really hard to actually become the artist you claim to be. You know, put some old-fashioned effort into something, become an expert, then dedicate your life to it, try to reach beyond what others have reached for, fail at it, and fail at it over and over again, driving you into a severe alcoholism, then a drug habit that almost kills you, then outright madness that makes you obey the voices in your head telling you to cut off an ear, wrap it into tissue to give it to a prostitute, and finally taking you to the edge of suicide, because the very matter you dedicated your life to, has betrayed you, until finally, one day, in a time of greatest possible desperation, something else, something that has been hidden deep inside you, takes over, and suddenly every step you need to take is clearly laid out in front of your inner eye, and you walk the walk, ascending to a higher level of knowledge, forever shedding your limited comprehension of the world, leaving behind your entanglement in pretentious and shallow counter-culture kitsch, engrossing you with nothing but amused alienation from the activities and values that once mattered, because finally, life has turned you into a true artist.
Or, if that sounds too hard, attend a Tatort party. Elite German people at one point found out that they can gain the same amount of respect and interestingness that a true artist receives without putting in any effort. You simply have to redefine whatever painfully normal things you crave to do as being totally edgy, artistic, and non-conformist. Take some guidance from the masters: Attend a Tatort party. It’s the perfect blueprint of how elite German people take a mainstream thing they secretly crave, witlessly yet homogeneously change their attitude towards it, and call it the edgiest and most avant-garde thing ever. Attending a Tatort-Party means learning about the inner workings of the elite German mind.
So where do these elitists meet? Just walk around your trendy neighborhood on a Sunday evening. Tatort-Parties are usually held at “young” bars and cafes. Once you find a flock of German people wearing black, thick-rimmed glasses and T-Shirts with somewhat witty slogans, who are hanging out in a demonstratively relaxed “Sunday pose,” clutching on to bottles of ironic beer or Club Mate, while staring at a small, makeshift cinema screen, then congrats, you found a Tatort-Party. Enter and find a seat, then wait until the creepy, blatant staring at the new guy (you) ceases, then prepare yourself for the things to come by ordering the strongest coffee available. You’re just about to experience the longest 90 minutes of your life.
A new episode of Tatort is aired every Sunday. It is Germany’s longest running crime drama, a bit like a teutonic version of “Law & Order,” just a lot slower and less exciting. That’s the reason Tatort didn’t have a huge following among young Germans until about 10 years ago.
In fact, Tatort is so slow, tedious, and deliberately low-key that one 1.5 hour episode feels like a whole day going by. Halfway into it, you’ll want to inject caffeine into your eyeballs just to make it through the next minute. In good German film-making tradition, everything about it feels painfully over-endeavored and every single character is stock beyond the worst stereotype. But that’s, like, sooo not the point, Auslander. German people love Tatort for its realism and dedication to pick up controversial topics and social developments to base its stilted plots on in a really contrived way.
Example: If someday, somewhere in Germany a guy who works at a bakery and whose day job is to make spongecake would kill another guy who makes, for example, danish pastry, then the producers of Tatort would waste no time to come up with an episode of Tatort which took a pretentious shot at „unmasking“ the immoral aspects of the spongecake business and „illuminating“ its „hidden dark side“. The spongecake chef would be borderline psychotic and overweight, and there would be long-winded shots of him in a white spongecake chef’s apron, wielding a palette knife in a sleazy, dark bakery back room, with the cameras slowly panning up from his palette knife-wielding hands, up and up, past his meaty chin, to finally reveal, to much “ooh” and “ahh”-ing on part of the Tatort party’s members, he wasn’t really making spongecake, but staring into nothingness with his totally crazy, murderous, psycho spongecake chef eyes, but the scene doesn’t stop, and we can hear, but never get to see, him stabbing at the cutting board in an increasingly aggressive way, all mounting in a wild crescendo of staring and stabbing, staring and stabbing, staring and…you get the idea, it’s an extremely powerful scene because of the things we don’t get to see.
Don’t blame that poor spongecake chef though. Because Tatort is at heart a very German show, each episode takes plenty of time exploring the „social conflicts“ and „circumstances“ that lead to a crime. Mirroring the German society, in Tatort, everybody is a victim. Even the detectives. That’s because German people love to come up with far-flung excuses for any wrongdoing that wasn’t committed by a well-off person, and go to great lengths to construct a theory which serves to blame all the usual things they fear or disapprove of: Capitalism, environmental pollution, and being identified as Germans when traveling.
In the above example, the spongecake chef’s murder would be explained by the brutal, dog-eat-dog world the spongecake making business has evolved into. There would be a huge, faceless, spongecake-making corporation that aims to rule the spongecake marketplace with cheaply made, but bland products, rendering life for the loveably privately kept, romantically small spongecake-shops extremely competitive and impersonal. The murderer’s deed would be explained by the unbearable fear of the future those evil capitalists brought to this simple, down-to-earth spongecake chef, yet, and this is very important, Tatort wouldn’t take all the guilt off him, leaving the audience at your Tatort-Party in an ambivalent state, resulting in statements like “I’m not exactly sure who’s to blame here, and I think nobody should jump to conclusions. All we can say is, capitalism brings out the worst in people, right? Right??”
When the Tatort is finally over, the Germans around you feel obliged to start an orderly debate discussing the “important questions asked„ by this Sunday’s Tatort. The majority of German people will agree that the evil, faceless pastry company should take 100% of the guilt. It is highly recommended for you to always join the anti-capitalist side of the argument and actively take part in this discussion to secure your role as a knowledgeable media commentator. Discussing a substantially boring, run-of-the-mill crime drama gives your German acquaintances the warm, fuzzy feeling of being critical, self-determined people who are aware of the dangers of blind media consumption, because they are way too intellectual to just watch TV for its entertainment value, which, in the case of Tatort, is close to zero.
