"Tatort" check These are the Easter eggs from the psycho crime scene

Jan-Niklas Jäger

29.9.2024

Janneke and Brix bid farewell to the audience in "Tatort: Es grünt so grün, wenn Frankfurts Berge blüh'n". But how crazy was this crime thriller with a psycho-psychologist played by Matthias Brandt?

29.09.2024, 21:45

29.09.2024, 21:47

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Margarita Broich and Wolfram Koch bid farewell to the "Tatort" audience in their roles as Anna Janneke and Paul Brix.
Their last case is told from the perspective of the murderer. He suffers from a dissociative disorder and is sometimes unaware of his actions.
In addition to the special narrative style, the "Tatort" team has included numerous Easter eggs and a kind of celebrity cameo to bid farewell to the two detectives.
The two actors will be succeeded by Melika Foroutan and Edin Hasanović. However, their first case will not go on air until after the summer break in 2025.

Ten years ago, the renowned theater actors Margarita Broich and Wolfram Koch filmed their first Frankfurt "Tatort" entitled "Kälter als der Tod". It was broadcast on May 17, 2015.

Their two characters, Anna Janneke and Paul Brix, had an empathetic and friendly relationship for a total of 19 episodes. They were the successors to alcoholic detective Frank Steier (Joachim Król) and the brash Conny Mey (Nina Kunzendorf), between whom things were usually stressful.

Now, the friendly duo from Frankfurt have completed their last job with "Tatort: Es grünt so grün, wenn Frankfurts Berge blüh'n". The movie was so crazy and psychedelic that it felt more like a film from the nearby Wiesbaden precinct with Ulrich Tukur as Felix Murot. But it's not on until three weeks later.

Janneke and Brix's final performance told the story of a psychotherapist (Matthias Brandt) whose life slips away, leaving a trail of blood behind him. But did you catch all the witty and meaningful allusions in the movie? And what happens now in Frankfurt?

What was it about?

Psychotherapist Tristan Grünfels (Matthias Brandt) introduces himself to the audience right at the beginning, as the murderer in this "crime scene" is also the narrator. He talks about his estrangement from his wife (Patrycia Ziolkowska) and their two almost grown-up children (Maja Bons, Niko Jungmann).

But Grünfels has even worse problems: The shrink talks to his own doppelganger. He sees things that others don't - and he leaves a trail of blood behind him. Is he murdering people without really realizing it?

Janneke and Brix investigate the case of a police officer killed during a traffic stop. Grünfels, who also works as a family counselor for the Frankfurt police, is asked by Janneke to look after the relatives of the woman he himself may have murdered.

What was it really about?

You could make it easy for yourself and say: the craziest possible exit. In fact, the authors Michael Proehl and Dirk Morgenstern have already created a number of crime thrillers on the borderline of the arthouse genre.

"Tatort" star talks about shock shootChrisTine Urspruch: "It was creepy and disconcerting"

Proehl, who was born in Frankfurt by the way, wrote the famous Tukur case "Tatort: Im Schmerz geboren" (2014). Together with Morgenstern, he also wrote the upcoming Tukur crime thriller "Tatort: Murot und das 1000-jährige Reich", which is set in 1944 (!).

And yet there are also interesting psychiatric hard facts in "Tatort: Es grünt so grün, wenn Frankfurts Berge blüh'n". The main character apparently suffers from a dissociative disorder. This causes the self to break down into different parts, which are usually very different from one another.

For example, one part of Tristan Grünfels does not realize that another part of him is murdering people - and only observes the result in amazement. Through the subjective and also sick narrator, the viewer experiences the dissociative identity disorder - also known as multiple personality disorder - which is very popular in films, virtually "at first hand".

Did you recognize the Eintracht Frankfurt player?

Even those football fans who are interested in the German Bundesliga may not recognize the name Timothy Chandler. The 34-year-old former US international and Frankfurt native has only been used sporadically in competitive matches for the last two to three years. Chandler, a great joker and caretaker, responsible for the integration of new arrivals within the team, is known in Frankfurt and among fans of the club like a colorful dog.

In "Tatort: Es grünt so grün, wenn Frankfurts Berge blüh'n", he makes an appearance as a surprised cleaner in a scene in which Janneke and Brix search an apartment.

Chandler is not the first professional footballer to make an appearance in "Tatort" in the recent past. Bayern player and national team captain Joshua Kimmich has already played a fitness trainer twice in the Munich "Tatort" episodes "Hackl" (2023) and "Schau mich an" (2024).

Which famous painting was used here?

The farewell film for Janneke and Brix creates strong psychedelic images with a lot of double bottom and art references. Want an example? In one scene, psycho-psychologist Grünfels is directed to the gallery of his daughter's boyfriend. In the video installations that you can enter there, a famous Romantic painting by Caspar David Friedrich is mixed with animated horror scenes. In the dark romanticism of the motif, an even darker monster runs towards the already crazy protagonist.

Caspar David Friedrich's paintings are currently mega-popular. Florian Illies' book "Zauber der Stille: Caspar David Friedrichs Reise durch die Zeiten" (Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich's Journey through Time), published in the fall of 2023, was number 1 on the "Spiegel" bestseller list for a long time. Major exhibitions have also taken place and continue to do so.

"Tatort" author and art specialist Dirk Morgenstern says of the scene in the film: "The installation is the mirror of the main character's soul. The model was, of course, 'The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog', an iconographic image of the German soul's longing for peace and tranquillity." "Tatort" protagonist Grünfels also sought this peace - in vain.

What was it about the toilet slogans?

At the beginning of the film, Janneke and Brix find a dead police informant in a toilet. Brix knew the man well, but the Frankfurt insider gags that are conveyed in the scene via two toilet slogans are interesting: "Lieber Grie Soss als brauner Käs" is written there as a political-culinary Hesse statement ("Frankfurter Grüne Sosse" is the local cult dish alongside "Handkäs' mit Musik").

And then you can read: "Peter Feldmann make Offenbach great again." For those unfamiliar with Frankfurt: Peter Feldmann was the hated mayor of the city who was voted out of office by the citizens and Offenbach is, well, the poor little neighbor that people in Frankfurt like to make fun of. Of course, the slogan also creates a connection to Donald Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again", which is now often abbreviated to MAGA.

What's next for the Frankfurt "Tatort"?

Margarita Broich from Berlin and Wolfram Koch, who has actually lived in Frankfurt for a long time, decided together and voluntarily to end their tenure in the mail metropolis. They want to devote more time to the theater and also to private challenges such as their grandchildren (Broich's statement).

Their successors were introduced at the end of July 2024: They are Melika Foroutan (48) and Edin Hasanović (32), who will shoot their first "Tatort" in the fall of 2024, but it will not be shown until the 2025/26 season - i.e. after the 2025 summer break.

The traditionally innovative Hessischer Rundfunk is also breaking new ground with the approach of the new "Tatort" team: the focus of Foroutan and Hasanović's investigations is on cold cases, i.e. unsolved murders and homicides from the past. So perhaps we will soon be seeing regular crime thrillers from Frankfurt without a "fresh" corpse.