The “Crime Scene: Among Gardeners” (March 17, 8:15 p.m., the first) takes Chief Inspector Frank Thiel (Axel Prahl, 63) and forensic doctor Professor Karl-Friedrich Boerne (Jan Josef Liefers, 59) to an idyllic allotment garden in the middle of the city picturesque cathedral. There, after the death of Sabine Schmidt (Sibylle Canonica, 66, “The Pass”), they have to deal with naked neighbors, poisonous plants and corpses with historical references. The crime thriller in a fact check.
As part of the interviews in the allotment garden, Thiel and his assistant Mirko Schrader (Björn Meyer, born 1989) meet, among others, Sabine’s outspoken neighbor Klaus Karger (Tobias van Dieken, born 1980, “The Anders Family”). Completely naked, he gets out of his pool in the plot, which is surrounded by a high privacy screen, to grill sausages. He explains about the neighborhood: “They think I’m doing something to their valuable brood if I show my dogs the sun and the sun my dogs.”
The Bonn actor Tobias van Dieken is behind this entertaining scene. He was last seen in “Wilsberg – A Detective and Gentleman” (2024) and as the new friend of the mother of a patchwork family in the TV series “The Anders Family” (2023). Two new episodes are on ZDF on April 7th and 14th from 8:15 p.m.
“These fair trade philistines want to get rid of everyone who still has cherry laurel in their garden. It’s an invasive species,” adds Klaus Karger. Which brings us to the next topic. This rose plant is not only invasive and threatens to displace native species, the information center against poisoning also classifies all parts of the laurel cherry plant as poisonous.
In “Tatort: Among Gardeners” viewers are presented with a small ABC of poisonous plants. The crime novel says about the black belladonna: “In case of an overdose: respiratory and cardiac arrest.” The autumn crocus “can also be deadly”. The angel’s trumpet can also be found in the dead Sabine’s garden plot – “Has this lady planted anything that isn’t deadly?” asks Professor Boerne.
But edible things are also discussed. Among other things, the investigators discovered particularly large vegetables in the soil under which a body was buried many years ago. “The world food crisis can be solved very easily – growing fruit and vegetables in cemeteries – this is where the best fertilizer and the best care are available,” says Boerne. It sounds macabre, but there is actually a cemetery in Austria, for example, where onions, kohlrabi or tomatoes are planted on some of the graves that are no longer used by relatives. “Demand is increasing,” said Walter Pois, cemetery manager of the Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof in Vienna, about the slightly different urban gardening in 2022 to the “FAZ”.
In “Crime Scene: Among Gardeners,” the corpse of “Horst Stenkamp – the Red Bull” provided the nutrients for the lush vegetables. “He always wanted to go to Cuba – we thought he was on a plane to Cuba – but instead he was shot dead in Mrs. Schmidt’s allotment garden,” it says about him in the film. It is unclear whether these “possible police officers” or templates really existed.
What is important and documented in terms of world history is the meeting at which Federal Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927-2016) and his USSR counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze (1928-2014) negotiated German unity on June 18, 1990 in the Peace Hall in Münster. The “Westfälische Nachrichten” recalled this on the occasion of the death of the German politician.
