Media and Minorities

German Television Crime Films and German Emotions  95
conceptions. One also confronts, on the one hand, an antisemite who will
hardly meet with approval and, on the other hand, a campground owner, who,
though he acts in an antisemitic fashion by staging a ritual murder legend, in
so doing follows emotions that the viewer would not necessarily condemn: he
wants to help his brother. And in Blum, we encounter a detective chief inspector
who helps the “Jew” but also makes him understand clearly what his moral
obligations are.
5. Schimanski, Numbered Bank Accounts,
and Moral Sentiments
The Schimanski episode Das Geheimnis des Golem [“The Secret of the Golem”]
also stages feelings, images of Jews, and antisemitism. At the center of the
plot, there stand an object — the notebook — and Schimanski. The latter finds
himself mixed up in the confusing story of the Swiss numbered bank accounts
because by chance he helps a Jew, Rosenfeldt, who is lying prostrate
on the ground, being threatened by a stranger. In the course of the episode,
Schimanski has to deal with various Jewish characters in order to solve the
case. As a rule, these characters are older, male, religious, and ugly. A beautiful
young woman named Lea Kaminski is the obvious exception. At the end
of the episode, it is revealed — to Schimanski as well as to the audience — that
she is the daughter of Ari Goldmann, the man who received the notebook from
his father in the concentration camp.
The episode establishes this contrasting physical and aesthetic setting from
the very beginning. Schimanski steers into the harbor of Antwerp. The film
crosscuts to Rosenfeldt’s arrival in the same city. If Schimanski bares his muscular
upper arms in a tight T-shirt as he stands upright at the helm of his boat,
then Rosenfeldt, wearing a badly-fitting suit, nervously deboards a train and
hurries off with unsure steps, his body slightly stooped — to the Jewish cemetery
and then to the synagogue to Rabbi Ginsburg. While the synagogue appears
to be a respectable building from the outside, it is dilapidated inside.
The rabbi’s office is located in the basement. There are long, torn paper scrolls
with partly huge Hebraic letters hanging on the walls, which are dirty and
crumbling, and the light is broken. This room is the first Jewish space — apart
from the Jewish cemetery — with which the viewer is confronted. What the
paper scrolls mean and why they hang here remain mysteries, as does why the
rabbi lives in a dilapidated synagogue. But perhaps it is precisely in the enigmatic
that there lies the essence of what the film presents as Jewish.
Unlike in the Tatort episode, in the Schimanski episode the audience has
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882