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CULTURE

Why you should watch German TV on a Sunday evening

Now that we live in the age of Netflix and a whole bunch of other streaming services, internationals in Germany don’t need to watch local TV for a bit of evening entertainment. But they should make an exception on Sundays.

Published: 30 January 2022 18:06 CET
picture alliance/dpa/MDR/MadeFor/Daniela Incoronato | MDR/MadeFor/Daniela Incoronato
The detectives from Tatort Dresden. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/MDR/MadeFor/Daniela Incoronato | MDR/MadeFor/Daniela Incoronato

Let’s face it, using a VPN to access streaming services from our home countries can make evening entertainment more familiar than watching German television.

Thanks to super-fast internet, living abroad in 2022 can feel a lot more like living at home than would have been the case even 15 years ago.

But watching local television is a good way to passively take in the local language.

So on long winter evenings, taking one evening of the week to watch a bit of German Fernsehen could be a good resolution for 2022.

And what better night to do it on than a Sunday, the evening of cult crime shows Tatort and Polizeiruf 110?

Tatort, meaning crime scene, has been going for over five decades and is still so popular among the German public that it regularly pulls in nine million viewers or more.

The plot is simple: the first scene usually shows the aftermath of a grizzly murder. Over the next 90 minutes the police detectives have to solve the case. It’s not rocket science: in fact it’s so formulaic that it’s easy enough to follow even if you don’t understand every single word.

Interesting for foreigners is the fact that each Sunday brings a Tatort in a different city with different detectives. The location changes offer a glimpse into life in areas of the country you may have never been to.

Alternatively, you might find the detectives walking down a street you know very well.

The Berlin Tatort for example is very Berlin. The most recent episode drew complaints for its semi-graphic sex scenes. And when not at the scene of a murder, the detectives seem to spend most of their time getting drunk in poorly lit clubs.

One of the most popular episodes is Tatort Münster, set in the medieval university town in North Rhine-Westphalia. The Münster show is well liked due to the love-hate relationship between droll detective Frank Thiel and the vain and uptight forensic pathologist Dr. Karl-Friedrich Boerne. Their chalk and cheese personalities are ingredients for some good, dry comedy.

Other Sundays will take you to places as far afield as Saarbücken, Hannover and Bremen. There is even a Tatort Vienna that’ll help give you a feel for Austrian German and the famously cool Viennese dialect.

Due to its cult status, Tatort is also a magnet for iconic figures in the German entertainment industry.

Many of the country’s best-known actors have taken on roles as detectives, while singers and celebrities also regularly make guest appearances.

In one recent episode, 1980s rocker Udo Lindeberg helped a detective solve a crime after she found a corpse in the Hamburg hotel that he calls home.

Examples of award-winning actors who have taken up roles as detectives include movie actor Ulrich Tukur in Tatort Wiesbaden and Corinna Harfouch, a noted stage actor, who recently became a detective in Berlin.

And, of course, due to the fact that Tatort always revolves around a murder, you will hear the same words each week, which will help you to build up your Wortschatz.

Here are some useful words and phrases:

Mordkommission – homicide division

Hauptkommissar – chief inspector

Tatverdächtiger – suspect

Erschiessen – to shoot dead

Erschlagen – to beat to death

Erwürgen – to strangle

Das ist der merkwürdigste Fall seit … – that is the strangest case since…

unter die Lupe nehmen – carefully examine

And if you really don’t like Tatort, you can always have a moan with your German colleagues on Monday morning about how banal it is (even though they all watch it anyway!)

Die Folge war aber besonders schlecht! – that episode was really bad!

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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