Klaus Doldinger, one of Germany’s really great musicians, wrote the title track to the longest running TV crime series in 1970 when it was first broadcast. Guess who played the drums? Yes, it was Udo Lindenberg (the one who lives in the Hotel Atlantic here in Hamburg and one of my favourite musicians).

This week, Der Spiegel featured a title story on the phenomenon that almost disappeared as antiquated and something from tester-years. Because nobody really knows how this series is attracting 10 million users every Sunday!!!

Each Sunday, Tatort ‘travels’ to a different Bundesland with a different Kommissar. And they could not be more different. My favourite one was Schimansky in Düsseldorf. It felt so much like home, so normal, watching this. Like one of us. There is a new Kommissar around in Hamburg now, who is even a tick more extreme: Tschiller (Til Schweiger), who is working with Gümer, mainly on drugs-related cases. Willkommen in Hamburg is a classic (the link brings you to the trailer).

Pádraig seems to be entering a new routine: no additional oxygen during the day, and little during the night. It’s really great how he is coping. He wasn’t quite alert as yesterday, at least not in the afternoon, but he was still sitting outside in his wheelchair, looking relaxed. Like a Couch-Kommissar himself!

Remember the declaration I had to sign about ‘lüften’, opening the windows, ‘Durchzug’, and the nice gentleman from the Wohnungsgenossenschaft calling in because he had noticed some condensation on the windows?

Today, we received another letter in the postbox, also very different and strange. It seems to be a letter distributed from a private person in a street nearby to all the neighbours. I recounts a ‘Tatort’ in and around our streets about a ‘Spanner’, a man who gets close to your window and peeps in, hoping to see and/or hear private and personal ‘stuff’. The letter says that it’s someone from the neighbourhood, apparently well known, someone that goes out in the mornings and evenings to collect bottles (to get the deposit from the shop). The letter writer asks all who see him getting close to ground level windows to stop this ‘unsittliche Verhalten’. – We read the letter a couple of times with all sorts of different thoughts coming up. Who was the person who wrote it and went to the bother to distribute it to dozens of postboxes in the neighbourhood. Perhaps more importantly, who is the poor man who is so poor that he collect empty bottles, and who is so lonely that he goes out in the evening to watch into strangers’ windows?

Today’s German Music Tip
Klaus Doldinger, Tatort (1970). This is the original version – it was modified only twice (and only slightly) over its 44 year history.
What’s hot
Tatort
What’s cold
Sunday evenings without it’d
The German word/phrase/verse of the day
Couch-Kommissare