TELEVISION CRIME SERIES AND CRIME NOVELS have a long tradition in Germany, and, as James W. Jones has written, a “secure place within German popular culture” (570). Both television crime series and crime novels are referred to in German as Krimi, which is the abbreviation of Kriminalfilm and Kriminalroman (detective film and detective story). The long-running crime television series Tatort (Crime Scene), first broadcast in West Germany in 1970, is one of the most popular and controversial crime series in the German-speaking countries. East Germany had its own crime series called Polizeiruf 110 (Police Call 110), and after German unification in 1990, both series continued to be broadcast. Tatort is always aired on Sunday at 8:15 p.m. but sometimes on a Monday as well if it is a public holiday. Each of the TV channels of ARD (Germany), as well as ORF (Austria) and SF (Switzerland), produces the show in its local setting. On an alternating basis, episodes are filmed in eighteen different locales, both rural and urban, in Germany, and one each in Austria and Switzerland, with the main characters (the investigators) varying with the location. The investigator team is usually composed of two characters who operate in their specific region—for example, Team Cologne, which consists of Chief Inspector Ballauf (played by Klaus J. Behrendt) and Chief Inspector Schenk (Dietmar Bär). Only a few teams diverge from this format, such as Team Dortmund, which consists of four investigators, or Chief Inspector Lindholm, who is the sole investigator in the Tatort from Hanover. As Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times describes,

Tatort is not just one of many German TV crime series with Lokalkolorit, a regional flavor with local scenery, however. Instead, particularly in the twenty-first century, it has become known not only for dealing with crime and criminal justice, but also with various types of social injustice.