EIt’s hot in Brandenburg’s lignite mining area. Cops and criminals sweat. The earth in the gardens of the houses with the old-fashioned wallpaper is as hard as concrete. With their faded colors, the Lusatian opencast mine and the area around it appear even more inhospitable than in reality in the six-part mini-series “Lauchhammer”. Even the rain is without blessing. He destroys the investigators’ tracks on the corpse of Ramona (Jule Hermann), a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. Near the discovery site on the edge of the coal mining strip, the advertising of the windy real estate seller Florian Langendorff (Arnd Klawitter) promises “living by the lake”.
For those who are smart enough to invest in the future now when the groundwater pumps are shut down. People are talking about climate change, but like they used to talk about the SED party secretary. Can’t do much if he interferes everywhere. Better to duck and let the others do it. Visions of the future seem scarce.
Here you get stuck in the processing of the GDR injustice and on the bottle like Karl Briegand (Uwe Preuss) or just manage the shortage of personnel like the current police force. Some eat their lives, others just want to get away. Few believe in structural and cultural change, promises are still followed by fraud, that’s how most see it. The only thing in abundance in the area is crystal meth, sold by alleged people who bought subscriptions to magazines, seized by police officers like André Pötschke (Marc Hosemann), kept in evidence rooms and spread as widely in “Lauchhammer” as the coal that, according to the local legend , the devil put under the beautiful Lusatia created by God.
Now tourists visit the remains of the industry
In this six-part series with around two dozen roles, the opencast mine is a visually stunning co-star (screenplay: Frauke Hunfeld and Silke Zertz). Drone footage of the ripped-up landscape shows scree deserts like the petrified entrails of a once-living landscape organism (Felix Novo de Oliveira directs the camera). Huge excavators are shoveling their way towards the remaining forests like dinosaurs made of steel. Forests in which young climate protectors from all over the world have set up camp in “Lauchhammer”, suspiciously eyed by the former miners’ families, who are still proud of having once kept the whole country warm with their coal. Even if the white, embroidered Sorbian costume on the wedding day soon turned gray from the soot in the air, a symbol such as there are in the series. Now tourists tour the remains of industry, marvel at the extent of the destruction of nature and hear tales of survived worker pride. Which also plays a role in the complex episodes that are now running on Arte (and in the Arte media library), in October in the first (directed by Till Franzen).
“Lauchhammer”, designed as a thriller, gains an epic character, reaches into mentalities and industrial history, is generational drama and emancipation history, concrete description of the state and cautious vision. The coal is not just a motif, but a point of reference, once the basis of life, emotional identification – and at the same time the destroyer of the planet. The series almost entirely avoids the debating club gesture, instead relying on fictional concreteness.
As Maik Briegand and Annalena Gottknecht, Misel Maticevic and Odine Johne are an unlikely pair of investigators whose skills and origins complement each other without personal fanfare. Both come from the LKA, from outside, to Lauchhammer to investigate Ramona’s death. Gottknecht works correctly, Briegand grew up in Lauchhammer in a police family and fled from the circumstances. While Gottknecht is gaining ground investigatively, Briegand has to take care of daughter Jackie (Ella Lee), who is planning actions with the climate protectionists. The Ramona case widens. Traces point to cover-ups in the GDR era, when perverse serial killers were only allowed to exist among the class enemy.
The fact that GDR injustice is fictionally processed in television series is not new. The examples, which often focus on family relationships, range from “Weissensee” to “Die Toten von Marnow”. In “Lauchhammer” it is not a family that is told, but a community. The actual ending not only concerns the investigation of the crimes, but strives for the basis of a future that concerns everyone.
Lauchhammer – Death in Lusatiaat 8.15 p.m. at Arte and in the media library.
