Tracing the Stasi in the Televised German Krimi: Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 Episodes as Precursors to the Post-Reunification Stasi Debate

The feature film The Lives of Others (2006) is commonly credited with initiating a post-reunification debate on the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) in the mass media. This article examines select episodes of the German Tatort and Polizeiruf 110 crime series, demonstrating that fictional television productions also addressed the Stasi, and did so much earlier than 2006. In either a subliminal way, as in the Polizeiruf episode "Der Fall Lisa Murnau" and the Tatort episode "Taxi nach Leipzig," or as an open Stasi discourse in "Unter Brüdern," episodes from both series can be read as precursors to the Stasi debate.