Angela compares the pompous, wheeling-and-dealing Philipp von Baugenwitz to media tycoon and former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The two European leaders had a famously…rocky…professional relationship.

(Want to know more about the political career of Silvio Berlusconi? Check out the trio of Italian historical dramas 1992, 1993, and 1994: Berlusconi Rising.)

Angela keeps a biography of Konrad Adenauer, who was chancellor of Germany from 1949 to 1963, as a “deterrent” to working herself to death. She tells Mike that Adenauer was chancellor until he was 87 and couldn’t let the position go even after he resigned. He then died four years later. She’s determined not to follow in his footsteps by taking retirement seriously (until she gets bitten by the sleuthing bug).

Angela makes a reference to the president of the People’s Republic of China when her husband Joachim complains about the length of the regional play they’re sitting through.

Before picking up a piece of evidence from a crime scene, Angela takes out a piece of cloth from her pocket to prevent leaving fingerprints. She notes that the Tibetan-style handkerchief was a present from the Dalai Lama. Who knew gifts from His Holiness would come in so handy in murder cases?

As her husband snoozes on the couch, Angela picks up the remote and changes the channel to news coverage of her successor, the current chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz, following a cabinet meeting. She watches the reporters swarm him and remarks, “That poor man.”

Angela notes a “weirdly sweet scent” in the air on the way into the coroner’s office and realizes that it reminds her of Pope Benedict’s cologne.

Pope Benedict XVI, who famously gave up the papacy due to illness in 2013, was the first German-born pope in over 900 years.

When Angela makes a joke to her bodyguard Mike about skinnydipping, he retorts indignantly, “I don’t want to go skinnydipping.” Angela responds with, “You prude West Germans.” Nudism, known as Freikörperkultur or FKK, has been a popular part of German culture since the 19th century, particularly in East Germany, where Angela grew up.

(Fun fact: Katharina Thalbach, who plays Merkel in the series, was born the same year as the former chancellor and is also from East Germany!)

In the same conversation about prude West Germans, Angela remarks that “the girls from Gaddafi’s guard wore crop tops.” While it’s true that the late Libyan dictator did have a cadre of female bodyguards known as the Revolutionary Nuns, there doesn’t seem to be evidence that they wore crop tops. 

At the end of episode one, Angela is laying in bed reading the Adenauer biography when she suddenly sets it aside and starts reading a book called Mord auf dem Friedhof, which translates to Murder in the Cemetery, instead. This is a self-referential nod to the second book in David Safier’s Miss Merkel series, and foreshadowing for the second episode in the TV series.

When Angela first stumbles across Kurt Krunkel in the woods, she’s immediately attracted to him. But her attraction turns to full-fledged passion when she sees he’s reading Miss Shakespeare, a fictional work of literature that theorizes that Shakespeare’s plays were written by a woman.

Infatuated, Angela begins to fantasize Kurt introducing himself as Jean-Paul Aramis, a reference to Aramis of the Three Musketeers. Later on, as she cyberstalks him, she makes a remark that he’s the first Musketeer not from the Gascogne, referring to the Gascony region of France where the Three Musketeers are from in Alexandre Dumas’s novel.

When Merkel was chancellor, she was widely criticized for German’s lag in digitization, despite it being the richest country in Europe. In Miss Merkel, Angela struggles to find a stable internet connection in her house, prompting her to say, “I should have put more money into digitization.”

Angela takes a cheeky dig at former German transport minister Andreas Scheuer, comparing him to the series’ breathtakingly inept kommissar, Hannemann.

Angela makes a reference to former American President Donald Trump after a stone-carving hammer drops on her foot.

In episode two, Joachim agrees to join Angela in solving the case of the graveyard murder. When they make a breakthrough in their case, the husband and wife team playfully nod to Agatha Christie characters when Joachim says, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Miss Merkel?” And Angela responds with, “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, Mr. Stringer.”

“Miss Merkel” is a play on Miss Marple and “”Mr. Stringer refers to the character of John Stringer, who was a friend of Jane Marple. His character was created for the Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford and was played by Rutherford’s real-life husband, Stringer Davis.  

After a Satanist meeting goes horribly wrong, Kommissar Hannemann calls the attendees “honorable citizens of Kleinfreudenstadt,” except for a random man named Henning Keul who “runs through the town square as a naked Fidel Castro proclaiming a revolution.” At the end of the episode, Henning does indeed run through the town square naked, wrapped in a Cuban flag and screaming about the revolution. 

Toward the end of the episode, just after Angela cracks the case, she recites a quote from Shakespear’s Henry IV in order to distract someone long enough to diffuse the situation: “Thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.”