Meet the latest addition to MHz’s ever-growing roster of investigators from the long-running Tatort crime franchise – and it’s the most iconic one of them all! Tatort: Schimanski (Beta Film) stars Götz George as Horst Schimanski, a character who was so popular in the 1980s and ‘90s that even his costume (a beige field jacket) is still known in Germany as “the Schimanski jacket”! Based in Duisburg, the rugged, unkempt Schimanski is a working-class hero, closer to the criminals he pursues than his upper-class police superiors. He is partnered with Christian Thanner, Schimanski’s well-educated and well-dressed (not to mention well-mustached) polar opposite. Nevertheless, the two detectives work well together and complement each other – and it turns out that Thanner is just as handy with a gun as “Schimmi” is! (This being the ‘80s, there is no shortage of either firearms or facial hair.)

After watching Tatort: Schimanski, you can clearly see its influence in subsequent Tatort series, particularly Tatort: Cologne. There is more than a touch of Schimanski’s everyman persona in Max Ballauf, for example. (Incidentally, keep your eye out for actor Klaus J. Behrendt’s guest role in the episode “Schimanski’s War” – several years before he was cast as Max!) Another 1990 episode, “Between Brothers”, was filmed shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and was a crossover episode with Polizeiruf 110 (the East German version of Tatort) where Schimanski and Thanner team up with their GDR colleagues to investigate a murder.

After Dortmund and Essen (Inspector Haferkamp, 1974-1980), Schimanski’s Duisburg is the third city in Germany’s Ruhr region to feature in a Tatort series. And if you ever find yourself there, not only can you take a stroll down Horst-Schimanski-Gasse, you can also take a tour dedicated to exploring the series’ filming locations!

So popular was Götz George as Schimanski that, for the first time ever, a Tatort series spawned a spin-off show – the aptly named Schimanski (also known as “Schimanski’s Return”) which ran from 1997 to 2013 and featured Schimanski, having retired from the Duisburg police and settled in Belgium, working as a boxing trainer and living with his girlfriend on a houseboat. But it isn’t long before he is called back to Duisburg as a freelance investigator…