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In the television series Krimi.de, young detectives carry on investigations in four German cities, and soon too in a fifth, Stuttgart. They solve the trickiest cases: all without a special police unit, staff cars and bloodshed, but with courage and good ideas.

The start at the new school could not have been less happy. Only just moved to a Stuttgart high school, Clara has become the laughingstock of the whole class. Photos, taken in fun at a “photo shooting” with a friend, show her scantily clad – and pop up on the Internet after Clara has lost her cell phone at a party. Desperate, she goes in search of the person who did this to her.

A pleasant tingling sensation transfuses the young viewer. He snuggles a little deeper into his chair. What adults in Germany traditionally look forward to on Sunday evening has been available to children on Saturdays since 2005 in the television series Krimi.de, broadcast by the children’s channel KI.KA, a community broadcast station of ARD and ZDF.

If necessary, a professional cop helps

The idea behind the children’s detective stories and that behind the successful ARD TV series Tatort (Scene of the Crime) is the same: teams of investigators in various German cities consecutively share the time slot. Krimi.de plays alternately in Leipzig, Jena, Erfurt and Hamburg. And soon cases will be solved in southern Germany. In October 2009 shooting for the new episode “Network Attack” started in Stuttgart.

The detectives in Krimi.de are much younger than their Tatort colleagues. They are called Tom and Mandy, Emily, Conny and Lucas and are between six and fourteen years old. If the kids, who have yet to attend a police school, are balked in their investigations, they get support from an adult professional cop. In the Stuttgart episode, Detective Thorsten Lannert, alias Richy Müller, intervenes and helps solve the case of “cyber bullying”.

Germany in Tatort fever

Krimi.de has gone down well: younger viewers have obviously caught Tatort fever. Why are the Germans, whether young or old, so enthusiastic about Tatort? Why do they love their disputatious, singing, Swabian-speaking detectives who are always on duty and almost always successful? “Most Tatort episodes are high quality television”, explains the director of the Stuttgart children’s thriller “Net Manhunt”, Marco Petry. Then there is the established time slot on Sunday evening: “We viewers know that, as the finale to the weekend, we’ll be watching detectives whom we have grown fond of over the years”.

Krimi.de banks on the same appeal. The first team consisted of Louis, Tom and Mandy from Leipzig. They were assisted by Bruno Ehrlicher, alias Peter Sodann, who already retired in the “real” Tatort. They have been doing their detective work now in five episodes. In Jena, four episodes have been filmed to date, in Hamburg six and in Erfurt seven.

The art of shooting a detective story

The history of children’s thrillers dates back to 1929. In that year Erich Kästner published his novel Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives), which was successfully filmed several times. Since then, countless teams of kids have cudgeled their brains over tricky cases. Krimi.de, however, wants to mark itself off from The Three Investigators and TKKG, for instance, which begin their detective work only once their homework is done. “The children carry on their investigations not as a hobby but because circumstances make them do so”, says director Petry. “For example, because a friend is in danger, or the children are themselves involved in something unpleasant.”

Moreover, unlike most children’s thrillers, the detectives of Krimi.de are not hunting down some big bad stranger who exists only in the movies. Like the adult Tatort, the children’s thrillers also take up social questions that might arise in their own everyday life. These include mysterious doings on the part of a baby sitter, an alcoholic father, drug abuse and classmates in the neo-Nazi scene.

The Stuttgart episode deals with the issue of cyber bullying. “Virtual friendship portals such as Facebook, SchuelerVZ and MySpace are becoming bigger and more popular”, says Petry, explaining the selection of the theme. “The extent to which many people, especially young people, reveal their private lives there makes abuse easy. We wanted to show how quickly such an intrusion into privacy can develop its own dynamics and how much suffering this can cause when people are first exposed on the Internet and then in real life – for instance, at their schools.”

No murder, no manslaughter

In the forty-five minute Krimi.de episodes there is never a bloody murder. Unlike the adult Tatort, the cases are largely non-violent. And unlike the adult TV detectives, the young investigators have only limited means at their disposal. They are not in charge of a special police unit, don’t drive staff cars, and don’t even have a driver’s license. It is precisely this, thinks Petry, that is the attraction for authors: “We have to have the children continually find new ways and make more effort when it comes, for instance, to checking up on a suspect”. They solve the cases without bloodshed, but with courage, brains and good ideas.

Whether Clara’s only friend, Tim, is involved in the affair of the cell phone photos, whether several classmates are conspiring against her, and whether there is a big unknown culprit, was solved in February 2010 on KI.KA. Although nothing more will be revealed here, the reader may be assured: justice triumphs and Clara’s story has a happy end that let the young thriller fans sleep soundly.