‘Miss Merkel’ TV Series Reimagines Angela Merkel as Detective: NPR

BERLIN — Little is known about how former German Chancellor Angela Merkel is spending her retirement, and that seems to suit her. German crime series Adapted for television and now enjoying success in Italy, she is back in the headlines, this time as a fictional amateur detective in a small town.

As the title suggests, Mrs. Merkel is a thriller that stars the former Chancellor as an Agatha Christie-esque detective who starts solving crimes out of sheer boredom. With no G7 or EU summit on the horizon, Merkel is desperate to put down the gardening shears and get back to solving something, anything! This time, it’s a village murder. Move aside, Miss Marple!

The TV adaptation stars German theater doyenne Katharina Thalbach as Merkel. Like Merkel, Thalbach is 70 and comes from the former East Germany. She says it wasn’t too difficult to prepare for the role.

“You could always see the weight of power on Merkel’s shoulders, how much it weighed on her,” Thalbach tells NPR. “So I focused on my shoulders, put on a wig and one of her signature colorful boxy blazers, and I felt like I could was she. That I am “Angela Merkel!”

Thalbach has met Merkel several times, but it is not clear whether the former chancellor is a fan of Mrs. Merkel.

“The last time I saw Angela, I tried to find out if she had read the books or seen the show,” Thalbach recalls. “But she skillfully dodged the question, claiming that her office staff were big fans.”

THE author of booksDavid Safier, previously known for his fictional accounts of the Holocaust and his work as a screenwriter, He says he is not more aware of what Merkel thinks of his alternative retirement plan for her.

“She probably read the novels,” Safier speculates. “To be honest, if there was a detective novel in which you were the hero, wouldn’t you at least read the first ten pages?”

While the books are a commercial success, RTL’s small-screen adaptation – which will be available to stream later this year in the US – has received mixed reviews in Germany. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung acknowledged the star power that Thalbach’s performance brings to the production, but lamented the show’s “cheesy jokes.” The German magazine Focus suggested to the production company that they hire Safier as a screenwriter, since he had won an Emmy for a German sitcom Berlin, Berlin.

Safier had the idea of Mrs. Merkel in 2019, the day Merkel announced she would not run for a fifth term. He says he sat down to watch an old rerun of Columbo that very evening and the idea of ​​his top 10 Mirror bestseller was born.

According to Safier, Angela Merkel is an accomplished detective.

“Merkel is very intelligent, much more so than other politicians,” he said. “She has a strong head. And after 30 years in politics, she is used to dealing with sociopaths and psychopaths.”

Like Miss Marple, Angela Merkel is often underestimated, a point the former chancellor has relied on throughout her political career. According to Thalbach, this has particularly disconcerted mainstream politicians.

“The real Merkel was good at finding skeletons in the closets of her political rivals,” says Thalbach. “But she had none herself: the perfect trait for a top detective!”

Safier says it’s the references to Merkel’s former life as chancellor that tickle his readers.

In the first book, Ms. Merkel attends a community theater production and remarks that “compared to six hours of Peking opera with Xi Jinping, everything else is child’s play.”

“Her experience allows her to solve criminal mysteries. When she interrogates a suspect, she knows she has to silence him,” Safier says of her main character. “Merkel knows what it’s like to probe and ask questions over and over again. She’s done it until the early hours of the morning at countless European summits.”

Unlike Miss Marple, Merkel is actually a Mrs. — a Frau Dr., meaning she has a PhD in quantum chemistry. In the TV series, Merkel’s husband asks her why she always wears his logo pantsuits retired. His answer could be considered classic Merkel logic: “I still have 50 in my wardrobe.”

Angie’s nostalgia aside, Safier says that in his next bookMerkel is seeing a therapist after realizing, while writing her memoirs, that she had neglected to address a number of issues during her time in office, from Germany’s troubled rail system to relations with Russia.

Merkel was something of an enigma during her time in office. Today, in retirement, the fictional version of her is an open book. The real version is expected to be revealed in November. That’s when the next episode of Safier will be released — and the real Merkel will publish her book. autobiography.