Tatort Investigators in Transition.A diachronic analysis of investigator characters as artefacts, fictional beings, symptoms of society and symbolic representatives of the state.

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Tatort is one of the most important institutions of German television. With 1,041 episodes produced in Germany and continuing high ratings, the crime series celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2020. The presented research project is designed as an interdisciplinary cooperation between a chair of media studies at Philipps University Marburg and a sociological chair at the University of Wuppertal. The aim is to reconstruct the investigator characters of Tatort and their development diachronically from the origin of the crime series in 1970 to its anniversary in 2020 at the levels of text, production, and reception. The concept of grounded theory according to Glaser and Strauss serves as methodological basis. The central research objective is to examine investigator characters as media artefacts, fictional beings, symptoms of society, and, most importantly, as symbolically condensed representatives of the state, following Jens Eder's concept of character analysis (2014). To this end, a sample of approximately 200 episodes will be used at the Marburg location to analyse how the investigator characters are constructed: how they interpret their professional and private roles, how they are socially contoured (for example, in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and milieu affiliation), and which traces they each bear of the social context in which they originated. Special attention will be paid to the question of diversity. Most importantly, though, the aim is to ascertain which image of the state has been and is being conveyed as part of the diachronic change in political culture. The empirical survey and evaluation on the levels of production and reception take place at the Wuppertal location. On the basis of approximately 50 semi-standardised interviews with people from the domains of script, editing, and directing who were involved in the production, we aim to reconstruct the considerations behind the design of the investigator characters and the reasons why changes were made to investigator teams. The dimension of reception is examined via group discussions with four to six participants each, who discuss the characters of the investigator teams based on selected, thematically relevant clips. The results of both sites are continuously triangulated. In this way, a typology of crime scene investigator characters is developed.