Charlotte Friedrich

Was it an act of sabotage or willful negligence? The non-party engineer Heinz Solter is suddenly arrested and accused of approving a defective pipeline that caused a half million loss to his company. At first, the case seems clear-cut for the state prosecutor, but when he probes deeper, he discovers that Solter had acted against his better judgment due to the pressure from his career-driven and authoritarian boss.

Uli has found an old book in the attic of the Kulturhaus that tells of the exploitation of the peasants by the feudal lords. He tries to imagine how the robber barons would fare in a socialist village. Then two of this type step out of a dusty picture and Uli joins them on their way to the village. There they fail miserably with their overbearing behavior, and even a break-in turns into a failure.

A Saturday evening dance in the village pub is interrupted when the barn of local farmer Paul Gäbler catches on fire. The farmer himself is soon found – hanged. Sawmill owner Züllich claims that Gäbler committed suicide because he was forced to join an agricultural production cooperative, but others are convinced Gäbler was murdered. Officers Schneider and Anders must navigate their way through a complex maze of personal and political motivations in order to reconstruct the crime.