“Forbidden Love”: 200 women make their fate – ZEIT ONLINE

Here it’s all about people, not performers: After 20 years, the ARD soap opera ends “Forbidden Love”. A great loss.

26th June 2015 16:22 clock

The first Fall 1995: The siblings Jan and Julia fall in love. | © ARD / Steven Power

The worst word in 70 years of television history has no good German translation: Procedural . If investigators determine doctors patch up, pursue their employees always equal employment and tick off cases, always one or two per week, in the same pattern, for 10 years in the worst case. The young doctors , pathologist with Profile . Scheme F.

Since Hill Street Blues (1981) and Emergency Room (1994) are those weekly thrillers and professional worlds bolder, more personal, more sophisticated. But in their sheer metropolitan creates a joyless, limited monotony: Almost all major hour series are procedurals . Every struggling in their own way with the corset, wants to break processes and expectations, or loosen the transmitter specifications. But each investigator counts once as an investigator. Every politician as a politician. Even vampires, serial killers, superheroes meet every week their task. People, so it tell these series, are what they do. What do you do? Always the same.

For almost 20 years led Forbidden Love with up to 25 leading roles not a single policeman. The many doctors were often gay, took drugs, making out their roommates – and counted as people, not as functions. 4,664 episodes, only 25, then more than 40 minutes, only a day, then for 15 ultimate only on Fridays, showed Forbidden Love something that’s second in almost every other series or remains drittrangig: People. Instead performers.

In

1995, the fitness trainer Jan Brandner encounters at Düsseldorf Airport with Julia von Anstetten together. The bourgeois and the dutiful Countess fall in love – without knowing that they are twins, separated at birth. Sophie was a prostitute, takes over a pub with guest house and a year later an international music label, with early 20th Cécile was jockey leads a stud, but switches to the Count’s auction house. Kim wanted to lead a fashion label – but now tells her Jannik what makes stock market and futures sexy. Much more important here: If Jannik Kims half brother? ? And he brings her marriage to Emilio in danger

Forbidden Love acts often narrow-minded, reactionary: champagne flutes, a castle with Butler, oversubscribed Setzkasten-Machiavelli as Ansgar (type: Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg), Tanja (type: Young mum with the Slytherins) or Clarissa (Type: Snow White Queen) as entertaining, but usually quite clumsy figures. Bitter evil Count. Fairy Women, lard-curls prince eve Kitsch. In almost every episode there were – often: thrilling, carefully told – lesbian, gay, queer love stories for 20 years. But many role models, gender images still remain dusty, unimaginative, disappointingly conventional.