<i>Tatort</i>: Murder scene, montage and melancholy in the neo-noir imagination (or: <i>Das Leiden unter der Tat und die Sehnsucht nach dem Wissen</i>)

Drawing principally on the writings of the Critical Theorists Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, this paper considers the contemporary neo-noir detective story in relation to three interwoven themes/motifs: spatiality (scenes, sites and settings); temporality (time and narrational arc); and, characterization (the detective as a figure of repetition and melancholy). Combining the traits and practices of flaneur, ragpicker and collector, the detective wearily undertakes the investigation through an archaeological/genealogical discovery of the antecedents of the crime so as to reconstruct thereby a ‘bio-topography’ of the unfortunate victim(s). The facts ( Tatsachen) of the case are to be gleaned somehow from, among other things, the deed itself ( Tat) and from, among other loci, the actual crime scene ( Tatort). I suggest how, as the evidence – traces, testimonies, forensics – proliferates and accumulates, the crime investigation board on which these fragments are pinned and presented becomes the object of the detective's ceaseless and sorrowful scrutiny, transforming her/him thereby into one of Benjamin's most famous allegorical figures of historical witness.