“This is Chief Inspector Derek; that is Frau Doktor Göbel, the principal of the home school”-these first words are Fritz Weber as Inspector Harry Klein on October 20, 1974 ZDF. A dead young woman was lying in the cold water and was murdered. Frau Doktor Göbel said that when witnesses arrived at the scene, Harry’s boss and chief inspector Derrick was currently examining the body. At the same time, the traces were fixed, and the photographer curled up in the bushes, dumbfounded. Sometimes, a lot of things happen at the crime scene. Someone must now pay attention to the orderly process and introduce the people encountered here under indecent circumstances.
In the thriller of the TV series, the assistant character is looked down upon at first glance and ungrateful. In the memory of the TV nation, Harry spends most of his time hiding behind the big windbreaker of his boss. But this underestimated him. From a narrative point of view, assistants are very important. He adopted a gentle attitude, he connected the characters, he had talked to the local police and provided all the information important to the story, but did not put it in the scene. Last but not least, he gave the key words. You can hear him sometimes even pick up the car when needed. So it’s no wonder that since crime fiction was invented, the police often get a helper.
Double row trench coat and jacket
Chief Inspector Derek and the murdered family student appeared on German TV for the first time, but friends of TV crime stories already knew Harry Klein, who created order there. In episode 71, he is “Detective” Erik Ode (Erik Ode), the lead detective in Herbert Reinecker’s legendary black and white series of the same name. Then his serial brother Owen, his real-life brother Elma Weber, took over the position. When Reinecker invented “Derrick” in the early 1970s, Harry Klein himself had transferred to this series, and thus into the world of color TV; at the same time, he was promoted to criminal inspector. He has been assisting his boss until 1998. A total of 281 episodes of “Derek” were created. All of these episodes are composed of Horst Tarpert and Fritz Weber, dressed in trench coats and jackets, dressed in a somewhat laid-back duo, in a single-family home Track the corpse in the surrounding area of Munich. Harry Klein is the record holder and works longer without a TV officer. Soon after he happily retired, he had to be resurrected in 2004 for the cartoon “Derek-Duty Phone”.
At that time, Fritz Weber has found the next role in the series, and he will be Acute respiratory disease Nineteen and a half years until a few weeks ago, you can see the cunning mayor Wolfgang Wöller conspiring against the nuns of the local monastery in Kaltenthal, a small town in Lower Bavaria. Fortunately, he did not achieve the slightest success. it. If you look at the entire route, you can say that Fritz Weber is a bit like a series of world champions on public television. In the main evening show, ARD and ZDF have been inseparable from him since the mid-1970s.
Lord and Gigolo
You can almost forget that Fritz Weber played other important roles in his career. He became famous for playing student Albert Mutz in Bernhard Wicki’s anti-war film “Die Brücke” in 1959, when he was only 18 years old. This film about a group of boys being conscripted into the Wehrmacht to defend remote bridges at the last minute was nominated for an Oscar abroad and won the Golden Globe for Best Non-English Film. Volker Lechtenbrink’s career also began in “Brücke”, and Vicco von Bülow-then still under his original name-assumed his first sergeant role.
In addition, Weber played with Liza Minnelli in the “sing and dance show” as the dancer Fritz Wendell, who fell in love with a Jewish woman in Berlin in the early 1930s. Speaking of crime, Weber finally made his first appearance in the rather mediocre Edgar Wallace movie “The Man with Glass Eyes”. He plays Lord Sullingham, the drug addict, and the investigator is—coming here for the first time—Horst Tuppert.
The “derrick” has been running for so long, so persistent, so successful, and exported to all over the world. Imitation is inevitable. For example, Harald Schmidt and Herbert Feuerstein, who reinterpreted a family constellation in front of a newly wealthy backgroundMost importantly, the somewhat dull dialogue in the series is a template for some humorous re-evaluation.
Later, a sketch in the comedy show “RTL Saturday Night” ensured that the phrase “Harry, get the car” became popular. He has never fallen like that in a series. As a good assistant, Harry probably knew what was needed when. However, you will always associate this sentence with Fritz Wepper, who is now 80 years old.
