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Vienna
Blood is a 2019 British-Austrian television series set in 1900s Vienna, based
on the Liebermann books by Frank Tallis.
It stars
Matthew Beard as Max Liebermann, a doctor and student of Sigmund Freud, who
helps Detective Oskar Rheinhardt (Jürgen Maurer). He assists the detective in
the investigation of a series of disturbing murders.
The
Liebermann family's position as Jews facing growing anti-Semitism is a
continuing sub-theme.
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Vienna Blood review – so much like Sherlock it seems like a spoof
3 / 5
stars3 out of 5 stars.
This fin de
siècle murder mystery about a maverick detective and his doctor sidekick is
laughably Holmesian – but enjoyably absurd
Emine Saner
@eminesaner
Mon 18 Nov
2019 22.30 GMT
For someone
who professes to be into the new-fangled science of what makes people tick, I’m
not sure it was the cleverest move to get into a rickety carriage on a
fairground ferris wheel with a psychopathic killer. Still, the image of junior
doctor Max Liebermann hanging from his fingertips over the city of Vienna after
being hurled from the door, proved a thrilling, if completely avoidable –
“hypnosis would be easier” – end to the first episode of Vienna Blood (BBC
Two).
It is set
in Vienna in 1906, where gruff detective Oskar Rheinhardt (Juergen Maurer) is
told that a young doctor – Liebermann (Matthew Beard), a fan of Freud – will be
shadowing him to learn about “the psychopathy of the criminal mind”. “Catchy,”
deadpans Rheinhardt. The three-part series will be compared, unavoidably, to
Sherlock: its writer, Steve Thompson, adapting the Frank Tallis novels, was
also a Sherlock scriptwriter. But Liebermann’s character study of his reluctant
new mentor is so Holmesian it feels like a spoof. For the first half an hour,
it feels as if the makers are failing to repress their Sherlock complex – the
jaunty camera angles, the hyperreal look, the jangly music – until it starts to
relax into itself.
A medium
has been murdered – a crime that has been made to look like suicide. Except,
points out just about every character – as if we didn’t get the significance
the first time – where is the weapon? Rheinhardt is, in the classic tradition,
one of those troubled but maverick detectives with quirks – he munches coffee
beans – and who needs a quick conviction. His relationship with Liebermann is
predictably tricky at first, but it is nice to watch him thaw. “You’re
staring,” says Rheinhardt. “I was told I could observe,” says the young doctor.
The police officer is humble enough to value Liebermann’s talents for
personality profiling, and asks for help. And hurrah, (possibly) TV’s first
forensic psychologist is born.
Liebermann
is implausibly good at this: he points out that the woman’s apartment is “like
a stage set” (they realise she holds seances), and is puzzled by the absence of
clothes in her wardrobe, until he makes the giant leap that she must have been
pregnant, her clothes all taken to be altered by a seamstress. “Welcome to the
case, Inspector,” says the doctor. Goodness, he’s cocky, under that cool
demeanour. Back to the morgue where his theory is confirmed. “Find the father
of this child, he’s your killer,” he tells the experienced older detective, who
inexplicably fails to thank him sarcastically for the suggestion.
Is the
killer Otto Braun, one of the men they track down who attended the seance?
There is a good rooftop chase that makes him look guilty. “Welcome to the case,
doctor,” says Rheinhardt back to Liebermann, when they catch him. It is cheesy,
but their relationship is developing so nicely I’ll let them off. But it’s not
Braun – the killer is an adulterer with a reputation to lose, and anyway, Braun
soon ends up dead.
The sleuths
arrange another seance, presumably – though it’s not clear – to pretend to
contact the dead medium, and flush out one of the other attendees, a wealthy
banker, Heinrich Holderlein, whose wife makes him go to this sort of thing. It
doesn’t work but he is questioned, until rich and powerful people conspire to
put pressure on the police, and get Rheinhardt taken off the case.
As if that
would work; Rheinhardt is dogged and anyway, he says, “work is all I have”. He
deduces the murder weapon is an antique gun, stuffed with fragments of human
bone instead of shot, so it leaves no trace (I still don’t understand why the
killer thought this necessary) – and Liebermann figures the door was locked
from the outside using steel forceps. Which makes them suspicious of the Vienna
steel magnate and mayor’s right-hand man, Hans Brückmüller – as if he’s the
only one in the city with access to such a device. But it must be him – the
police commissioner was keeping the mayor’s office informed of the
investigation, so Brückmüller was always a step ahead.
Invited
anonymously by Liebermann to meet him at the fairground and ride the big wheel,
Brückmüller is revealed not so much as a Moriarty mastermind but as a
frighteningly recognisable trumped-up politician wanting to rid Vienna of “the
vermin – the subversives, the intellectuals, the muck-raking journalists”. He
spits contemptuously at Liebermann: “Dr Jew.” Still, Liebermann gets his
confession, and stuffs a life-saving finger in Brückmüller’s fresh bullet
wound.
It is all
absurd but enjoyable, the extended length more or less justified by the
subplots: the advent of a more humane treatment of mental health v the
electroshocks championed by Liebermann’s arrogant professor; Viennese overt
antisemitism and Liebermann’s father’s desperation to fit in; the difficulty of
convicting powerful men who think they are untouchable. I take issue with the
women depicted almost exclusively as beautiful corpses, vehicles for gratuitous
breast shots, hysterics or needy girlfriends. And the odd-couple detective and
sidekick setup feels tired. But Beard and Maurer are excellent, and my id is a
sucker for a bit of murder in a fin de siècle setting, so I’ll forgive much.
Fin-de-siècle
Vienna: Politics and Culture is a 1979 transdisciplinary non-fiction book
written by cultural historian Carl E. Schorske and published by Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc. Described by its publisher as a "magnificent revelation of
turn-of-the-century Vienna where out of a crisis of political and social
disintegration so much of modern art and thought was born," the book
won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The book is lavishly
illustrated with both color and black-and-white reproductions of key artworks,
helpfully referenced from the text which explains their relevance to the themes
in question.
Partly
reconstructed from Schorske's articles published in the American Historical
Review, the book is structured into seven thematically interlocking chapters.
Each chapter considers the interrelationships between key artists with the
development of psychoanalysis and what was — at the time — viewed as an end of
history.
In the
'Introduction' the author claims that the text was born from his desire 'to
construct a course in European intellectual history, designed to help students
to understand the large, architectonic correlations between high culture and
socio-political change' (p. XVIII). In his view, Vienna was a peculiar cultural
environment due to the late ascendancy and early crisis of its liberal middle
class between the 1860s and the 1890s. This compression of the socio-political
liberal hegemony provided the opportunity for a 'collective Oedipal revolt'
against the liberal inheritance, promoted by "Die Jungen" (the Young
Ones), spreading from politics in the 1870s to literature and art in the 1890s.
The chronologically compressed and socially circumscribed character of the
Viennese experience created a more coherent context for studying the different
ramifications of its high culture (p. XXVI).
The second
essay, "The Ringstrasse, its critics, and the birth of urban
modernism" looks back to explore the liberal cultural system in its
ascendancy through the medium of urban form and architectural style ... but it
looks forward too … to the critical responses on the part of two leading
participants in it — Otto Wagner and Camillo Sitte — reveal the emergence of
conflicting tendencies, communitarian and functionalist, in modern thought about
the built environment (p. XXVIII).
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