Jürgen Ehlers
Your body, dead and beautiful

1938 – a cold October day in Hamburg, and a seven-year-old girl hasn’t come back home from school. Her friends don’t know where she is. The teacher says: “Anna? - She never even turned up for school today!” It has long since grown dark outside. Police patrols are on high alert. The Reich Radio Station Hamburg is broadcasting hourly search reports. Meanwhile Kommissar Berger tries to reassure the mother. But he fears the worst. Four years ago another child had disappeared and never been found. The beginning of a series? For years a stranger has been writing anonymous letters to young girls: “In your beautiful body / your entrails tempt me...” Is that merely tasteless mischief, or has the man started to put his murderous fantasies into practice? While Berger starts to investigate, the SA pays a visit to his home and family.
Germany in 1938 – the Great Depression seems overcome. The number of criminal offences is going down; the police are dreaming of a ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ without criminals. Child abduction or even child murder doesn’t fit into this image of an ideal society. The lost girl needs to be found, the case has to be solved – at all costs.
Kommissar Berger is having great trouble to stay in the force, to solve the case and, at the same time, to save his Jewish daughter, while his pre-Nazi middle-class world is collapsing around him.