Merkel the German Marple: TV caper with ex-chancellor as sleuth goes Italian

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Almost three years after quitting politics, Angela Merkel pops up on Italian TV on Friday in a radically new guise: as a German Miss Marple, solving murders accompanied by a flatulent pug called Helmut.

The long-time chancellor features as the fictionalised heroine of Miss Merkel, a comedy caper that has already proved a hit in Germany and will now be shown on public broadcaster RAI, dubbed into Italian.

Based on the bestselling novels by German writer David Safier, the show has a simple premise: a retired Merkel, still sporting her trademark coloured blazers and unruly bob, has retreated to the Uckermark, her home region north-east of Berlin, with her husband and a bodyguard.

But the woman who was once Europe’s most powerful politician becomes bored with endless gardening, baking and hiking and ultimately seeks distraction — by investigating unsolved crimes.

The result is a kind of Midsomer Murders auf Deutsch, with a dose of clunky German humour thrown in.

The tone is light, but there are occasional allusions to Merkel’s time as a senior stateswoman, such as when she sits down to watch a local amateur drama. “Compared to six hours of Peking opera with Xi Jinping, everything else is a piece of cake,” she says.

Italians on social media were bemused by the series’ conceit.

“The only thing missing was a TV show with Merkel as detective. What stuff have they been smoking? Stock cubes?” wrote Jeanne Perego, an Italian freelance journalist, on the social media platform X.

Merkel, whose autobiography will appear in bookshops this autumn, has declined to comment publicly on the series. 

But her fellow Germans have lapped it up, with the first series garnering 3mn viewers. “It’s the combo of crime and comedy that works just brilliantly,” said Yvonne Wagner, spokeswoman for RTL, the private German broadcaster behind the show.

The show is also helped by some canny casting. Merkel is played by Katharina Thalbach, one of Germany’s best-loved character actors. “She’s the perfect fit,” Wagner said.

In an interview last year, Thalbach said she had leapt at the chance of playing Germany’s former chancellor. “This mutation of Angela Merkel to amateur sleuth — I found it such a stroke of genius that I said: ‘I have to do it!’, she told the Neue Presse.

“I’m the same age as her, also from the GDR [former East Germany], I also love physics, I also love hotpots. So we’ve got a lot that connects us,” she said. Thalbach admitted she had actually only met Merkel once, just after she became chancellor in 2005 — at the hairdresser.

The show evinces a certain nostalgia for Merkel, even though many now blame her for the poor state of German infrastructure and the country’s heavy dependence on Russian gas, which turned into a huge liability after the Kremlin sent its troops into Ukraine in 2022.

Safier said the idea for his books had arisen out of a conversation with his film agent in 2019 about what the ex-chancellor would do when she retired. That evening he watched an episode of detective show Columbo “and I thought, that would be the right thing for her”.

The reviews of the TV show have been mixed. “A bit bland,” said the Dresdner Neue Nachrichten newspaper, adding that it was still “pleasant TV entertainment”, largely thanks to Thalbach.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine daily was less forgiving. “The first [series] was unspeakably vapid, the second simply terrible,” it wrote.

Additional reporting by Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli