The year is 1969; the place is Eberswalde, near Frankfurt an der Oder. Two nine-year-old boys are cruelly murdered, and their numerous stab wounds point to sadistic offenders. The Stasi wants to cover up the events, but the detective duo Heinz Gödicke and Stefan Witt go out on their own to investigate the case, as they do with their own private issues as well. Soon, a third murder takes place, and Gödicke continues to investigate feverishly on his own. But »Mord in Eberswalde« [»Murder in Eberswalde«] doesn’t end happily—it ends as it began, with a human tragedy that is also simultaneously a political tragedy. Accompanied by the aptly-integrated music of a soundtrack by Irmin Schmidt, Stephan Wagner's film, which was first aired in 2013, is as much a detailed sociological study of late-1960s GDR as it is a suspenseful crime thriller.
»Irmin Schmidt: Musikgeschichten«Irmin Schmidt played with the best band in the world and hasn’t stopped creating music history ever since. On three evenings at Pop-Kultur, he will share memories from a long life and show films that he himself or his band Can set to music. Alongside screenings of »Mord in Eberswalde« [»Murder in Eberswalde«] and »Deadlock«, Schmidt will speak with moderator Hanna Bächer and with Stephan Wagner, the director of the »Mord in Eberswalde«, about the movie’s soundtrack. Ulrich Gutmair will present the composer with recordings of unfamiliar music, and Schmidt will exchange with the writer Max Dax in a talk moderated by Anne Waak about the recently-published band biography »All Gates Open: The Story of Can« by the British music journalist Rob Young, to which Schmidt contributed the text collage »Can Kiosk« and Dax contributed an oral history together with Robert Defcon. Although Schmidt has written so many music stories already, there’s always another couple to tell—about Can, or Stockhausen, or about murder cases in Brandenburg.