Vienna Blood
In my normal way I’m reviewing Vienna Blood after seeing all three episodes of the second series.
It is a psychological thriller set in Vienna around 1900 and is based on the Frank Tallis novels.
The two central characters are police officer Oscar Rheinhardt (Jurgen Maurer) and a pupil of Freud, Max Lieberman (Matthew Beard), who investigate murders together.
Rheinhardt does the more routine detective work whilst Lieberman the psychological profiling.
The atmosphere and location of early twentieth century Vienna is well created but oddly there is no reference to some of the other figures that made Vienna at that time so noteworthy – e.g. the painter Gustav Klimt, the writer Stefan Zweig and the composer Carl Schnitzer.
Each episode, at one and half hours, is long – too long in my view – and generally begins with a long what Hitchcock called a Maguffin (a red herring).
This in the final one – a murder of an anti Semitic friar – takes place in a monastery.
It’s a sinister place containing a dark secret but when it’s unearthed it does not reveal the culprit.
Jurgen Maurer plays the gruff detective well whilst, Max Lieberman his close friend and associate from a family who are denizens of the wealthy Jewish community, is similarly well interpreted.
Duos are scarcely unknown in fiction, notably Holmes and Watson or Hercule Poirot and Hastings, but generally the second of them is dim but worthy and plays the foil.
In this series the two work very much in tandem – particularly in the final episode in which there is a strong theme of anti Semitism.
According to our resident Rust expert this came later with the Anschluss (1938) and with the likes of the Ephrussis and Wittgensteins.
Vienna’s prominent and affluent Jewish families did not suffer until much later.
I should think there will be a third series.
In watching European drama such as Deutschland or The Spiral or Montalbano I have been critical of the BBC for being over-reliant on costume period dramas but this Anglo-Austrian production proves Auntie can cut it.
