Marie Brand und das Erbe der Olga Lenau (2015)

Hannah Lenau, a young artist, exhibits large-format collages at her first gallery opening. In them, she explores the squatter movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which her mother Olga was once part of and from which she had also received many of the photographs used. While Hannah waits for her mother to arrive, Olga falls from the window of her apartment in an old building. Marie Brand and Jürgen Simmel are assigned to the case, and Marie quickly discovers that Olga was pushed and did not take her own life. As she had forty years earlier, she still lived in a shared apartment and remained politically active. According to her will, the apartment Olga owned is to pass to a foundation after her death and be maintained as a shared flat with four residents at all times. Simmel suspects Harald Wecker, one of the flatmates, because relations among the four have been far from harmonious lately. Meanwhile, Brand finds fingerprints belonging to someone else on a glass, suggesting that an unknown visitor had been there. They soon trace the prints to property developer Bernd Lüttke, with whom the victim had recently had a major dispute. He denies doing anything to Olga, and Brand believes him. Unexpectedly, Hannah Lenau’s studio is broken into, and all the spare photographs for her exhibition are missing afterward. Fortunately, she had saved digital copies of them in the cloud, so they are not completely lost. Marie Brand tries to find a lead to the killer through the photographs. But before she can uncover any clues, petty criminal Nils Schmadtke is found shot dead. All the signs point to his having broken into the studio and then been silenced by the person who hired him. During her investigation, Marie Brand comes across the death of a police officer who was killed thirty years earlier during a squat organized by Olga. She and Simmel follow this lead, which takes them to former police chief Artus Matthiesen. The investigators discover that Matthiesen had tampered with the investigation files. It is quite clear that he wanted to protect his illegitimate son, who, as the investigation reveals, is Harald Wecker. At the time, Harald fired the fatal shot at the police officer during a scuffle, and Matthiesen wanted to cover it up. He had not imagined that, so many years later, the matter might catch up with him again. He admits that Olga had sent him tickets so he could see the exhibition. When he saw the photographs depicting scenes from the squat back then, he went straight to Olga’s. She wanted to blackmail him, as she had done several times before, and he wanted it to finally stop. He also admits to the murder of the burglar and is arrested.