Vienna Blood | in the footsteps of the first profilers # 2023

The methods of the best forensic scientists and profilers from the USA, Canada and Europe date back to turn-of-the-century in Vienna. An exploration of the history of criminology. 

A person is brutally killed, there are no traces and no motive. Profilers and forensic scientists use amazing methods to reconstruct even the most mysterious homicides based on psychological abnormalities and microscopic clues. How do killers tick? How do they reveal themselves? How could they be convicted and brought to justice? Can there be any such thing as justice in bizarre violent crime cases? And why have fictional retellings of various murders become literary bestsellers and hit ratings in the media? The documentary "Vienna Blood - In the Footsteps of the First Profilers" investigates these questions. 

Inspired by the internationally successful TV series "Vienna Blood" co-produced by ORF and ZDF, the documentary focuses on the first profiler in criminal history: Max Liebermann, a student of Sigmund Freud. The author of the crime series on which the series is based is British psychiatrist Frank Tallis. He is a connoisseur of turn-of-the-century in Vienna, the setting for his crime novels. Tallis focuses on a fictitious student of Sigmund Freud and lets him, as it were, as the first profiler, solve mysterious criminal cases. Liebermann is based on a real model: Theodor Reik. He was the only student of Freud who specifically dealt with criminology. 

The science of "profiling" is still based on his findings about murders and the motives behind them. The Austrians Reinhard Haller and Thomas Müller are among the most successful criminal psychologists of recent times. Müller "dreams of", as he puts it in his book "The Human Being", "of decoding the code of evil". His specialty is crime scene analysis, the art of inferring his personality from the decisions a perpetrator makes at the scene of the crime. His job is to look at what people do to other people and the "why?" to clarify. In recent years, Müller has become one of the best criminal psychologists in the world, analyzing thousands of crime scene photos. 

In addition to Müller, the psychiatrist Reinhard Haller also has his say. He has investigated around 500 criminals - serial killers, sadists, psychopaths. Other interview partners include Robert Dornhelm, the director of the three new parts of the third "Vienna Blood" season, and the main actors Juergen Maurer and Matthew Beard. The documentation by Gabriele Flossmann delves into turn-of-the-century Vienna and describes how the city and its cultural makeup at the time helped break new ground in criminology.