German Series in North America
Sebastian Fitzek's "Therapy"

The six-part Prime Video miniseries Therapy opens with a setup out of Hitchcock: renowned psychologist Viktor Larenz (Stephan Kampwirth) frets in a Berlin waiting room as doctors examine his teenage daughter Josy (Helena Zengel), who suffers from unexplained, possibly psychosomatic illnesses. Viktor waits, and waits. Finally he barges into the exam room, only for the baffled medical staff to tell him that Josy is not there, and never was there. Is Viktor the victim of a conspiracy?

By Mark Tompkins

Josy’s disappearance is never solved. Viktor’s marriage collapses, and he retreats to the island of Parkum in the North Sea. His willful isolation is disrupted by the appearance of Anna Spiegel (Emma Bading), a mysterious young woman who claims to be schizophrenic. She also says she writes novels that later come true, as in a story she wrote that predicted Josy’s disappearance. She begs Viktor to treat her, but Viktor realizes it’s his own sanity that is put at risk by Anna’s arrival…and that she may be toying with him.

Sanity is a matter of perspective

The opening of Therapy, a.k.a. Sebastian Fitzeks Die Therapie, sets the stage for a psychological thriller where the viewer is always kept on edge. A jumble of flashbacks shows how Victor strived to be Josy’s valiant protector, though overprotector would be more accurate, as it can seem like Victor sought to shelter Josy from adolescence itself. Another layer of flashbacks shows the agonizing purgatory Viktor and his wife endured, first together, then increasingly apart, as they waited for the police to find Josy or at least solve her disappearance.

In the present day, Viktor’s exile in Parkum grows more unsettling as Anna Spiegel, impossibly well informed about Josy’s disappearance, becomes less a prospective patient than a stalker. An attentive viewer will have noted early on that certain things about this scenario don’t add up, and as circumstances on the windswept island become more sinister, Viktor’s mind takes refuge in increasingly bizarre imagery that finds him reunited with his missing daughter.
Meanwhile another narrative strand follows maverick doctor Martin Roth (Trystan Pütter), whose use of unapproved drugs to treat his patients threatens his leadership of a prestigious Berlin psychiatric clinic. Roth’s stubborn convictions threaten more than his career, as when he haunts the city’s seedier precincts to procure opioids. This straightforward realism of this subplot makes it hard to see how Roth and Viktor’s stories will converge. The mystery deepens with each episode. The viewer is left wondering, is there a villain in this story? Is there a hero?

A reign of terror - in the bestseller charts

Therapy is based on Die Therapie (2007), the first novel by Sebastian Fitzek, and also his first hit. Every year since then, Fitzek has released another ‘Psychothriller,’ as the subgenre is known in German, and has long since crossed over from best-selling author to publishing phenomenon. Nowadays his name is inescapable wherever there is printed matter in Germany: step inside the bookstore of any train station and you can’t miss his oeuvre prominently on display, a pile of sleek black paperbacks with titles inscribed in the sort of ‘chiller’ font that promises sleepless nights.

Fitzek tours to promote his new books in a bus with his name emblazoned on the side. Such is his popularity that for an author reading in Berlin in December 2024, he headlined not the biggest bookstore in the city or even an auditorium, but the Uber Arena, i.e., the venue that is home to Berlin’s hockey team and where the biggest names in music play.

That kind of popular success invites critics to sniff with disdain, of course. But a curious critic might ask, just why have Fitzek’s ripping yarns caught on to the degree they have? These are not your granny’s whodunits or even gritty crime procedurals, but grim, lurid, unstable narratives, replete with gore, sexual violence and psychological breakdowns. A protagonist who appears stable and lucid in the first chapter will not make it to the last page unscathed, and may not even recognize himself any more. 

Noir on steroids 

No surprise, TV and film producers have snapped up the rights to Fitzek’s work. The 2018 thriller Cut Off, a.k.a. Abgeschnitten, based on the 2012 novel Fitzek co-wrote with the forensics expert Michael Tsokos (to get all the gruesome details right, one assumes), is a crash course in the Fitzek aesthetic. Think noir on steroids, everything dark, heavy, and twisted, with a color palette skewed toward black and blue. A movie for anyone who thinks David Fincher thrillers suffer from too much levity, in other words.
Initially Therapy appears to take place in a milder register of tamped-down realism. But the deceptive setup is part of the fun, if “fun” is the right word here. The surreal starts to supplant the “real” as Viktor’s Parkum retreat becomes a psychic fun house, an instance where Therapy gets to show off some imaginative production design. Midway through the series, the narrative tears in half, and the audience has to reorient itself to what is really going on.

Physician, heal thyself

So far, so true to the Psychothriller genre. But Fitzek’s novels wouldn’t have attained their page-turner status if the shocks stopped coming halfway through, and the late rug-pulling twists in Therapy compel the viewer to reassess events and characters yet again. (Admittedly, by this point plausibility and logic have long since ceded the stage to narrative momentum.) It’s one thing to experience delusions alongside a protagonist, but it’s more unexpected to discover that the therapist — the voice of wise, competent authority — has been lying to himself about his capacity for monstrous deeds.

The climactic revelation is not just a storyteller’s parlor trick but a twist that gives the series an oblique topical dimension, as a seemingly objective, authoritative account of past events is upended. Fitzek’s dark tales may be the campfire stories our times deserve.

“Therapy” a.k.a. “Sebastian Fitzeks Die Therapie”
Limited series, 2023
Six episodes, 45–50 min. each
Starring: Stephan Kampwirth, Trystan Pütter, Helena Zengel, Andrea Osvárt, Emma Bading, Samir Fuchs
Based on the novel by Sebastian Fitzek, adapted by Alexander M. Rümelin
Production Company: Ziegler Film