Oil rush in the Lüneburg Heath

Anyone who still thinks that Dallas, Texas, with its nasty oil baron JR Ewing, is the serial mecca of oil greed from the blessed days of television museums will now have to memorize the name Wietze.

In this town on the edge of the Lüneburg Heath, an oil production boom occurred not only in “Black Gold” but also in reality around 1900, which the German Petroleum Museum located there still tells about today.

As early as 1858, one of the world’s first successful oil drillings took place in Wietze. In an area otherwise dominated by poor heath farming. The oil industry dominated the growing town until the 1960s, and between 1900 and 1920 the Heidedorf, which recruited workers from everywhere, supplied up to 80 percent of Germany’s total oil production.

If that isn’t a surprising German series material! Like Jack London and Charlie Chaplin, who transformed the dramatic material of human greed into novels and films using the example of the US gold rush on the Klondike, head author Justin Koch and the directing duo Nina Wolfrum and Tim Trachte have also recognized the blood, sweat and tears potential that is sloshing around in the oily soup.

The greed for money and power, hope for breaking through rural class hierarchy, patriarchal megalomania, a family feud including forbidden love with Capulet and Montague appeal, exploitation, labor migration, workers’ strike, cultural clash between agricultural and industrial society, eco-crime, peasant pride, male violence, women’s resistance, early environmental activists and corrupt police – in “Black Gold” there is nothing that doesn’t exist.

Nevertheless, the series mechanics unfold at the beginning with many beauty shots of purple heath panoramas in a Lower Saxony leisurely manner. While the script is still developing the exposition through the total collapse of the Lambert farming family, who first lose the sheepfold (why sheep and not the local Heidschnucks?), then the house father and finally their oil-rich forest land to the large farmer Pape (Tom Wlaschiha, known from “Game of Thrones” and “Stranger Things”), the predictability of the plot that is usual in domestically produced series already sets in.

“Black Gold”, with its elaborate high-end furnishings and picturesque half-timbered and thatched roof views from the museum village of Hösseringen in the Uelzen district, one of the main filming locations, is ideal as calming entertainment fodder at the end of a worrying year.

As far as the show values ​​are concerned, the saga of Johanna Lambert (Harriet Herbig-Matten, known from “Maxton Hall”), a poor farmer’s daughter who becomes the Joan of Arc of the oil workers in the fight against the unscrupulous patriarch Pape, becomes really sexy through the hats. The directing duo Wolfrum and Trachte apparently took a good look at Andreas Prochaska’s Alpine western “The Finstere Tal” from 2014 and realized: cool western hats are half the battle.

Hans Zimmer’s musical western touch

Together with the score trimmed to country folk by Hans Zimmer and Aleksey Igudesman with western guitars, harmonica motifs and accordion sounds, the landscape panoramas typical of the western genre and classic showdown shots of the Pistoleros, the heath, a popular 50s homeland film motif, looks much more international. There’s even a stagecoach – er, an oilcoach robbery.

The fact that the ARD company responsible for the production, Norddeutsche Rundfunk, has so little faith in the protagonists’ own local color, is a clear shortcoming. Jessica Schwarz as the careworn farmer’s wife Martha Lambert and Lena Urzendowsky as Luisa Pape, the farmer’s daughter who is threatened with forced marriage, speak in the finest High German, sometimes even in today’s vocabulary, without it sounding like a subtle artistic intention. That costs authenticity and atmosphere.

If you don’t want to expect the audience and the ensemble to speak Heidjer Low German, as every woman in Wietze spoke around 1900, mixed forms or a tonality with an accent, in this case a North German language coloring, are now often state of the art in historical settings.

In Fatih Akin’s film drama “Amrum” you could recently experience how much identity it brings to a historical subject when the actresses can say a few sentences in the Frisian language Ömrang. In the Alpine region – see Matti Geschonneck’s latest ZDF historical drama “Storm is Coming” – people have been much more self-confident for a long time. “Black Gold”, on the other hand, also aims at an international exploitation with the character of the British entrepreneur Tyler Robertson (Marton Csokas), who is staged as the mastermind of a nascent global industry.

What many screenwriters can currently agree on also characterizes “Black Gold”: a feminist approach. Female characters who act, who rage, who kill and not just love and suffer. That doesn’t correspond to the realities around 1900, but the series is Kintopp from the 21st century. There may be modern approaches, even if Johanna’s life as the only female member of the oil workers’ camp seems surprising.

Here, migrant worker Jakub Mazurak (Slavko Popadic) trains Johanna, who was rejected by her mother because of her high-handedness, in boxing. Large farmer Elisabeth (Henny Reents) is in charge of finances on the Pape farm. And son Richard (Aaron Hilmer), Johanna’s childhood sweetheart, plays the new man from Lower Saxony as a violence-abhorring softie.

It is a society in transition that tells “Black Gold” and in doing so dramaturgically likes to hit the open-ended improbability scale. The shootings and the circumvented ban on weapons among the rough fellows in the oil fields of Little Texas in Wietze are historically documented.