The End of Lindenstraße
The ARD announced they’re cancelling Lindenstraße. Thirty-four years on air, and they’re done. Final episode in 2020.
My mother watched it every week. So I grew up watching it too. Nothing fancy about the show—just stories happening in a stairwell or someone’s apartment, people living their lives, dealing with things. Hans W. Geißendörfer made something that didn’t need to be important to be important. It was just there, reliable, every Sunday, unspectacular. But it was the show that made me understand that homosexuality was normal. That you didn’t need to fear people who looked different. That the absurdity of the world outside finds its way into your living room and your relationships, whether you’re paying attention or not.
The ARD says viewership is down. Production costs don’t match the audience size anymore. They’re being respectful about it—a proper finale is promised—but the truth is simple: the show isn’t profitable enough. So it goes.
What leaves with it is hard to articulate without getting melodramatic. It’s not that Lindenstraße was high art. It was a soap opera that actually cared about the stories it told. It took social and political issues seriously without turning them into spectacle. They lived in the show the way they live in actual life, as part of the texture of being alive, not as drama to be solved in forty-five minutes. Most German television now is just screaming—talk-show hysteria, reality competition formats, endless recycled games. Lindenstraße never shouted. It just was there.
I know this sounds like I’m making something small into something huge. A TV show ending isn’t a tragedy. But something real is gone, and what German television is replacing it with is noise. Lindenstraße was never cool enough, weird enough, or cruel enough for what television wants to be now. It was too steady. Too willing to believe its audience had a brain and a conscience.
My mother will watch the final episodes. I’ll watch them too. I’m not sure what else you do with something that’s been in your life that long. You show up for the ending. You don’t abandon it when it’s almost over.