The Machine and Its Staff
Description:
ZDF replicates its SOKO format for every corner of the country. Why is this no coincidence, and what effect does it have on the audience? Regression as propaganda: a psychoanalytical and sociological critique of the ZDF series format.
The Machine and its Staff: SOKO and the Psychostructure of the Early Evening Crime Drama
Why the ZDF franchise is not just bad television, but a lesson in technology, regression and the covert production of the conformist subject.
There is a phenomenon on German and Austrian television that is so familiar it goes unnoticed: the endless proliferation of the SOKO series. SOKO Vienna, SOKO Leipzig, SOKO Stuttgart, SOKO Cologne, SOKO Wismar, SOKO Kitzbühel, and ZDF promote the whole package on their website with the words: “From north to south, east to west, in small towns and metropolises. Always with total commitment, suspense, fun and plenty of heart.” https://www.zdf.de/die-sokos-100
SOKO is a long-running German-language police procedural franchise produced by ZDF, Germany's main public broadcaster. The name stands for "Sonderkommission" (special commission), a term for dedicated investigative units in German and Austrian police forces.
What makes SOKO unusual isn't any single show — it's the sheer scale of replication. Since the original SOKO 5113 launched in Munich in 1978, ZDF has cloned the format across virtually every German-speaking region: SOKO Wien (Vienna), SOKO Leipzig, SOKO Stuttgart, SOKO Köln, SOKO Wismar, SOKO Kitzbühel, SOKO Hamburg, and others. The network markets this openly, promising "North and South, East and West, in small towns and big cities — always with full commitment, suspense, fun, and lots of heart."
Each show follows an identical 45-minute structure: a crime is discovered, a small team of detectives investigates, and by the end of the episode the case is solved and order is restored. The characters vary cosmetically — different cities, different names — but the dramatic architecture never changes. There is no serialized storytelling, no moral ambiguity that survives the credits, no case that remains unsolved.
The franchise airs in the Vorabend slot (early evening, roughly 6–8 PM), which is the most-watched time block on German television and skews older. Collectively, the various SOKOs have produced well over a thousand episodes. For many German and Austrian viewers, some version of SOKO is simply part of the weekly furniture — so familiar it barely registers as a choice.
The article on your blog treats this not as a curiosity of German TV scheduling but as a case study in what happens when a public broadcaster, funded by mandatory license fees and therefore free from commercial pressure, nonetheless reproduces the same industrial logic of efficiency and scalability that Jacques Ellul described as the essence of modern technique. The format doesn't expand because the market demands it — it expands because the production system has no internal mechanism for asking whether expansion is necessary.
No backwater is too provincial. No slot is too lowly. The format replicates itself with the reliability of a computer algorithm.
This observation is the starting point for an analysis that brings together three interlocutors who, at first glance, seem unlikely: the French sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul, the Frankfurt psychoanalyst Alfred Lorenzer, and the American symbol theorist Susanne Langer. The question is not merely “Why is this bad television?” It is: What does this format say about the society that produces and consumes it, and what does it do to it?
I. The machine that drives itself
In *La Technique* (1954) and *Le Système technicien* (1977), Jacques Ellul developed a concept of technology that extends far beyond machines and apparatus. Technology, in Ellul’s sense, is the universal principle of optimisation: the tendency to restructure every human activity according to criteria of efficiency, reproducibility and scalability. Technology is not a tool that people use; it is an autonomous system that shapes people while multiplying itself.
Three characteristics are central to this. Firstly, technology is self-reinforcing: once established, it no longer generates any internal criteria for self-limitation. It does not ask whether it is necessary, but only how it can become even more efficient. Secondly, it is universal: it stops at no sphere of life, because it does not recognise the category of the non-technisable. Thirdly, it is propagandistic, not in the sense of deliberate deception, but in the sense of saturation: those who live in a fully technised environment lose the ability to imagine a non-technised alternative.
In this sense, the SOKO franchise is certainly the product of creative decisions, but above all, a technical process that clones itself. The question of whether a new SOKO is dramaturgically necessary or culturally valuable is not asked within the system; it cannot be asked. The system knows only one question: Which slot is still unoccupied? Which region is not yet covered?
The fact that ZDF operates this process as a public service broadcaster – that is, without commercial pressure and financed by licence fees – confirms Ellul’s interpretation. The logic does not stem from the market. It stems from the technology of series production itself, which asserts itself against any institutional framework. In this context, ‘public service’ does not mean more reflective, more critical or culturally sophisticated. It means: the same technology, with more stable funding, and therefore even more expensive.
II. From Life to Template
How, then, can we ground Ellul’s concept of technology at the psychological level? The starting point is the concept of the sensory-symbolic form of interaction: the living, physically grounded practice between mother and child, in which, even before the introduction of language, meaning is not conceived abstractly but emerges through action, including a kind of ‘instruction for action’. These forms of interaction actually emerge even before birth, in early relational experiences. They form the pre-linguistic layer upon which subjectivity is built. With the introduction of language, the action-guiding systems of the sensory-symbolic forms of interaction (the drives of psychoanalysis) are linked to linguistic figures, forming linguistic-symbolic forms of interaction and thus becoming conscious.
If instinctual desires are rejected and cannot be satisfied even in the slightest, these conscious forms of interaction are at risk of disintegration. This does not occur through simple substitution, but through ‘desymbolisation’. The linguistic-symbolic form of interaction, which is accessible to consciousness, disintegrates in the process of desymbolisation back into forms of interaction that once again become speechless (clichés) and into hollow linguistic figures severed from emotion. If the repressed forms of interaction are provoked, the only outcome is the compromise of a ‘symptom’: Under the compulsion of circumstances, the desire must be content with a substitute satisfaction. To ensure that no gap arises in the coherent conscious self-perception, the vanished linguistic-symbolic form of interaction is replaced by language with the empty linguistic template of a ‘name’ (rationalisation).
The symptom, so to speak, provisionally satisfies the desire as a compromise under the constraints of circumstances, and the empty linguistic template covers the gap left by the disappearance of the sensually-symbolic form of interaction. The substitute satisfaction thus operates under a false name: the repressed desire is present in the symptom, but rendered unrecognisable by rationalisation.
For the SOKO format, this means, in concrete terms, the 45-minute structure is the symptom as a compromise, a makeshift substitute for the satisfaction of the desire to resolve the fear of the intrusion of evil, without ever having to address the fragility of the order or the origin of evil within the system. “Suspense, fun and plenty of heart,” as ZDF calls it – though one might add, “just no thinking” – is the empty linguistic template that, under a false name, masks what the format actually does. The audience returns because of the repetition, not despite it, because the template takes on the relieving function of a symptom.
Maintaining power through adaptation to the zeitgeist
In *The Council of Accountants*, Lorenzer applies this mechanism to the liturgical reform of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). The subtitle, The Destruction of Sensuality, names the result: the restructuring initiated by the Council delves deeply into people’s symbols, myths, rituals and experiences of objects, leaving behind a new type of believer who loses all the inner and outer images through which he might understand himself and others. His religiosity has become a worldview: predetermined, devoid of vividness, monological, and lacking living forms, stripped of any self-determination.
Lorenzer analyses this not as an error, but as an institutional calculation. The driving forces pursued a common structural goal: to stabilise the Church by adapting to the spirit of the age. The Latin Mass, whose sensory, symbolic forms of interaction operated through bodily repetition, ritual and myth, and thus opened themselves up to individual experience, was an obstacle to this goal. Its destruction was a deliberate desymbolisation in the service of maintaining power: the sacred was reduced to a communicable worldview, the living ritual transformed into a canonised template. Lorenzer calls this the vandalism of the Second Vatican Council, not as an aesthetic judgement, but as a psychoanalytical diagnosis.
The two seemingly opposing poles of this movement—conservative modernisation on the one hand, progressive-communicative openness on the other—both achieve the same thing structurally: they sacrifice the sensory-symbolic substance to the demands of an unrestricted explanation of the world by means of ‘substitute solutions to fundamental social problems’ and the alleviation of fears regarding ‘communism’.
In the realm of pop culture, ZDF is structurally carrying out the same movement. Here too, the destruction of living scenic forms is not collateral damage, but a prerequisite for the operation: the format secures a slot and ratings. What remains are staged, desymbolised linguistic templates which, through the weekly trigger of crime, first activate the audience’s fear, then bind it, and finally lull them into a false sense of security with the restoration of order as a substitute satisfaction—conformity to the zeitgeist rather than depth.
III. Myth and ritual as elements of propaganda
In Philosophy in a New Key (1942), Susanne Langer distinguishes between discursive and presentational symbolism. Discursive symbols—language, argument, statement—can be analysed, refuted, replaced. Presentational symbols such as image, music, ritual, myth, and even everyday objects operate differently: they do not address the intellect, but rather serve as a call to action for the organisation of emotion. They thus structure what one can feel and how one can feel it, before the reflective intellect intervenes.
For Langer, ritual and myth are the most primordial and therefore most powerful forms of presentational symbolism: ritual physically creates meaning through gestures and movements; myth organises collective experience into narrated images that are not experienced as stories, but as images of reality itself.
The SOKO format operates precisely at this level. It is not an argument for a particular view of police work, of law and order, or of social conflicts. It is a ritual arrangement of these themes, repeated weekly and aimed at an affective structure that runs deeper than any conscious conviction. The 45-minute dramaturgy—threat, investigation, resolution—is a ritualised narrative form whose message lies not in its content but in the arrangement of templates and their repetition.
The SOKO Saga
The myth conveyed by the format can be precisely defined: the world is fundamentally in order. Crimes are disturbances caused by individuals, not symptoms of the system. Some people are called upon to restore order, and these people are recognised by their authority, not by their reflection. Evil is recognisable, nameable and punishable. In the end, everything is fine again.
In Langer’s terminology, this is a representational symbol: it is believed as dogma and felt as truth. And, as Ellul’s concept of propaganda suggests, through sheer repetition, it becomes the only available emotional template for issues that it prevents from being addressed.
When this myth is consumed weekly, in ten parallel formats, over the course of decades, a mythical structure of emotional life emerges, a pre-organisation of affects that renders certain experiences – police violence as competence, ambivalence as weakness, institutions as fundamentally reliable – emotionally self-evident before they can even be thought.
IV. Technique, Template, Ritual
Ellul, Lorenzer and Langer describe the same phenomenon from three different angles, and their descriptions reinforce one another.
Ellul shows that the SOKO franchise is the result of decisions that follow a systemic logic: it ‘produces itself’ because the technical system can no longer ask any questions other than those of efficiency and reproducibility.
Lorenzer shows what this systemic logic does psychologically: vibrant forms of symbolic interaction are replaced by empty templates through substitute gratification and the alleviation of anxiety. The result is not cultural flattening, but repression: consciousness is plastered over by templates before it can even take shape.
Langer shows why these templates are not ineffective, despite being empty. Precisely because they do not operate discursively, because they bypass arguments and instead repeat them ritually, they burrow deeper into the affective structure than any argument. The ‘SOKO myth’ is more powerful than a political message because it does not present itself as one. It presents itself as reality in images, and every week, in every episode, in every spin-off, this reality becomes a little more self-evident.
V. The psychological structure of the cast
These theoretical considerations have concrete implications for our understanding of the characters, and for the effect their consumption has on the audience.
The symbolic father as a systemic requirement
Colonel Dirnberger, the central figure of SOKO Wien for over 13 years and 193 episodes, explicitly calls himself the ‘pack leader’ of his team. He is the only officer portrayed with a functioning marriage, the only one with a resolved past, the only one to whom bourgeois normality is granted as a basis for legitimacy. In the Lacanian sense, he is the bearer of the Name-of-the-Father: the symbolic function that embodies and simultaneously legitimises the law.
All other characters are systematically excluded from this. Officer Nowak is divorced, officer Ribarski remains structurally alien, female officer Penny Lanz is kept in a semi-subordinate standby position throughout the series, and forensic scientist Wohlfahrt is completely desexualised. The ensemble does not form a community of equals, but rather a line of siblings under a single father, the administratively optimised personnel of a myth that portrays authority as a principle of order.
Regression as a condition of production
The practice of turning suspects, without exception, into objects through loudness, humiliation, and status dominance is framed as a form of competence. Psychoanalytically, this constitutes a regression to pre-Oedipal control fantasies. The other is turned into an object through dominance; their right to ambivalence and silence is annulled.
In Lorenzer’s sense, these interrogation scenes are one of the templates of the format: they replace lively interaction, the genuine struggle for truth, for understanding the other’s subjectivity, with unbearable gestures of dominance that are affectively normalised through their ritualised repetition. The viewer, having consumed this scene in hundreds of variations, has not merely seen it; they have internalised it as a representational symbol of competence. The capacity for mentalisation required to recognise the scene for what it is—an attack on the other’s subjectivity—is systematically undermined by its ritualised repetition.
The scientist as an externalised superego
Forensic scientist Wohlfahrt (263 episodes) and pathologist Dr Beck are structurally reduced to a single function: cue-givers with pieces of evidence. Conscience, reflection, precision – everything the investigators must not possess, as it would slow them down, is outsourced to these supporting characters. They caution, they doubt, they correct. And they are regularly ignored.
This is the technical solution to the superego problem: it is not abolished, but outsourced to a character whom one can conveniently consult, shout at, and ignore. In Langer’s terminology, the ritual of ignoring the female scientist is itself a representational symbol; it repeats weekly the message that intuition trumps knowledge and experience trumps expertise, that the gut feeling of the ‘man of character’ prevails over the data of the ‘educated woman’.
Private life as a structural prohibition
The fact that the characters have no private life, or that it only briefly flickers into view during episodic crises before vanishing immediately, is, in Lorenzer’s terms, the erasure of private scenic experience from the cultural text. What appears to be a private life is structurally always a crisis: Nowak’s relationships end in separation (when, for once, this does not happen at the end, he disappears from the ‘sibling series’ to South Africa), Ribarski fails, Penny Lanz does not develop. The pattern of repetition across seasons is also the symptom here, not of an individual pathology of mediocre screenwriters, but of the technical production process, which has no use for living characters with an inner life.
The sunglasses are the prop that makes the mechanism physically visible. All officers wear them constantly. In one episode, the pathologist even conducts a preliminary post-mortem at the crime scene whilst wearing a pair. They thus replace eye contact—the primary form of interaction through which subjects recognise one another as subjects—with asymmetrical perception: I see you, you do not see me. Dominance through a concealed gaze. The fact that all officials wear them constantly, including the coroner during the post-mortem, demonstrates the cliché's irreversibility in Lorenzer’s sense: the habit has ceased to be situation-dependent. Particularly revealing is the fiddling, the constant pushing up and pulling down in moments of interactional tension. It is the motor compromise between the cliché of aloofness and the dramatic requirement of closeness: the stereotype has no genuine form of interaction at its disposal, so the sunglasses are shifted. The fiddling is the symptom. The body acts out the conflict that the character cannot resolve.
VI. Propaganda without a message, ritual without meaning
Ellul’s Propagandes (1962) describes propaganda as the totality of technical means that adapt people’s thinking to social requirements. Propaganda works not through persuasion, but through saturation. The SOKO franchise does not propagate a political stance; it propagates a pre-reflective and infantile image of social stability: crimes are isolated incidents. Institutions function. Dominance is competence. 45 minutes are enough for any truth.
This form of propaganda is particularly potent because it operates through presentation. It does not argue; it shows. It does not persuade; it repeats. And through repetition—which Ellul identifies as the core element of propaganda—the image becomes a myth: a perceived reality so self-evident that the question of its constructed nature no longer even arises.
This propaganda does not intervene in reflective consciousness, but in the sensory-symbolic forms of interaction themselves. Replacing lived experience with templates undermines the psychological infrastructure necessary to recognise propaganda as such in the first place. The series not only produces interchangeable cultural commodities; it supplants experience itself.
VII. Conclusion
Ellul describes how the technical system produces collectivity without community: people act in a coordinated manner without actually being in relationship with one another. The SOKO team is the narrative equivalent. The characters call themselves a family, work together, but there are no genuine conflicts, no real development of intersubjectivity, no mutual recognition in the sense of Jessica Benjamin.
What is marketed as a familial ‘team spirit’ is, in reality, coordination without a bond. In Lorenzer’s terminology, the template of team spirit replaces living togetherness. What is missing from a psychoanalytic perspective is what Winnicott calls the capacity for solitude in the presence of the other: the ability to be an autonomous subject who experiences the other as truly other. SOKO characters structurally lack this capacity and cannot possess it, as doing so would break the mould of the format.
The SOKO franchise is therefore not subject to criticism for having poor scripts or flat characters. It invites it because it exemplifies what arises when a production system operates entirely according to Ellul’s criteria, thereby cementing templates into presentational symbolism.
The system optimises itself. It does not ask for meaning. It produces regulatory kitsch that disguises itself as living scenes. It masquerades as entertainment and, as a by-product, creates an audience that has lost the category of the alternative, not because it has been convinced, but because the weekly repetition shapes the affective structure in such a way that other images of order, of conflict, of humanity are no longer emotionally accessible.
Dirnberger, 13 years, 193 episodes, Wednesday after Wednesday: this is not entertainment. This is desymbolisation in a drunken frenzy as a weekly programme. And the ending of every episode, perceived by millions as reassuring—the restored order, the solved case, the arrested perpetrator—is the presentational symbol par excellence: the ritual confirmation that the world is good, just as the system requires it to be.
In Foucault’s work (Surveiller et punir), public execution functions as a representational ritual of power: the body of the condemned becomes the theatre of sovereignty. The audience is not a witness, but a participant. It helps to enforce order by watching. The spectacle is not a perversion, but an affective integration into the social contract: this is what order looks like, this is what its price looks like.
The sunglasses reproduce this structure on a microscopic scale. The interrogation scenes are a miniaturised public execution: no physical violence, but the same asymmetry of visibility, the same ritual confirmation of who is the subject and who is the object of order.
And just as the public execution is not primarily addressed to the condemned, but disciplines the audience, the SOKO interrogation scene is not addressed to the suspect on the screen, but to the viewer on the sofa: this is order. This is competence. This is how it should be.
RELATED ARTICLES: