"What is good and evil and how the latter is punished depends not only on the laws of the land, but also on the norms and values of a society. The two different systems which existed in Germany from 1945 to 1990 naturally also defined the development of the TV Krimi in each case."
"The genre established itself on the TV screens of East and West Germany at the end of the 1950s, and on both sides it came at first under great legitimation pressure. In the West, the subject was regarded as trivial. The federal state TV stations of the ARD (First) network justified it merely by the argument that it conveyed information on crime and the fight against it. In the East, the problem was that according to the regime there was no crime, or there should be none, in a socialist state."
"The viewers couldn't care less. When the series 'Stahlnetz' [Steel Net] (West/1958-68) and 'Blaulicht' [Blue Lamp {or better still, Blue Light -- GL}] (East/1958-68) were screened the streets were deserted. In the West, the crime around the corner, in the middle of an intact bourgeois world, was unrolled like news reports based on authentic cases. The perpetrators were mostly misguided persons or professional criminals. On the East side of the Wall, evil was presented in the form of spying or sabotage, usually dragged in from the West."
Sabine Pahlke-Grygier "The German TV crime thriller" http://www.goethe.de/kug/mui/rut/thm/en27383.htm