#der pass

August Diehl as Stefan Polt — Der Pass / Pagan Peak s.3

At first glance, Ellie and Claas’s affair may seem rather well-matched. There were indeed feelings between them, intense ones at that. Yet their story was doomed from the very beginning. Unlike Ellie, Claas had a family: a wife and a child, whom he did, in his own way, love. Ellie knew this from the start, she accepted it as a given. And yet, it placed a certain burden upon her shoulders. When she became pregnant she was faced with a choice: to destroy herself, or to destroy someone else’s family.

At the beginning of the series, Ellie appears as a person of ideals, and that alone speaks volumes about her principles. She’s capable of walking along the edge, but never too far beyond it. There was always a measure of self-sacrifice in her. She risked everything to save Gedeon from prison. She had earlier crossed professional boundaries in order to uncover his true motives. But her very first sacrifice was her own child.

And yet, no matter how serious Claas’s intentions may have been, there remained a fundamental difference between them: he was stable — she was not. He had both her and his family, while she had only him and her sick, later died father. They were both, in a sense, formalists. Yet, once confronted with a difficult case, Ellie quickly strayed from the path of a “good police officer”. Claas’s position did not allow him such liberties. Moreover, he felt a certain empathy towards his subordinates. Ellie, on the contrary, tended to see them as functions. Later on, this discrepancy became a source of conflict between them.

One might argue that, had it not been for the Krampus, their relationship could have developed into something more sustainable. The ambition was certainly there, but, as we all know, a mere ambition is rarely enough.

As for Rafael, that relationship was, from the outset, rather functional for Ellie. There were no feelings involved, only her motive to reach Gedeon through his superior. And it worked.

It must be sad that there was always a palpable tension between Raphael and Ellie. She never truly loved him, nevertheless, and this is important, she never ceased to feel a certain guilt for her insincerity. Circumstances eventually placed them on opposite sides of the law. And from that moment on, their paths diverged for good.

But there was one man for whom her feelings (perhaps even against her often will) were always sincere, and dangerously deep. Gedeon-his fluffy coat excellency-Winter. A man who once saved her life at the cost of his own, only to betray her later, suffering perhaps even more from it than she did. And yet, not without a painful effort, he eventually shared his traumatic past with her. No one before her had known what life had done to him. She was the first.

I would argue that her stated motive (to seek justice for Yela) was merely a pretext. What truly drove her was not justice, but the need to understand why Gedeon have betrayed their bond. Why he had lied. She sensed there was something far deeper beneath it.

And if one looks closely enough, it becomes clearly that honesty holds an almost sacred place for Ellie. It was exactly its absence that had slowly undone her life. And when Gedeon finally revealed himself to her not as a man unjustifiably immoral, but as he truly was: someone who had endured sexual violence, and who had never known love, not even from his own mother, Ellie could no longer hold anger against him.

My Mom: ,,He is so ugly wtf ew."

Me: ,,Yeah."

😔

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