On the death of Helmut Dietl: Grantler and charmer – tagesspiegel

06:12 clock Peter Becker

He loved women, strutted before all in white. Helmut Dietl repeatedly succeeded, must be available on the company level. Now the director has died at 70 years old. He had

The last two major appearances in Berlin. Mid-November 2014 Helmut Dietl received another honorary “Bambi” for his life’s work. The still elegant septuagenarian with graying mane and beard looked course of already marked as bloated by drugs.

But Dietl, who had exactly one year before made public his lung disease in a “time” -Gespräch with Giovanni di Lorenzo, tried again to be humorous and self-deprecating in his acceptance speech. He had since his youth smoked approximately 960,000 cigarettes and survived the

“If you have again to award a life price in ten years – I’m ready.”.

Open and become vulnerable

More than drawn from life by then already inevitable end, Dietl has acted in May 2014 Berlin Tempodrom. Also, since he got a lifetime achievement award, the Golden Lola German Film Academy, an institution from which he had earlier resigned in protest. Dietl made, the Lola in hands, the matter now no nonsense.

Instead, he said in a witty as well as self-confident metierklugen, live show short speech, the price probably throw a better light on the distinguishing as to the award winners. He then thanked, who was otherwise particularly sentimental averse, his fourth wife Tamara: “. The fact that I am here, I am indebted for their care”

To open, so vulnerable, he had become: the largest Filmsatiriker, Germany has had since 1945 – or rather had since left the country since 1933, the German-Jewish spirits. Filmmakers such as Max Ophuls and also the young Billy Wilder.

Of course, an artist hides sometimes in his characters to reveal or they are in the mask only the sharper, mocking or loving can. Even with Helmut Dietl, who in his Munich apartment, accompanied by his family, died of his cancer, threw on Monday afternoon many of his dazzling film and television creatures at the same time the shadow of its inventor.

The Münchner Freiheit

One thinks first of his somewhat g’scherten Stenze and playboy pictures: the characters of “Munich stories” that also up riding 40 years ago before as Baiuvarii cowboys Ludwig and Leopold street on horses that do not Bierkutschergäule were. A touch of Western blew because the I-san-me-Gemütigkeit, it was Schwabing conditions and towards that place that really the “Münchner Freiheit” means. So they rode, if they do not level with a few jaunty rabbits slipped in open Amischlitten through life. So easy and yet grounded as soon the legendary Monaco Franze in the eponymous television comedy series in the form of actor Helmut Fischer.

The Monaco Franze was in 1983 as Frauenaufreißer a Filou, Strizzi, Stenz (louder today extinct terms), which hardly made in the bottom of a well “Tatort” Bangles Munich society soles of your boots dirty. A madcap flat. Just another word for the museum of frivolous passions.

For Dietl this particular Italianate Munich was in fact a soul mate, and as Helmut Fischer 1997 at cancer died and was then immortalized as a memorial to those Münchner Freiheit No one could have guessed that a similar fate and a half decades later his director would meet. Where the monument now is still pending, but will surely come.

A southerly Flaneur type

Helmut Dietl, however, was more, much more than a local or regional publication only. Even if he, who was born in 1944 in Bad Wiessee, the Bavarian with all the charm and all occasional Grantigkeit quite unmistakable adhered – Helmut Dietl was much more of a southerly Flaneur type, outside an Italian-Californian mixture. No Bierdimpfl, but one who loved women and wine and earlier like all in white, in linen or silk, stalked, when he had his female partners or wives on the side. These included more than “sex bomb” because traded as a full artist involved in the nationwide mid sixties Barbara Valentin and later Veronika developed by him respectable actress Ferres. (Dietl: “the Vroni”)

He himself came from so called humble background, his father died from alcohol early gastric cancer. To the film came Helmut Dietl after high school and a broken Theatre Studies program, according to assistant at the Munich games and as a cameraman. Reüssiert he is the Bavarian television first as director for the evening program. With a nose for serial stories and as an inventor probably the continuation Comedy on German screens -. Beyond “odds and ends”

No career in Hollywood

In the 1980s, he was for a time also to Los Angeles. To a Hollywood career à la Billy Wilder – who was one of his few role models, except Chaplin and Karl Valentin – it’s never come. Although his film satire “Schtonk!” (1992), a satire of the media scandal surrounding the forged Hitler diaries with Götz George, Uwe Ochsenknecht and Harald Juhnke, indeed, would have won almost an Oscar.

Of course outshines his best movie almost everything there were German comedies ever. This was “Rossini” in 1997, as did the “Monaco Franze” written together with Patrick Süskind. Dietl, a highly ironic Sarkast not let many people really close to get close to him – but much shyer people, younger writer Patrick Süskind was before his worldwide hit “Perfume” a friend in Munich. An intimate confidant. And in “Rossini” have Dietl and Süskind both their soulmate images, perhaps even doppelganger designed.

“Rossini” was again the escalation of the trenchant Munich scene life in the television series “Kir Royal” in 1986, then with the furious Franz Xaver Kroetz as reporter Boulevard Baby Schimmerlos. Film, actors, authors and wannabes operate in Schwabing Nobel Italian named “Rossini”; among them the director Uhu Gypsies, played by Götz George, and producer Oskar Reiter (Heiner Lauterbach). Gypsy was more of Dietl, in the real producer Bernd Eichinger rider, but both together vest as it were a double Dietl.

These Veronika Ferres was called as Snow White Virgin Fatal in the game, and although successful, but sensitive Bound writers (Joachim Krol) reflected the touchingly comic portrait also the co-author Süskind. On a small scale, the local scene in reflection on film myths, love dramas, society antics was because of the pubs story great art to the world stage.

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Had it in New York, one would have thought Dietl, choose an alias Woody Allen. Even the American Grand Master would not that funny, bile funny, not a brilliant success.

“Zettl” as a swan song

About the like has Dietl with his “Zettl” 2012 as Berlin film no longer nailed it. The satire on a cinematic animated refined, future science fiction Berlin halfway manhattan magical setting was not well received by the majority of film critics. All compared “Zettl” – with Bully Herbig instead of one aged Kroetz in the lead role – as always using “Kir Royal”. It was the flash story, including a Governing Mayor as umoperiertem man, also a melancholy tale: a lost Berlin. Dietl’s swan song.