2024-04-26 14:07:37
Film Michael Verhoeven †
“He was our hero without ever wanting to be a hero”
Status: 26.04.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Michael Verhoeven and his wife Senta Berger at the Berlinale in 2016
Quelle: FABRIZIO BENSCH/REUTERS
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The great director Michael Verhoeven spent a lifetime filming German history, with Heinz Rühmann, Mario Adorf and Senta Berger, to whom he was married for many decades. And he even blew up a Berlinale with his own hands. An obituary.
You can also go through German film history on a quieter foot and still leave your mark. When you hear that the director Michael Verhoeven died in Munich at the age of 85, it might only ring a bell for older people. The really big successes were a long time ago: “The White Rose” (1982) about the Scholl siblings or “Fondenes Fressen” (1977) with Heinz Rühmann and Mario Adorf, with whom Verhoeven often worked; Adorf was married to his sister at the time.
German history again and again: scene from “The White Rose” from 1982
Quelle: United Archives/kpa/picture alliance
The loud bang with which the experimental anti-war film “ok” blew up the Berlinale in 1970 has long faded away. In the Bavarian forests, Verhoeven, who also stars, recreated Vietnam – and told a story that couldn’t sound more modern: American soldiers rape a Vietnamese girl and ultimately kill her without being held accountable for it. The American jury chairman George Stevens withdrew in protest, and a German colleague also ran out of the hall because of alleged “anti-Americanism”. This was followed by addresses of solidarity, arguments and finally a dispersal of the jury without any awards being agreed upon. This has never happened again since then, apart from the weak repetition this year in the dispute over Israel and Palestine.
But you don’t have to imagine Verhoeven as a scandalous noodle. He wasn’t one to seek effect for effect’s sake. On the contrary. When asked about the beauty of his wife Senta Berger, to whom he had been married for many decades, he simply said that it was not important to him at all. From the beginning, he liked that she wore her heart on her sleeve. He himself is more of a secretive type.
A beautiful original confession from the two lovers appeared in “Spiegel” in 2007. Even though they are physically separated from each other, they talk about their love. “Michael was an extremely beautiful young man with incredible, large, sparkling green eyes and two dimples,” remembers Senta Berger. “He had small, beautiful hands and a cheeky nose.” And adds: “I try to understand him, and he understands that I don’t understand him.” That would be a motto for Generation Z!
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Verhoeven, on the other hand, reports that he is not happy about emailing his wife, which he has been doing lately, but only in emergencies because: “There is no voice.”
She accepted early on that he would never go shoe shopping with her and that even on vacation there would always be an unfinished script on the table.
When they met, he was a medical student but had plenty of acting experience; his father Paul Verhoeven – no relation to the Dutch director – ran the Bavarian State Theater after the war. As a child, Michael appeared in all sorts of film productions, including the 1954 film adaptation of “The Flying Classroom”. He later returned to cinema fulltime, but seemed to a certain extent to be transferring the Hippocratic oath to society – and repeatedly made relevant films that discussed, for example, the role of the Germans in the Nazi era (“The Terrible Girl”, 1990, Oscar-nominated) or even transsexuality (“Revealing a Marriage “, 2000). In 2016 he produced “Welcome to the Hartmanns” with the company Sentana – which he and his wife founded in 1965, the year before their wedding. The great success of the migration comedy remained in the family; The son Simon directed the film.
He now told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that he had the most loving, wonderful and funniest dad a child could ever wish for: “He was our hero without ever wanting to be a hero.”
As has now been announced, Michael Verhoeven died last Monday after a short, serious illness.
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