Ein gentle perseverance. A quite heavy hero who became softer and softer with age. Although he always had something broken from a young age. Michael Degen, who only turned 90 on January 31 and has now died, was an actor. A convertible, very good. But life gave him a role. He was Jewish. He never hid that. But he didn’t make it an issue for a very long time. Because he played characters, didn’t want to focus on himself.
Michael Degen performed his first job wonderfully and flexibly. But then, when the culture of remembrance, the giving of testimonies, was socially more important, and also when he got older, he remembered himself and made precisely this contradiction the subject of the fact that he, the mime, was always marked and clearly defined by his religion . And in a clear, truthful, thoughtful, intellectually eloquent voice, he spoke very calmly but vehemently in the land of the perpetrators about what that means to this day.
And so we remember his Hamlet and his Professor Bernardi, of course also Michael Sanders, the friend of “Mama Drombusch” Witta Pohl in the popular eighties series – or the fluffed-up, cunning Deputy Chief of Police Patta, who appeared in Donna Leon’s television Venice Brunetti makes his inspector’s life difficult. Oh yes, and he also played Hitler once, just as he did in 1984 under Zadek at the Freie Volksbühne Berlin as Yaakov Gens, the head of the Judenrat in Vilnius alongside Ulrich Tukur and Esther Ofraim in Joshua Sobol’s heartbreaking play “Ghetto”.
Degen (centre) in 1983 in the Feuchtwanger film “The Oppermann Sisters” with Rosl Zech (l.) and Wolfgang Kieling (r.)
Quelle: picture alliance / United Archiv
But we are also thinking of the author of his autobiography Not All Were Murderers – A Childhood in Berlin (1999), which was filmed in an impressive way by Jo Baier in 2006. Of the novels Blondi and The Tax Evader and the exploration of My Holy Land: In Search of My Lost Brother. To “Family Ties”, a fiction about the life of Michael Mann, or “The Sad Prince” about Degen’s encounter with the alcoholic Oskar Werner. Michael Degen, he was truly a player with well-known, but always new facets.
Born in Chemnitz in 1932 as the son of a Jewish language professor who was almost tortured to death by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (he died shortly after his release), he and his mother had to change hiding spots in Berlin eight times under false identities until they found them in a colony of summer houses Berlin-Kaulsdorf could survive with communist friends. After the war, Degen began acting training at the Deutsches Theater in 1946, where he was employed until 1949. But then he followed his mother to Israel. Here he found his older brother Adolf, whom his parents had been able to send to emigrate in the 1930s. In 1951 Degen, who had also acted in Tel Aviv (and learned Modern Hebrew), returned once more to Bert Brecht’s troupe at the Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin.
Degen 2013 at the premiere of the film “Hannah Arendt”
Quelle: picture alliance / dpa
Michael Degen didn’t want to be without his country of origin, the language that shaped him. That’s why he never accused “the” Germans, but only those who had allowed themselves to be made into henchmen of the exterminators. But first he wanted to play. And that’s what he did, for many decades in the most important roles of classical and contemporary drama on the stages of Cologne, Frankfurt/Main, Berlin, Munich, Salzburg, Hamburg and Vienna.
Directors such as George Tabori, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Rudolf Noelte and Peter Zadek were formative for him. Between greasy and difficult, Mackie Messer and Don Juan, his spectrum was huge. And mostly his sculptural figures, even the positive ones, had a quiet melancholic trait around the slightly mockingly curled lip. Someone knew more about people than he wanted to reveal on stage.
Politically, however, Michael Degen was not silent, even if he became more cautious after he received death threats in 1986 because of his protest against an approved meeting of the “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler” in Bad Hersfeld and the return of his festival prize there and his apartment in Hamburg had been ransacked. A nervous breakdown was the result. This made him thin-skinned, but also receptive to the nuances of his art, which became more and more subtle, but always straightforward and without manners.
Michael Degen, attractive even in old age, was always a sincerely clear actor, not a self-promoter, not a diva. This could always be seen in his many TV and film roles, which often consisted of such average characters that the performer became famous and concise, but the different facets of the people he embodied actually only strengthened his own.
Even when he played Adolf Hitler in Michael Kehlmann’s TV film “Secret Reichssache” (1987), which deals with the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of 1938, Degen wanted to show “how Hitler dealt with the Germans”. – “And I liked playing this Hitler!” he said. Michael Degen, to whom Dieter-Wedel-Stoffe or Egon Monk’s “Die Geschwister Oppermann” (1983) was very important, was just as happy to be there, but also “Der Alte”, “Tatort” or the “Klinik unter Palmen”.
Diversity was symptomatic for Degen, small roles, shallow fabrics did not really exist for him. For some he reduced the drop, made them consumable, brought them closer, humanized them, for others he deepened them and upgraded them, being broken gave them character. The world is loud enough, the late, cultivated Degen, who always had his German and Israeli passports extended and lived in Hamburg as a father of four children with his third wife, preferred to counter with soft tones. Again very strong from 2010 as a Jewish professor in Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” at the Theater in der Josefstadt. From there came the first news of his death.