WDR
By Thomas Köster
He was much more than Harald Schmidt's sparring partner. Herbert Feuerstein has given the entertainer's job a new quality through anarchic stupid art. The author, entertainer and cabaret artist died yesterday at the age of 83 in Erftstadt.
For Herbert Feuerstein, nonsense was an act of resistance from the start. In his youth, nonsense was an effective means of defending himself against the self-confessed Nazi father and the hysterical mother: the entertainer, who was born in Zell am See, Austria in 1937, will remember this later.
It also goes well with why he flew from the Mozarteum in Salzburg as a budding concert pianist in 1958: He had written a cheeky slap on a composition by the then president of the festival there.
Fooling around at the highest level
Against this background, his 20 years as the German editor-in-chief of the US satellite magazine MAD from 1971 to 1992 appear as an anarchic attempt to "plant the virus of fooling in young people's heads".
From the boredom of everyday life, he wanted to protect " strange high school students and dysfunctional wise guys " with around 50 million books and the " around one billion laughs " of his tenure: "So guys like me".
Nose flutes for millions
In the early 1980s, Feuerstein came to television as a gag author of the WDR youth programs "Die Michael-Braun-Show" and "Wild am Sonntag". When he took off alongside Harald Schmidt in the advice team for the WDR game show "Pssst ..." and the WDR program "Schmidtanders", which began in 1990, he was already over 50.
Herbert Feuerstein once claimed that he would send himself to hell for this TV time. Nevertheless, it makes the little man with the side parting and the cash register a cult figure.
This is mainly due to "Schmidt each other". Feuerstein imported this talk show idea from the USA, and its charm lies not least in improvised fooling. "Feuerstein wrote the concept and Schmidt ignored it," says Feuerstein, summarizing the work.
Great comic art
In fact, with its well-groomed silliness and boredom that is sometimes deliberately put on display, "Schmidtanders" is great comic art that lives from the right timing and gives German television entertainment completely new accents.
In the show, Feuerstein plays the nose flute, climbs into playpens - and only has a chance of survival because he skillfully defies his counterpart Harald Schmidt in absurd mirror-fights.
"It was dislike at first sight," says Herbert Feuerstein time and again about his collaboration with Harald Schmidt. "And thus the basis for a fruitful cooperation". In fact, even after the end of "Schmidt Another" in 1994, Feuerstein Schmidt couldn't get rid of the media. There is hardly an interview in which he is not addressed about Schmidt. That annoys him more and more.
FEUERSTEIN, Herbert
Born: 6/15/1937, Zell am See, Austria
Died: 10/6/2020, Ecfstadt, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Herbert Feuerstein’s western – actor:
Der Schuh des Manitu – 2001 (Apache photographer)
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