Günter Lamprecht, Star of ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz,’ Dies
at 92
He drew acclaim as the central character in Rainer Werner
Fassbinder’s 14-part 1980 television epic about Weimar Germany.
The New York Times
By A.J. Goldmann
October 7, 2022
Günter Lamprecht, the German character actor whose
acclaimed performance anchored Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 14-part television
epic, “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” died on Tuesday in Bad Godesberg, a suburb of
Bonn, Germany. He was 92.
His agent, Antje Schlag, confirmed the death, at an elder
care facility, on Friday.
When “Berlin Alexanderplatz” was first broadcast in West
Germany in 1980, Mr. Lamprecht was hailed for his portrayal of Franz Biberkopf,
an ex-convict navigating life in the gritty Berlin of the late Weimar era.
“Berlin Alexanderplatz” was later shown in movie theaters in the United States
in a cut of more than 15 hours.
In the 1990s, Mr. Lamprecht became a familiar face to
television viewers in the newly reunified Germany as the lovable police
inspector Franz Markowitz on the long-running crime procedural “Tatort.”
Before “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Mr. Lamprecht appeared in
a number of Mr. Fassbinder’s films and television series, including the 1973
science-fiction epic “The World on a Wire” and the director’s breakthrough
international hit, “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” in 1979. But it was his
herculean performance in “Berlin Alexanderplatz” that won him the greatest
praise of his career.
Reviewing its United States theatrical release in 1983 (a
year after Mr. Fassbinder’s death), Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote:
“At the center of the film is the remarkable performance of Günter Lamprecht as
Franz. He is a large, doughy-looking fellow with small eyes, a big stomach and
a certain sweetness that makes understandable the loyalty he inspires in the
series of women who live with him. Mr. Lamprecht must rant, rave, laugh
crazily, booze, brawl and never — not for a minute — be ridiculous while
behaving in ridiculous ways.”
Mr. Lamprecht said he saw himself as cut out for the
role.
“You must remember that I grew up close to Alexanderplatz,”
he said in a 2007 documentary film that accompanied a screening of a restored
print of “Berlin Alexanderplatz” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He
recalled knowing intimately the seedy and run-down Berlin quarter that is the
center of Biberkopf’s world, and spoke of swimming in the Spree, the river that
runs through Berlin, and stealing fruit from the marketplace as a rambunctious
boy.
Günter Hans Lamprecht was born in Berlin on Jan. 21,
1930, at the tail end of the Weimar era, when Germany was a republic between
the world wars. His father was a taxi driver and a staunch supporter of the
National Socialist Party, which gave rise to Nazism. His mother was a cleaner.
Toward the end of World War II, when he was 15, Günter served as a paramedic
and buried bodies during the Battle of Berlin.
After the war, he trained as an orthopedic technician, a
trade he practiced for a few years. In his free time he danced at a West Berlin
jazz club frequented by actors. Getting to know the performers there inspired
him to pursue a stage career, he recalled in an interview with the German
broadcaster ARD in 2020.
Beginning in 1952, Mr. Lamprecht studied at the Max
Reinhardt Seminar acting school in Vienna on a stipend from the City of Berlin.
He had early engagements with theater companies in two West German cities,
Bochum and Oberhausen. In Oberhausen, where he worked from 1959 to 1961, he won
praise for his portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s “A
Streetcar Named Desire.”
He remained active both onscreen and onstage throughout
his long career. In 1981, the director Wolfgang Petersen (who died in August)
cast him in a relatively small role in “Das Boot,” the World War II submarine
drama that became an international hit. One of Mr. Lamprecht’s more recent
appearances, in 2017, was as Paul von Hindenburg, Germany’s Weimar-era
president, in the hit Netflix series “Babylon Berlin.”
Mr. Fassbinder, the prolific and unruly West German
filmmaker, discovered Mr. Lamprecht while Mr. Lamprecht was working in Bochum
and cast him in three small roles before entrusting him with the demanding lead
in “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” an adaptation of a modernist novel by Alfred
Döblin.
“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re Biberkopf!’ I said,
‘Great, who is that?’” Mr. Lamprecht recalled in the 2007 documentary. He said
he had tried reading the novel three times while in acting school but gave up
each time, finding it too difficult.
Mr. Fassbinder mailed Mr. Lamprecht the script, and the
actor shut himself up in a hotel on the Baltic coast for an entire week to read
all 14 episodes. “In the end, exhausted but elated, I said to myself: ‘Yes, of
course. You’re Biberkopf,’” Mr. Lamprecht said.
Döblin’s novel, published the year before Mr. Lamprecht’s
birth, follows Franz Biberkopf, newly released from prison, as he navigates the
mean streets of a radically altered Berlin. An Everyman coping with the tumult
of the city, Biberkopf is drawn into a life of petty crime and ultimately
crushed under the weight of an uncaring society on the brink of
self-destruction, losing an arm in the process.
From the first day of filming, Mr. Lamprecht and Mr.
Fassbinder quarreled about how much Berlin dialect to use; in the end, the
actor, a native od Berlin, prevailed over the director, a Bavarian. One of Mr.
Lamprecht’s other contributions drew on his orthopedic skills: He designed a
bandage to keep his right arm (the one the character loses) flat against his
body and out of sight.
A decade after “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Mr. Lamprecht
achieved new prominence in Germany with “Tatort.” From 1991 to 1996 he was
Markowitz, an endearing police inspector who does not carry a gun, rides the
U-Bahn and snacks on currywurst, Berlin’s popular street food. Mr. Lamprecht
also contributed to the scripts.
“Seventy percent of Markowitz is Lamprecht,” he said in
the ARD interview. “I’m hidden in this character.” He also performed onstage as
Markowitz.
In the fall of 1999, Mr. Lamprecht was in the Bavarian
spa town of Bad Reichenhall for a performance when a 16-year-old student opened
fire from the window of his parents’ home there, killing four people and
injuring several others before turning the gun on himself. Mr. Lamprecht and
his partner at the time, the actress Claudia Amm, were among the injured. Both
recovered. They later married, his agent, Mr. Schlag, said.
Ms. Amm survives him, as does a daughter.
Mr. Lamprecht published two volumes of memoirs, “And
Sadly I’m Still: A Youth in Berlin” (2000) and “A Hellish Thing, Life” (2007).
Both titles are quotations from the Döblin novel. At his death, Mr. Schlag
said, he was working on a third volume.
LAMPRECHT, Günter (Gunter Hans Lamprecht)
Born: 1/21/1930, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Berlin, Germany
Died: 10/4/2022, Bad Godesberg, Bonn, North
Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Günter Lamprecht’s western – actor:
Der Regenmacher (TV) 1980 (Sheriff File)
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