Michael Degen can look back on a very long, very rich life as an actor, he has been in this profession for seventy years – what a sum! His list of roles includes appearances in Rosamunde Pilcher Schmonzetten as well as protagonists from the classical repertoire; he has played Hamlet alone three hundred times. Firmly inscribed in the minds of the viewers and in the hearts of fans, he has above all played the vain and conceited Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, Supervisor of Commissario Brunetti in the ARD series “Donna Leon”, which ended in 2019. The Teutonic Italianità, which German television celebrated in these often sluggish Venice thrillers based on the books by Donna Leon, was hard to bear for some, but for others, after all, an audience of millions, it was a cozy crime-tourism event.
The role profile of the Vice-Questore, who is always perfectly dressed at Degen, includes the fact that he is in charge, but no one can really take him seriously because he is a pompous oaf and a bit stupid as a police officer, prone to luxury, corruption and Flattery. Degen has pushed the comedy contained in it to the limit of idiocy every time. He not only played the role, as they say, “with a wink”, but very often as a bang, with overly obvious rooster gestures, perhaps also to keep the character at bay, to signal his inner distance. Because actually this Patta was not his case. “I don’t miss him, I don’t even know if I particularly like him,” he said recently.
“The money has to come from somewhere”: Michael Degen in 1988 in the ZDF series “Dies Drombuschs” with Günter Strack and Witta Pohl.
(Photo: Teutopress/SZ Photo)
How reassuring. After all, Michael Degen is a much more multifaceted actor, even in comic parts much more abysmal, than his supposed “star role” in the “Donna Leon” series or his numerous episode appearances as a gallant gentleman on run-of-the-mill television would make you think. He himself described much of it as “scrap” and always referred to his role as the breadwinner of four children from two marriages: “The money has to come from somewhere.” In the late 1980s, for example, it came out of the very popular ZDF series “Dies Drombuschs”, in which Degen, alias Dr. Martin Sanders conquered the protagonist Witta Pohl with his typical nonchalance. Since his moving autobiography Not All Were Murderers (1999) about his childhood as a Jew in Berlin during the Nazi era, Degen, who has an excellent talent for storytelling, is also a successful author, writing novels such as “Blondi” (2002) about Hitler’s dog or “Family Ties” (2011) about Thomas Mann’s youngest son Michael.
The story of his survival during the Nazi era is full of horrors and wonders and has become a bestselling film
But Michael Degen doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone anyway. He will be ninety this Monday. The son of Jewish parents, born in Chemnitz in 1931, experienced and survived the darkest chapter in German history. However, he did not turn his back on the country afterwards, but contributed as an actor to the country’s cultural and spiritual and moral reconstruction; expressed itself politically, where necessary, against the diehards, the old and the new right. For that alone he deserves the greatest credit.
Michael Degen grew up in Berlin. His father, a businessman suffering from tuberculosis and a professor of languages, was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1939 and was almost killed there by the Nazis. He died a year later after they released him. While the older son Adolf, later called Ari (there is so much history in that alone), could be sent to Palestine, Michael stayed behind in Berlin with his mother Anna. They narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz in 1942 and survived until the end of the war with the help of a few civilly courageous people hiding in an East Berlin arcade colony – a story full of horrors and wonders that, when Degen wrote it down many decades later, not only became a bestseller, but in 2006 it was written by Jo Baier was also filmed.
After the war, Degen, who had memorized Goethe’s “Faust” in his hiding place and auditioned with it, found a job at the Deutsches Theater in East Berlin: as a scholarship holder at the attached acting school and in his first small roles. In 1949 he went to Israel, where he looked for and found his brother, served in the army and played at the Tel Aviv Chamber Theater. In his book “My Holy Land” (2007), Degen writes about this time, which, however, only lasted two years. He not only missed his mother, who stayed in Berlin, but also his “mother tongue”, the language in which he wanted to play. Back home, Bertolt Brecht brought him to the Berliner Ensemble in 1954. This was followed by engagements in Cologne, Frankfurt and again in Berlin, where he also directed for the first time (Goethe’s “Urfaust”), finally Munich, four years at the Bavarian State Theater, then free. He also staged Goethe in Munich, this time his beloved “Faust I”; he played Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer and directed by the great Ingmar Bergman in Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1981).
Michael Degen has always been busy on television in his professional life. Here in Dieter Wedel’s “Noon on Red Square” (1978).
(Photo: United Archives/SZ Photo)
It is an almost cool precision with simultaneous intensity, suppleness and elegance that distinguishes Degen as an actor, plus a gentle, one would almost like to say: natural melancholy, always in danger of falling. His friendly, striking face, the dark, terrified children’s eyes, his soft, prancing tone – he bestows his sword delicacy on even the most ambiguous figure. And he has embodied many ambivalent characters, has repeatedly dealt with the Holocaust in ambivalent roles, dealt with the Nazi past with an alert political awareness.
With Peter Zadek he played the Jewish camp guard Gens in Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto”: a man who hands over some Jews, saves others from being morally inaccessible. In the case of George Tabori, with whom he worked in Vienna, he was the driving force behind his horribly comical “Cannibals”: Concentration camp prisoners killed, mad with hunger, one of their own and set to work turning it into a soup. In 1988, Degen even played Adolf Hitler in the two-part TV series “Geheime Reichssache” by Michael Kehlmann.
“In Austria you either have to be National Socialist or Catholic”: Michael Degen 2010 in Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt.
(Photo: Roland Schlager/dpa)
He succeeded in portraying a subtle loner psychogram as Professor Bernhardi, the Jewish doctor who, in Arthur Schnitzler’s play, has to defend himself against an anti-Semitic campaign by his hospital colleagues. That was at the end of the 1980s, at the Vienna Theater in der Josefstadt. Degen returned there in 2010, after he had made himself rare in the theater for a long time, in Thomas Bernhard’s scandalous play “Heldenplatz”. as the Viennese critic Paul Jandl put it.
As an artist, eyewitness and admonisher, Michael Degen made his contribution to raising political awareness in the Federal Republic. Seeing anti-Semitism and right-wing radicalism in this country celebrating their happy birth must be bitter for the now 90-year-old. We congratulate him and thank him and assure him that his work was not in vain.