serious illness
Dieter Hallervorden reports on the hospital stay: “I couldn’t live like that anymore”
“It’s not easy for a man who always makes everyone laugh to admit that he didn’t want to live anymore,” the biography says
© IMAGO / Bernd Elmenthaler
For more than 30 years, the actor took a sleeping pill, which, according to the package insert, “should never be taken for more than six weeks”. Instead of calming him down, the drug made him sick.
Dieter Hallervorden (87) struggled with a life-threatening illness. In Tim Prose’s updated biography, “Hallervorden. A comedian gets serious,” the actor talks about his long-kept secret for the first time.
“I didn’t feel well for a while, and that’s why I was admitted to a clinic, I just had too many suicidal thoughts at the time,” Tim Prose quotes him as saying in the new edition, which will be published on October 13th. “One day these suicidal thoughts dragged me down longer and deeper than I was used to anyway.”
This became acute a year ago. “His wife Christiane and his best friend were looking for a psychiatric clinic for him at the time. Hallervorden canceled all appointments for the next few weeks, packed his suitcase and went to the hospital for 21 days,” the book says.
“I couldn’t live like this anymore”
Hallervorden told Prose about a sleeping pill “which he had unfortunately taken far too often for 30 years. Right from the start, the package insert said that you should never take this drug for longer than six weeks”. At some point Hallervorden admitted to himself “that this drug no longer calmed him down, but made him ill”.
“The warning signs became clearer and clearer. It couldn’t go on like this anymore. I couldn’t live like this anymore,” he said, according to Prose. In autumn 2021, Hallervorden revealed to his wife Christiane “what an abyss had opened up in him and how dark it was in his soul”. He then took the most important step alone: ”For the first time in his life, he handed in his pills at the clinic in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Of course, his cigarettes too.”
New bedtime ritual with his wife
The doctors at the clinic were looking for a substitute that wouldn’t make you dependent, Prose continues to write in “Hallervorden. A comedian gets serious.” In addition, Hallervorden learned in the clinic, among other things, to meditate and “follow your breath”.
The 87-year-old Tim Prose also revealed how he managed to do this: “By following Christiane’s breath, who always falls asleep very quickly when she lies next to me at night. That works very well. I put myself in her arms, snuggle up to her and take on her breathing rhythm – her deep, calm, steady draws.”
Today Dieter Hallervorden is “full of energy”, says Prose in an interview with the news agency spot on news. He has “just opened his third theatre, this time in Dessau, his home town. And he always wants more. He runs through his life”.
“This man struggles with an artist’s depression”
The book says about the time in the clinic: “The experts designed a new lifestyle for their patients.” For outsiders, a change was “rather not” to be seen afterwards, says the author. Hallervorden kept it a secret for a long time. “It’s not easy that a man who always makes everyone laugh confesses in our book that sometimes he didn’t want to live anymore.”
“He entrusted that to me,” says Prose, “because I’ve been accompanying him for five years now and also performing with him. I’m most interested in Hallervorden as a person – with his vulnerable and often aching soul.”
Prose therefore asked him one night how he was really doing and Hallervorden opened up to him: “This man is struggling with the depression of an artist who always gives his all. And that’s why he regularly falls into darkness after spending time in the limelight. Before But after a year it came to a head and became life-threatening.”
