The actor Michael Degen is dead. He died on Saturday in Hamburg at the age of 90, according to the Rowohlt publishing house. “We mourn and bow to a person and artist who touched and carried away with his warmth and enthusiasm, and whose multifaceted work will remain,” it said.
Degen was recently familiar to a large TV audience, mainly thanks to the ARD crime series “Donna Leon”. In it he embodied the “Vice-Qustore Patta” for years. The artist had previously enjoyed success in numerous classical, modern and entertaining roles on major stages, as well as in film and television. He worked with director greats such as Peter Zadek, Claude Chabrol and Ingmar Bergman and also directed himself. But he also often appeared in lighter programs – from “Derrick” and “Klinik unter Palmen” to “Traumschiff” and “Rosamunde Pilcher “.
Degen was born to Jewish parents in Chemnitz in 1932 and 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 Degen’s older brother managed to escape to what was then Palestine, he stayed in Berlin with his mother. 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 colony of allotments. Degen wrote down this family history decades later. In 1999 the book entitled “Not All Were Murderers. A Childhood in Berlin” was published. The story was also filmed in 2006.
Degen emigrated to Israel in 1949 but returned two years later. Out of a longing to play theater in his mother tongue, as he later said. He was then an Israeli and German citizen throughout his life. The actor became known to a large TV audience in 1979 as Bendix Grünlich in Franz Peter Wirth’s “Die Buddenbrooks”. He dealt with the Nazi past in, among other things, Egon Monk’s “The Oppermann Sisters” (1983) and Michael Kehlmann’s “Secret Reich Matters” (1987).