Who is Hannes Jaenicke? Actors, most would certainly answer: The 61-year-old is known as undercover agent Alex Pollack in the ARD series Amsterdam-Krimi. He also played a Russian tsar in the period film “Katharina the Great” and a policeman in Knockin ‘On Heaven’s Door. “Jaenicke still plays roles today. But quite often this Hannes Jaenicke means what he says.
Jaenicke uses his prominence to sensitize people to the issues that concern him: climate change, extinction of species, endangered animal species. He sits down on talk shows and curses politics. He makes documentaries and films.
He came to Munich on Friday afternoon to talk about his topics at the SZ Sustainability Summit – and the question of what each individual can do. Jaenicke knows it herself, the powerlessness when it comes to living more sustainably. He is vegan. He has been driving an electric car since 2013. He tries to use little electricity. But it also reaches its limits, he says, “all the time”. When the organic vegetables are shrink-wrapped in plastic again. Or when he gets back in the car on a rainy winter’s day to get rolls. “I’m just a comfortable pig,” he says.
The politic? “It’s all gibberish,” he says
But Jaenicke thinks that one shouldn’t rest on that. Just waiting for stricter rules so that everything gets better at some point, he thinks that’s completely wrong. Jaenicke says consumers need to get up for something to move. “I think our wallet is the sharpest weapon we have,” he says. “But we are comfortable, we are often poorly informed.” That is the reason why he turns documentaries.
But he is also politically involved. Jaenicke is a member of the Greens and expresses his opinions on other parties quite bluntly. “It’s all gibberish,” he said on Friday. Speed limit, kerosene tax, madness that they are still being discussed at all. He was impressed by the activists of Fridays for Future. “They understood that they had to pay for what screwed up our generation.”
But Jaenicke also wants to help them a little. After his performance, he goes to the office to work on his next documentary. This time, he says, it’s about pigs.