Obituary for Hardy Krüger: difficult to educate in the best sense – culture

Hardy Krüger, in his own way, was difficult to train. He didn’t live up to what life had in store for him, and life proved him right. Shooting a classic with Howard Hawks and John Wayne in Africa, then another generation with a television series, it was called “Globetrotter” and ran until 1995, as an adventurer burn in your memory: Could he even have imagined it as a boy?

That was perhaps his most important quality: enough imagination to go your own way. The image and the man behind it belonged together. Even Hardy Krüger’s teenage years would have provided material for adventure films. Krüger was born in Berlin in 1928, his first name was still Eberhard, a blond young man with an alert mind. “I was brought up to be a Nazi by nature,” he said in one a few years ago mirror-Interview. First from the parents, then in Hitler’s elite school in Sonthofen. But there must have been something in him that couldn’t be brought up. He acted in a propaganda film, worked as a courier for the resistance, was drafted, at the age of sixteen, sentenced to death by a court-martial, survived, deserted. After the war he was hired by youth radio and made a few first films.

But he had his first big success in England because he persistently applied for roles abroad. He did it, of course as a German soldier. In “One came through” (1957) he played the pilot Franz von Werra, who managed to escape from British captivity. And with that he was internationally known. Three years later he made a film that secured him world fame for many years: “Hatari!”, In which, with an innocence that cinema would have difficulty with today, a bunch of big boys having a lot of fun in Africa rhinos and elephants captures for zoos. Howard Hawks directed, John Wayne played Oberjäger who falls in love with an Italian photographer, and Hardy Krueger engages in bravado. “Hatari!” was adventurous, funny and heartwarming, a rare mix. And everyone still knows Henry Mancini’s music, especially the happy track that accompanies the baby elephant. In 1965, Krüger starred alongside James Stewart in “The Flight of the Phoenix” – Africa again, survivors of a plane crash are stuck far from civilization. That was a different kind of daredevilry that Krüger embodied: his bespectacled aircraft builder, who wants to construct a new aircraft from the remains, actually only knows about model airplanes.

Honey-sweet German idyll didn’t suit him

Krüger kept coming back to Germany, to film and to live, his children all became actors in Germany. But he never stayed long. It’s no wonder that he didn’t make his really big career in German post-war cinema. The longing to smother the terror with a honeyed idyll didn’t suit him. Krüger’s most beautiful German films were rare breakaways, and the fact that he was able to shoot them always had something to do with his international career. “Two under a Million” (1961), for example, took a very realistic look at the young Federal Republic. And as if that weren’t reality enough, the construction of the Wall began during filming. Krüger and Loni von Friedl play a young couple in Berlin who would like to build a future for themselves, but they don’t feel anything about the economic miracle. He’s going to be Al Capone’s right-hand man, he says, and safecracker in Rio, and then he gambles it all away in Monte Carlo. The two don’t make it, but his dreams are enough for a whole world.

Hardy Krüger died in Palm Springs on Wednesday at the age of 93.

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