He always remained a marginal figure in the young German film of the 1960s – and in a positive sense, this was obviously primarily his wife’s fault. At the time, actress Senta Berger had a six-year contract with the US studio Columbia and filmed successfully in Hollywood alongside Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas. And Hollywood, that was really frowned upon by the young filmmakers who declared Papa’s conventional cinema dead in the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962. Verhoeven did not sign the manifesto, but he went to Bonn several times with Volker Schlöndorff and Alexander Kluge to promote the new film funding to the politicians there.
Obituary for Michael Verhoeven: A life for the cinema – culture
