Käthe Reichel

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Käthe Reichel at the presentation of her book “Windbriefe an den Herr bb” on August 17th, 2006

Käthe Reichel (actually Waltraut Reichelt ; born March 3, 1926 in Berlin ; † October 19, 2012 in Buckow ) was a German actress and peace activist .

Life

Origin and beginnings of the theater

Reichel, who came from a humble background, grew up in a backyard in Berlin-Mitte . Her parents belonged to the working class; in her youth she often suffered from hunger . As a child, she sold fish in the market hall. Her father was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp . After completing her compulsory school education, she learned the trade of a textile merchant . After completing her commercial apprenticeship, she began her acting work with first engagements at the Greiz Theater , the Gotha City Theater and the Rostock Volkstheater . In the 1949/1950 season Reichel played the role of telephone operator in Bertolt Brecht's play Herr Puntila und seine Knecht Matti (guest director: Egon Monk ) at the Rostock Volkstheater ; Brecht's wife Helene Weigel attended a performance of the production in February 1950 and drew Brecht's attention to the young actress Waltraut Reichelt .

Berlin Ensemble

In October 1950, Reichelt was engaged by Brecht to the Berliner Ensemble (BE). From then on, Reichelt was called Käthe Reichel . Brecht recognized the talent of the young Waltraut Reichelt and encouraged her professional development. A love affair arose between Brecht and Reichel. She was Brecht's last lover at this time. Brecht wrote four love songs for Reichel in 1950; the songs were set to music in October 1951 by Paul Dessau as a song cycle called Vier Liebeslieder . Brecht cast Reichel in his play The Mother (as a maid in scene 13: In front of a patriotic copper collection point ); the premiere took place in January 1951 under Brecht's direction.

Reichel appeared in many productions by Brecht and Benno Besson at the Berliner Ensemble . Important roles there were: Gustchen in Brecht's adaptation of Lenz's Der Hofmeister (1950, director: Brecht / Caspar Neher ), Gretchen in Urfaust (premiere: April 1952 at the Landestheater Potsdam; takeover to BE from March 1953; director: Egon Monk ), the title role in Brecht / Seghers' The Trial of Joan of Arc zu Rouen 1431 (premiere: November 1952; director: Benno Besson), Mathurine in Don Juan (premiere: March 1954 in the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm ; director: Benno Besson), the Governor's wife Natella Abaschwili in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1954; Director: Bertolt Brecht) and the double role Shen Te / Shui Ta in The Good Man of Sezuan (1957; Director: Benno Besson).

Further theater roles

In 1955 she played (as a guest) at the Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt also the role of the maid Grusche in The Caucasian Chalk Circle . Directed by Harry Buckwitz . In the 1955/1956 season she appeared at the Rostock Volkstheater as Shen Te / Shui Ta (premiere: January 1956). In 1956 she played the title role in Shaw's play Die heilige Johanna at the Städtische Bühnen Wuppertal ; In 1965 she performed this role again in the West, at the Nationaltheater Mannheim . In 1959 she appeared at the Rostock Volkstheater as Polly in Brecht / Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper . In 1961 she played the title role in Brecht's play for the first time at the Schauspielhaus Stuttgart (seldom performed on West German theaters because of its anti-Americanism), Die heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe ; she was booed in the role of Johanna Dark in Stuttgart. In the same year she also appeared in this role at the Rostock Volkstheater. From 2000/2001 Reichel Brechts performed Johanna der Schlachthöfe in its own reading version as a one-person play.

Since the 1960/1961 season she has been a member of the Ensemble of the German Theater (DT); there she was a permanent member of the ensemble until 2001. Belonged to their roles at the Deutsches Theater: the title role in Minna von Barnhelm (1960, directed by Wolfgang Langhoff ), Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1963), Sophie von Beeskov in the play in 1913 by Carl Sternheim , the neighbor in Seán O ' Casey's play Juno und der Pfau (1972; director: Adolf Dresen ), the messenger in Sophokles / Hölderlin / Heiner Müller's Oedipus Tyrann (1976; director: Benno Besson) and later as Frau Brigitte in Der zerbrochne Krug (1990), as well in Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (1991/1992 season) and most recently in The Caucasian Kreidekreis (1991, as Grusche, next to Klaus Löwitsch as Azdak), each directed by Thomas Langhoff .

In 1982 she made a guest appearance at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg . Under the direction of Niels-Peter Rudolph , she took on the role of the "old woman" in Peter Handke's "dramatic poem" About the Villages .

Movie and TV

From 1951 Reichel was also active in the field of film and television work. She made her film debut in a small role directed by Artur Pohl in the feature film Corinna Schmidt (1951), which is based on Theodor Fontane's novel Frau Jenny Treibel . She did not resume filming until the late 1950s. In the contemporary film Die Feststellung (1958) she was seen as a mechanic. From then on, Reichel took part in several DEFA and DFF productions . Reichel mostly played "bizarre characters [and] folk characters", which she did not create primarily realistic, but always with a touch of alienation. Reichel was often committed to concise supporting roles: as the farmer Ulrike in the fairy tale film How do you marry a king? (1969) by Rainer Simon , as clerk in Nebelnacht (1969), as landlady of the student Karin in My dear Robinson (1971) by Roland Graef and as Lucie Matewsky, known as "Goldlucie", in Leichensache Zernik (1972). Reichel's bizarre characters also included her small, but memorable, “unmistakable role” as the “shrill” wife of the show booth owner in the film Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973).

In the television multiparter Daniel Druskat (1976) she played a simple, unpretentious maid with tragic-comic features; a role in which she temporarily pushed the main actors into the background.

In 1979/1980 she had one of her few main film roles, the title role in the television film Muhme Mehle . The film is based on the life story of the communist and spy Ruth Werner . Under the direction of Thomas Langhoff, Reichel played the role of the simple, apolitical nanny Wilhelmine Kegelang, who works in the Swiss high mountains for a scout (illegal courier of the Communist Party ) and her family; However, her talkativeness puts her employer and her family members in great danger.

She had another important role as Josepha Feller, the wife of the Catholic preacher Feller, in the film drama Levin's Mill (1980). The film scene in which Reichel and Andrzej Szalawski play the song Hei Hei Hei hei japadei makes the little Jew scream. sings, became known. In the feature film Glück im Hinterhaus (1980) she played the neighbor Ms. Wolff, the former best friend of the intern Ms. Broder's mother.

For her role as prison manager Olser in the feature film Die Verlobte (1980) she received the supporting actor award at the 2nd GDR National Feature Film Festival in 1982 . In the GDR television film Der Schimmelreiter (1984) she played the role of the midwife Trin. Reichel had one of her last film roles in the multi-part literary adaptation Der Laden (1997/1998).

Grave of Käthe Reichel

Late years and death

In 1994 she was a juror for the Alfred Kerr Acting Award . In the biopic, which premiered in 2000, Abschied. Last summer Brecht played the German actress Jeanette Hain Käthe Reichel.

In 2006 the book Windbriefe an den Herr bb was published . In the book Reichel writes 45 “wind letters” to Bertolt Brecht (“to the Lord bb”), in which she also describes the quirks and working methods of her lover. In 2011 she published an autobiography of her childhood entitled Twilight Hour - Tales from Childhood.

Käthe Reichel was unmarried. After the suicide of her only son (from a relationship with the painter Gabriele Mucchi ), she lived alone in her apartment in Berlin, not far from the German Theater. She died at her home in Buckow at the age of 86. Brecht bought the property on Buckowsee in 1952 for Käthe Reichel. On November 9, 2012, she was buried in the 1st French Cemetery in Berlin-Mitte .

Political commitment

Käthe Reichel during the Alexanderplatz demonstration

Reichel was considered a critical artist in the GDR due to her non-conformist attitude. For the Ministry of State Security , she was the “counter-revolutionary center of the German theater.” She expressed herself critically in public about the invasion of the Warsaw Pact states in Czechoslovakia in 1968. In 1976 she signed a protest against Wolf Biermann's expatriation from the GDR. On November 4, 1989, she took part in the Alexanderplatz demonstration ; she was one of the organizers of the rally. On April 5, 1990, she spoke in the Lustgarten (Berlin) to around 100,000 participants in a demonstration against the exchange rate 2: 1 for the GDR mark as part of the planned monetary, economic and social union . On November 4, 1990, she polemicized against " Krause and Maiziere ", who had "sold, bartered, betrayed" the country, and warned that the people would remember the sentence with which they had overthrown a state a year ago: "We are the people". In January 1991 she demonstrated against the Gulf War with a poster “Mothers, hide your sons” . In 1993 she supported the hunger strike of miners from the Bischofferode potash mine, which was about to be closed, with an open letter to the President of the Treuhandanstalt Birgit Breuel . In 1995/96 she criticized Russia's warfare in Chechnya and proposed the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006 she got involved in a Berlin Heinrich Heine Prize for Peter Handke after the Heinrich Heine Prize of the city of Düsseldorf , for which the jury had nominated him, had been refused because of his attitude towards Slobodan Milošević . The International Committee (for the defense of) Slobodan Miloševic , founded in 2001, counted Käthe Reichel among its supporters.

Filmography (selection)

theatre

Radio plays

Awards

literature

Primary literature

Secondary literature

See also

Brecht (film biography)

Web links

Commons : Käthe Reichel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Käthe Reichel - On the 75th birthday of the actress, who was considered Brecht's favorite. reocities.com, archived from the original on August 8, 2014 ; Retrieved October 19, 2012 .
  2. Brecht's young heroine Käthe Reichel is dead. Die Welt , October 19, 2012, accessed on October 19, 2012 .
  3. a b c She was Brecht's last lover: Last escort for the great Käthe Reichel. In: berliner-kurier.de. November 10, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  4. a b c Irene Bazinger: Käthe Reichel dead - Obituary: A farewell with drumming. In: fr-online.de . December 2, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  5. ^ Herbert A. Frenzel , Hans Joachim Moser (ed.): Kürschner's biographical theater manual. Drama, opera, film, radio. Germany, Austria, Switzerland. De Gruyter, Berlin 1956, DNB 010075518 , p. 584.
  6. a b c d Thomas Knauf: Obituary - On the death of Käthe Reichel. In: freitag.de. October 22, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  7. F.-B. Habel : Lexicon. Actor in the GDR. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-355-01760-2 , p. 345.
  8. a b Käthe Reichel biography at DEFA Foundation
  9. Matthias Heine: Käthe Reichel loved Brecht and liked Milosevic. In: welt.de . October 19, 2012, accessed May 2, 2017 .
  10. MUHME MEHLE (1980) cast, content and production details ; Entry in the television database of the GDR .
  11. ^ Alfred Kerr Foundation - jurors. In: alfred-kerr.de. Retrieved January 6, 2015 .
  12. Jörg Sundermeie: Obituary for Käthe Reichel: She never spared criticism. In: taz.de . October 22, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  13. In the press reports on the burial, the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof is consistently mistakenly mentioned , probably because the (larger and better known) Dorotheenstädtische is directly adjacent to the French Cemetery, possibly also to emphasize the proximity to Brecht, who was buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof.
  14. Roland Berbig: In the matter of Biermann. Ch. Links Verlag, 1994, ISBN 978-3-86153-070-1 , p. 70. Limited preview in Google book search
  15. Irene Bazinger: Käthe Reichel: With her moved the new time. In: fr-online.de . October 19, 2012, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  16. ^ DRA: Headlines 1990. In: 1989.dra.de. September 25, 2009, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  17. ^ Germany 1990. Press and Information Office. Central documentation system. 1993, p. 19
  18. ^ Käthe Reichel, 1991. In: bsd-photo-archiv.de. Archived from the original on October 4, 2013 ; accessed on January 6, 2015 .
  19. Michael Jürgs: A country on special offer . In: Der Spiegel . No. 7 , 1997 ( online ).
  20. ^ Käthe Reichel, The Berlin Heinrich Heine Prize. In: sopos.org. June 22, 2006, archived from the original on January 6, 2015 ; accessed on January 6, 2015 .
  21. Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research - Kosovo - was there something? Is there anything In: diss-duisburg.de. June 10, 1999, accessed January 6, 2015 .
  22. Reinhard Wengierek: Brecht's beloved Johanna. On the death of the actress Käthe Reichel. In: The paper. October 29, 2012, accessed January 15, 2019 .
  23. ↑ Multi- faceted search ; MOZ January 20, 2014. Retrieved July 3, 2015