Kurt Raab

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Kurt Raab (born July 20, 1941 in Bergreichenstein , † June 28, 1988 in Hamburg ) was a German stage and film actor . He has also worked as a screenwriter , director , set designer , production manager and dramaturge .

Life

Kurt Raab grew up from 1945 in Weißenbrunn vorm Wald and in Steinbeißen in Lower Bavaria , his father worked, among other things, as a groom. At the German Gymnasium in Straubing he met Wilhelm Rabenbauer ( Peer Raben ). After graduating from high school in 1963, he went to Munich, where, in addition to studying German and history , Raab helped out with television until 1969, including as a prop master for ZDF . In 1966 he was also a cashier in the action theater and played his first role in Raven's Antigone production. Here he came into contact with Rainer Werner Fassbinder .

In 1968, Raab co-founded the antiteater , where he appeared in several productions by Fassbinder and also worked as an author and director. Raab then had his first title role in the film Why is Mr. R. running amok? . In addition to stage work, he was involved in numerous film productions by Fassbinder until 1977, including the television games Welt am Draht and Eight Hours Are Not a Day . He wrote a first version of the script to Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven and received in 1971 for its facilities of the film Whity the German Film Award .

In Ulli Lommel's Die Zärtlichkeit der Wolfe , Kurt Raab played - according to his own script - the serial killer Fritz Haarmann ; He also took on roles in films by Reinhard Hauff , Herbert Achternbusch and Michael Fengler . He was best known for his title roles in the two- parter Bolwieser (1976/1977, based on Oskar Maria Graf ) and in the black comedy Satansbraten (1975/1976).

After the collaboration with Fassbinder ended, Kurt Raab played on stages in Bochum, Munich and Hamburg. In addition, he continued his film and television career and worked, for example, on two television film adaptations based on Thomas Mann . In 1981 Kurt Raab made his only film as a director, Die Insel der Bloutigen Plantage , with Barbara Valentin and Udo Kier in the leading roles. The film was a great success on the East Asian market, was largely indexed in Germany and only saw a few screenings in the cinema.

After Fassbinder's death in 1982, Raab wrote the book “Die Sehnsucht des Rainer Werner Fassbinder” together with the film critic Karsten Peters . Under the pseudonym 'Emma Potato', a nickname coined for him by Fassbinder, he also wrote a long column in the film magazine Cinema . In 1984 Raab worked for the band Die Toten Hosen on a single with the cover version of the song Kriminaltango . In 1985, Raab was seen in the music video for Living on My Own by his good friend Queen frontman Freddie Mercury , who gave a legendary celebration at Club Mrs. Henderson on the occasion of his 39th birthday in Munich. Raab, who suffered from the immune deficiency AIDS in the 1980s , addressed his experiences with it in 1988 in the video documentary Mitten im Leben and in the ZDF documentary Sehnsucht nach Sodom (1989), directed by Hans Hirschmüller and Hanno Baethe .

Kurt Raab on the memorial
stone by Memento II on the right , Ohlsdorf cemetery

Raab has been involved in more than 70 cinema and television films as an actor, screenwriter, director, dramaturge or outfitter, and with Fassbinder alone he has worked on 31 film projects. Among other things, he played a gunman, a bishop, Adolf Hitler , a company boss, and also played the "Peachum" from Brecht's Threepenny Opera on stage . Kurt Raab became known to a broader television audience through an appearance on the television series Kir Royal .

Raab described himself as an avowed Catholic and homosexual . At the age of 46, Kurt Raab succumbed to his immunodeficiency disease in the Hamburg Tropical Institute . A few weeks before his death he appeared on the NDR Talk Show to speak out against the stigmatization of AIDS sufferers. He was buried in the Ohlsdorf cemetery at grid square BQ 64; his grave was dissolved in 2013 after the usual rest period of 25 years. On the communal grave site “Memento II right” (grid square AE 15, north of the northern pond at “Millionärshügel”), one of the pillow stones commemorates Kurt Raab.

Filmography

Radio plays

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hubert Ettl:  Raab, Kurt. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , p. 53 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ Article in Prisma
  3. ↑ Discography on the website of the Toten Hosen ( memento of the original from October 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.dietotenhosen.de
  4. ↑ Renee zucker: "My name is Kurt Raab and I have AIDS" . In: The daily newspaper: taz . July 2, 1988, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 20 ( taz.de [accessed on January 23, 2020]).
  5. ↑ BETTINA GAUS: The pleasure of a failure . In: The daily newspaper: taz . June 27, 2005, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 17 ( taz.de [accessed on January 23, 2020]).
  6. ↑ Celebrity Graves
  7. ↑ knerger.de: Kurt Raab's grave
  8. ↑ Grave resolution 2012 at memento-hamburg.de
  9. ^ Memento Association Hamburg
personal data
SURNAME Raab, Kurt
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Potato, Emma (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actor
DATE OF BIRTH July 20, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Bergreichenstein , Reichsgau Sudetenland
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1988
Place of death Hamburg , Germany