Close observer: “The Tin Drum” director Schlöndorff turns 85
Published: Friday, Mar 29th 2024, 11:50
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With the film adaptation of the Grass novel "The Tin Drum", he brought the first Oscar to Germany in 1980: with more than 30 films in almost 60 years, Volker Schlöndorff is also one of the most prominent filmmakers in Switzerland's neighboring country.
Born in Hesse, he was always regarded as unpretentious - and liked to see himself in the role of observer of the world around him. Schlöndorff will be 85 years old on Sunday.
In addition to the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the film adaptation of Günter Grass' "The Tin Drum" also brought the then 40-year-old Schlöndorff the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 1979. The film was particularly praised for its sensual and powerful staging. The little drummer Oskar Matzerath, played by David Bennet, who refuses to grow up and upsets the lives of the adults in the process, remains unforgotten in film memory.
Mother lost in household accident
Schlöndorff was born on March 31, 1939 in Wiesbaden. During the Second World War, the doctor's son grew up with two brothers on the edge of a forest in Schlangenbad in the Taunus region. Even before the end of the war, Schlöndorff had to cope with the painful loss of his mother, who died in a tragic domestic accident in 1944.
A school exchange took the 17-year-old to France. Together with future filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier, he went to school and watched one film after another at the Cinémathèque française in Paris. Schlöndorff learned his craft as an assistant to several important film directors.
Interest in social grievances
In the mid-1960s, he achieved his first success in Germany with the Musil film adaptation "Der junge Törless". Since then, Schlöndorff has repeatedly dealt with social grievances. This was also the case in the Heinrich Böll adaptation "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum" with Angela Winkler and Mario Adorf about the bending of the rule of law by the police apparatus and the sensationalist press. The film, which Schlöndorff made together with his wife Margarethe von Trotta, soon became a classic of post-war German cinema.
Since then, Schlöndorff has stood alongside directors such as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and Alexander Kluge as a socially critical auteur filmmaker. Above all, Schlöndorff made a name for himself as an expert in literary adaptations. He was therefore occasionally criticized for never having told a story about himself.
"I always had more of an impetus to observe and describe what I see outside than to observe myself," Schlöndorff once told the FAZ. "This can also be applied to the adaptations of literature in my films: you can tell your own story very well with someone else's text."
Relocation to the USA
After his Oscar success, Schlöndorff moved to the USA in the mid-1980s. He had already found US culture liberating after the end of the war in 1945. Further literary adaptations followed - for example with star actor Dustin Hoffman ("Death of a Salesman") or in 1991 with Sam Shepard in the Max Frisch adaptation "Homo faber".
The fall of the Berlin Wall finally prompted Schlöndorff to return to Germany. He initially became managing director of the Babelsberg film studio in Potsdam and devoted himself to opera and theater productions in addition to other films. In 2023, he received the honorary German Film Award. From 1992, Schlöndorff was married to the editor Angelika Gruber until her death in 2018.
Looking back on his eventful life, the father of one daughter wrote the autobiography "Light, Shadow and Movement" back in 2008. His view of himself was always characterized by doubt and self-irony. He always had "admiration for artists as the chosen ones", said Schlöndorff in the "FAZ" interview. "I said to myself, of course you're not one of them, you're the boy from the forest and you can't measure up to them."
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