Obituary Erwin Geschonneck (Guardian)

Obituary Erwin Geschonneck
A respected actor, he survived Hitler's camps to become a star in East Germany Hugh RorrisonFriday March 14, 2008The Guardian

Erwin Geschonneck, who has died aged 101, was one of the most famous actors of the former German Democratic Republic. He spent years in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war and was a communist of the old school - democratic, idealistic, undogmatic, a man of infinite good humour and integrity, and a popular people's entertainer with a laconic line in sardonic wit. He was perhaps, above all, a survivor, undaunted, ironic, optimistic.
He was born in Bartenstein in East Prussia (now Bartoszyce in Poland), the son of a cobbler, who in 1909 moved to Berlin to work as a night watchman. He grew up in poverty and began working as a delivery boy at 14. He soon joined the Communist party and became a member of Red Megaphone, one of the many workers' agitprop theatre groups that abounded in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic.

Slatan Dudow's 1932 film Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?), which was scripted by Bertolt Brecht and immediately fell foul of political censorship, brought this kind of theatrical activism to the screen. Brecht used the vitality and energy of a communist Sportfest to end the film on an upbeat note after scenes showing an unemployed youth's suicide. "Forwards, never forgetting our solidarity" was the final anthem. Geschonneck was one of the anonymous worker athletes in that scene.

He later recalled that after watching Brecht's Threepenny Opera, the hit of the 1928 season, from the gallery, he became aware of the stage as increasingly becoming a means for rousing the proletariat against oppression.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, he assumed he was on the Nazi wanted list and fled through Poland to the Soviet Union, where he joined the Kolkhoz theatre of Ukraine, performing in German to country audiences until he was denounced to the NKVD, the secret police, and given three days to leave the country. He returned to Prague, where he was promptly arrested by the Gestapo. He spent six years in the concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Dachau and Hamburg-Neugamme until, on April 26 1945, he was one of 10,000 prisoners loaded on to the SS Cape Arcona, which was then sunk by the RAF in the Bay of Lübeck. Geschonnek was one of the few survivors.

After the war he worked from 1946 to 1948 as an actor in Hamburg before being engaged in 1949 by Brecht's wife Helene Weigel for the newly founded Berliner Ensemble, where he appeared in many roles as a character actor with a working-class touch, notably as the lippy chauffeur in Brecht's Baron Puntila and his Man Matti, and the shifty Chaplain in Mother Courage. Shortly before Brecht's death in 1956, he left the company and embarked on a film career.

In 1951 he played the lead in Das Beil von Wandsbek (The Axe of Wandsbek), an early East German attempt to show the criminality of nazism inside Germany. With Hitler about to visit Hamburg, four condemned communists in the cells must be eliminated, and the city has no executioner. Geschonneck played a slaughterhouse worker tricked by the SS into carrying out the executions.

In 1963 he played Kalle in Frank Beyer's Carbide and Sorrel, a critical comedy set in 1945. Geschonneck illuminates the film with laconic, mischievous wit as he brings back two of his seven drums of carbide in a series of begged, borrowed and stolen vehicles. He has a run-in with Russian soldiers, commandeers a US officer's boat, falls in love with a farm-girl and inadvertently strays into a minefield picking mushrooms. This finely judged sequence of comic twists make up what is essentially an East German road movie.

The unvarnished picture of the early years in the GDR could easily be related to its ramshackle economy in the 1960s, and the film narrowly escaped the draconian censorship imposed by the 1965 plenary session of the Socialist Unity party.

Also in 1963, Geschonneck played the prisoner Walter Kraemer in Naked Among Wolves, in which prisoners in Buchenwald successfully conceal a Jewish boy from the camp guards. He gave the character a real dimension, carefully avoiding the cliche of idealised anti-fascism that the tenets of socialist realism would have required.

In 1974 he played Kowalski in Beyer's Jacob the Liar, the story of a Jew in Lodz in 1944 who is taken into custody and accidentally hears news of the Russian advance on the police radio. Back in the ghetto he pretends he heard it on his radio and is forced to invent more bulletins to keep up morale. It was nominated for an Oscar in 1977 as best foreign film, the only East German film ever to achieve a nomination.

In all he appeared in more than 100 films for screen and TV and his name is intimately bound up with the entire history of the East German national film company, DEFA.

Geschonneck with his neatly trimmed, signature moustache was a much-loved figure in Germany and in 1992 was voted "best East German actor ever" in a poll run by the magazine Film und Fernsehen. Audiences appreciated his characters because they were believable, and although he was an anti-fascist by bitter experience, he rarely in his long career indulged in the glorification of heroes of the socialist working class or communist resistance fighters as officialdom would have required.

Always true to his working-class roots, he remained a believer, though not an uncritical one, in East Germany, for as long as it lasted. He was never tempted like so many GDR actors to seek his fortune in the Federal republic, and after the Berlin Wall came down, he transferred his political allegiance to the Party of Democratic Socialism, the successor to the Socialist Unity party.

He made his last appearance on the screen, as he had wished, in a comedy alongside his longtime colleague Fred Delmare. It was in the TV film Matulla and Busch, which was directed for the ARD network in 1995 by Geschonneck's son, Matti.
He is survived by three children.

· Erwin Geschonneck, actor, born December 27 1906; died March 12 2008