His last important role was in a carefully horrible movie. In Lars von Trier's "The House That Jack Built", Bruno Ganz was the confessor of serial killer Jack (Matt Dillon), always speaking with a leisurely, elegant and lively voice.

Ganz appeared as the enigmatic man named Verge, waiting in a run-down American factory building for the wicked sinner Jack to lead him to hell. The bloodier, sadder, hate-driven the acts his protege confesses, the quieter Verge becomes. Once the old man says, "Do not imagine telling me anything new."

And that's exactly where it is, the sensational, casual serenity paired with the death penalty and the willingness to artistic radicalism. A combination that made the Swiss actor Bruno Ganz an outstanding phenomenon in the world of film and theater .

  • In Trier's film of 2017, Verge's full-length character is a modern version of the poet and hellhunter Vergil from Dante's "Divine Comedy."
  • In Oliver Hirschbiegel's "Der Untergang" (2004), Ganz was a feverish, adamantly torn by rage and madness, despite all the hunchbacked sadness, very human Adolf Hitler, who in the Fiihrer bunker treats his last loyal followers and curses the world spirit.
  • In Wim Wender's "The Sky over Berlin" (1987) Whole as Angel Damiel whistled on his immortality to plunge into the happiness and misery of the living, in the earthly magic of a love adventure in the still divided capital of the Germans.

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Bruno Ganz's death: In the sky over Zurich

These three gorgeous Bruno-Ganz screen appearances in far apart, completely different cinema galaxies, convey a sense of the risk appetite that characterized the actor Ganz.

In the theater, he was recognized in the early years of his career - and perhaps in even brighter, youthful manner - as a great gift. A critically acclaimed superstar.

In 1966 he played Peter Zadek's "robbers" at the legendary Bremer Theater, the crippled, angry and rebellious Franz Moor. In 1972 he was in Peters Stein's "Kleist's Dream of Prince Homburg" at the Berlin Schaubühne the dreamwalking Prince of Homburg, 1996 in Botho Strauss "Ithaca" , premiered by Dieter Dorn in the Munich Kammerspiele, a highly concentrated, dark seething Odysseus.

Bruno Ganz grew up in Zurich, in the Seebach district. His father was Swiss and factory worker, the mother Italian. After graduation, he learned his profession at a drama school in Zurich, appeared in the first film roles and got at the boys theater in Göttingen his first engagement. Soon, as an actor in Hübner's Bremen ensemble and at the Berlin Schaubühne , which was dominated by Peter Stein, he was regarded as an artistically and politically determined executive, as a headstrong and idiosyncratic counterpart of every director.

"I must confess that I do not consider myself stupid ," he once said in a SPIEGEL conversation. He was sure, "that my inwardness and my pondering help me to penetrate things reasonably accurately . "

You do not have to conceal the great erotic fascination that the head actor Bruno Ganz has for women and men. A nice impression of this can be seen in Eric Rohmers film version of Kleist's "The Marquess of O." from 1976 and in Wim Wender's early masterpiece "The American Friend" from 1977.

Until he was in his mid-30s, Ganz graced major movie roles and preferred to play theater. The dramatist Botho Strauss praised him as a "protagonist in the early sense of the word", that is, as a man of progress, of unconditioned progress. Thomas Bernhard dedicated one of his pieces to him, "Die Jagdgesellschaft". Bruno Ganz had a friendly relationship with Peter Handke for many years. He received the famous, lifelong Iffland-Ring, which proclaimed the bearer the allegedly "most important and worthy stage performer of German-speaking theater".

For the theater it was a loss, for the film world lucky that the actor Ganz turned away more and more from the stage work. Only rarely was he to be seen in the theater, for example in his work with Klaus Michael Grüber (for example in "The Tied Prometheus" from 1986) and Peter Stein (in his 22-hour "Faust I and II" of 2000).

But he delivered triumphant appearances in front of the camera, as Patriarch-son in Bernhard Sinkel's monumental television work "Fathers and Sons" (1986) and as a dying poet in Theo Angelopoulos "The Eternity and a Day" (1998), as a melancholy and liebesverwirrter Waiter in Silvios Solvini's heartbreak comedy "Bread and Tulips" (2000) and as a wonderfully grumpy Alm-Öhi in Alain Gsponer's "Heidi" (2015).

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Grief and dismay "It was an honor"

At the latest after the mass success of Solvini's film and with the hype about the "downfall", Ganz, who had previously avoided all the media noise, seemed to have come to terms with his popularity. For a few years, from 2010 to 2013, he even co-directed the German Film Academy with Iris Berben . With a few friendly words, he kept in this office from the operating noise of the body.

And yet his fury could flare up again and again in between. "I'm totally upset with the theater," he announced, for example, in an attack on the dominated by younger directors practice on major stages. When SPIEGEL told him that he had changed from artist-democrat to artist-aristocrat, Ganz replied:

"Great, I am very much in agreement with this sentence, I am totally against any democracy today in terms of art." Total, I believe the idea that everyone is equally good in a particular cause is untrue. "

With his way of seeking truth, Bruno Ganz achieved a lot of clever, moving, sometimes heartbreaking art. In the late role of Verge, in Lars von Trier's film, he says about his client Jack that he is "the sad dream of something great". About the actor Bruno Ganz can be said: He was the great dream of something sad - and wonderfully beautiful.