Kerkeling's Childhood and Comedian Career: Where's Hape?

He had warned us. With his 50th birthday, as he had always announced, he wanted to put an end to the shows and appearances on television. That's exactly what Hape Kerkeling has actually done. Since December 9, 2014, he is gone and has hardly had a public view until his 54th birthday on Sunday.

Where did Hape stay? A search for clues with beginnings in the Ruhr area, in Recklinghausen. I was happy to see some old photos old school friends gave me. The little Hans-Peter yellowish and chubby - on the yellowed pictures you can see his boy's face, which resembled that on the Brandt-Zwiebacktüten. To this day, it seems spared from all fate, all hypocrisy of show business. Somehow this Hape had stayed in "this often broken industry," as he calls her. Otherwise he would have looked like Horst Schlämmer at some point.

The boy was barely a year old when he started to speak. The relatives leaned over him and wondered what the fat child was babbling about. Was this Moppel already preparing for his big roles?

He managed to make everyone laugh in the morning. Sometimes, on feast days, the grandma tied a fly around the child's neck, which always strangled him. He looked funny by nature, wearing horn-rimmed glasses with bulletproof glasses and colorful tank tops, as the film version of his book "The boy must go to the fresh air" shows (from Christmas in the cinema).

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His childhood was actually destroyed when he was only eight years old. Because then he watched as the coffin with his mother was lowered into the ground. "If the mother dies so early," he said later, "you have two choices as a child: either die or join the incorrigible optimist."

A sandbox friend remembers how "Hans-Peter had something funny back then". Every day she laughed from the heart, at the latest when he perfectly imitated Kermit, the frog: "Applause, applause, applause!" Nevertheless, she worried about the half-orphan in the class, wanted to mother him.

Caesar? "You prefer to do the funny role"

Kerkeling's former music and literature teacher at the Recklinghausen Marie-Curie-Gymnasium recalls his first stage experience in the school hall. As he wants to audition for the Caesar role in front of the theater-AG, from his played seriousness but so much joke penetrates that all blaring, and the teacher calls: "Hans-Peter, let's be alright, you better do the funny Role."

His first advisers wanted to give him artist names: Stefan Sonnenschein or Alexander von Hirseland. One agrees on the abbreviation HP people who know him from this time, emphasize his name to this day on the last syllable and say "Ha-Pé", not Hape.

Actress Isabel Varell, Kerkeling's skating partner in the eighties, is one of his best friends to this day. "I had a crush on him right away," she says. "He has something unique as a man." And he carries an "old soul" in itself. He came to the track when he attended a reincarnation seminar and the outlines of a previous life before him. Although he did not believe in rebirth, he saw himself as a monk in a monastery during the Nazi era. And imagined that he helped Jews as a friar and was shot by the SS.

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One of his school friends can get a sense of these visions. She has learned to appreciate a hape in the teashop of the penne beyond all happiness. "He comes from an anti-fascist family," says Dorothea Moesch from Recklinghausen. Kerkeling also told her the sad story of his grandfather, who survived as a resistance in the Buchenwald concentration camp. The grandfather could not talk much about it with his grandson, who kept asking him questions. "Unfortunately, the Nazis managed to silence my grandfather," says Hape today. And yet he is a role model for the grandson in attitude and the art of survival.

Susann Welk, another classmate, talks about her first performances in front of the class: "You could slam the books when the spectacle started, transforming the space into a stage, everyone in their audience!" He "swept in and spoke supposedly Dutch or other imaginary foreign languages".

Loriot as a model: "Zickezacke, Hühnerkacke"

At that time, Hans-Peter tore a page out of his math booklet and scribbled an application for Radio Bremen. At his "Omma" he had just seen the new Loriot sketch: "Christmas at Hoppenstedts" - with the child "Dicki" ("Zickezacke, Hühnerkacke"). I can better do that, he believed and wrote to Loriot's in-house station: "I'm 13 years old and already have some skits of my own, my friends say that I'm a real comedian ... and Loriot is my great role model, please contact me with me!" Editor Birgit Reckmeyer did not think anything further and answered with a standard refusal, but they included him in the artist's diary - which was "a lie," as Reckmeyer says today.

Hape believed it. It was not until many years later that Birgit Reckmeyer remembered the talent that you wrote at that time: She became his television editor and was very close to it when her Hape became famous. Reckmeyer hid on the floor behind the seats of the Mercedes sedan, where he was chauffeured in front of the Bellevue Palace, and whispered to him tips - for his legendary Queen Beatrix parody.

Eight years earlier, his "Omma" had given him a train ticket to Passau. Because Hape absolutely wanted to the prestigious cabaret contest "Scharfrichterbeil". There, a certain Ottfried Fischer in the jury piled up in front of him and then drummed his fists on the table with enthusiasm. Hape won the 1983 prize. His masterpiece.

It was exactly this Otti Fischer, three decades later, that Hape emerged from his voluntary exile. For a five-minute appearance only. At the German Comedy Prize 2017, he handed over the lifework trophy to Fischer, who was pushed onto the stage in a wheelchair. And the man, almost petrified by his Parkinson's disease, showed his emotion. At that moment, his whole feeling was back in his face. As if Hape had turned him back, old Ottfried Fischer flashed up - his smile, his wink, his joke. Can there be a nice thank you for someone who discovered you a while ago?

Show-farewell without sadness

But then Hape was gone again. He no longer lives in Berlin, but with his new partner, whom he also married, in Bonn and also in Italy in the countryside. In his very private, self-chosen silence.

Today Hape prefers to become artistically creative only in private. For home use: If he gets bored, he buys polymer clay and modeling cat heads, say friends. He gives his loved ones the dried works of art on his birthday - which tells a lot about this man who has remained a child in such a miraculous way.

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A few years ago, in one of his last interviews, he said to me, "I do not do big shows anymore because I do not want to do them anymore." Point out, "I say goodbye to it without much sadness."

Above all, he was suffering from the fact that he had always been a stranger, too overbacund and superficial show industry. "I loved doing everything, I loved it while I did it, but it's good too." During the conversation in the small VIP hall of the Frankfurter Hof reserved for him, he laughed his Hape laugh, which never seems to be strained. Not in the deepest seriousness.

He remembers his mother sitting in front of him on this wooden chair in the kitchen staring lost out the window. She has lost her sense of smell and taste during an operation on the maxillary and sinus cavities. It drives them into depression.

closedown

In vain he tries for a long time to tear his mother out of the shadows. She sits there on her stool, wrestling with her demons. And her son plays her the first skits of his life. Tell her jokes. Sing hits by Cindy & Bert. Everything just to cheer her up. At some point, however, he no longer reaches her. His mother Margret disappears in her darkness.

He remembers saying to him one night, when his father has to work, "You can watch TV as long as you like today, I'm going to sleep now." He does. Again and again he turns off the sound of the TV and listened anxiously to the bedroom. Then the word "end of transmission" appears on the screen. Ironically, the deadline. And the boy sneaks into his mother's bed, puts his arm around her.

At some point in the night, eerie sounds of his mother tear him awake. Fearful of her, he petrified beside her, praying - first loud, then softly - again and again the Lord's Prayer.

He finds next to her a glass with a rest of elderberry juice and dissolved sleeping pills. And a farewell letter. The emergency physicians at the clinic bring Hape's mother back to life briefly. But her boy will never see her again. She dies of pneumonia in the hospital.

As an eight-year-old, he is alone.

As he stands in front of the grave, the boy is as if he "from the inside in a strange way glow pleasant and burn at the same time without a vengeance". He is torn.

Graveyard, graves, last words. He feels at that moment: his childhood is over. But even in the midst of grief that paralyzes him, he can clearly feel that the worst is behind him. And he decides that his future life should be "a big celebration".