Gottfried John: an obituary
Gottfried’s autobiographical novel, Bekenntnisse eines Unerzogenen (Confessions of an Ill-bred Individual), tells the story of a young man born during the Second War World who is taken away from his mother and grows up in children’s homes. His mother later kidnaps him and takes him to Paris, where they are able to live together for the first time – on the banks of the Seine, on an old barge, with little money. At the age of eighteen, the young man’s sole ambition is to become a film actor. His mother encourages him and they return to Berlin, where he takes acting lessons, performs his first stage roles and meets Hans Neuenfels, a young, highly talented theater director who casts him in leading roles.
For the time being his dream of becoming a film star remains a distant goal. However, he takes his destiny into his own hands, applies to Bavaria Studios in Munich and soon after makes his first film, Jaider – The Lonely Hunter, which is screened at the Berlin Film Festival. There he is seen by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who soon afterwards offers him the role of the toolmaker Jochen Epp in Eight Hours Are Not a Day. They want to reach a TV audience of millions and make the world a better place to live in with their films. The Vietnam War is still raging; in West Germany the RAF is unsettling a stalled democracy. The unusual concept for a family series achieves high ratings. The series takes on cult status, making Gottfried John a star and launching a career that sees him soon become one of Fassbinder’s most distinctive actors. It is a career that reaches its highpoint with the role of the stuttering Reinhold Hoffmann in Berlin Alexanderplatz, a project that provides John, RWF and Günter Lamprecht as Franz Biberkopf with a distinguished place in film history.
I met Gottfried in 1977 during the making of Despair, RWF’s first international film. Fassbinder’s fame and his films with John, the “visage that brought him a lot of money,” as he later joked, increased the opportunities for this gentle, romantic and also highly intelligent man to pursue his profession abroad, above all in England, France, Italy and the USA, in films such as James Bond 007- Goldeneye, Asterix and Obelix Take On Caesar and numerous other international film and TV productions – which raises the question as to where Gottfried John’s less well-known work can be seen. Wasn’t he also a star of German and European film – an actor comparable with Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Gérard Depardieu?
In Gottfried we have lost a friend, a seeker, an explorer, an observer. He died on 1 September 2014 in Utting outside Munich. We should endeavor to discover everything he has left to us.
(Juliane Maria Lorenz)
Photo right: © Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation
Photo left: © Rainer Werner Fassbinder Foundation