Obituary – Hannelore Hoger: Training for icebergs

Commissioners, some of them anyway, tell us what world we live in. This is almost a corporate offense in the highly concentrated entertainment television industry. So much sadness in view of the conditions. So much resignation in the midst of the tireless fight for justice. So much amazement that you don’t give up yourself. Hannelore Hoger’s Bella Block was, on ZDF, a commissioner of fervently guarded foreignness in the midst of a cheeky familiarity with career criminality, corruption and upper-caste venality.

Hoger had a compelling power of simplicity in her playing: to show defiance, to be blunt, to assert dignity (and clever wit!), she took every tempo out of her game. As if she was training Greenland’s icebergs as a part-time job in their vital ability to withstand the grueling climate. Kind, iron-hard and razor-sharp, well-armed with a devastating silence that she drew from the abyss. She hunted, but remained a driven person herself: She was pursued more violently by suffering and powerlessness than she herself could pursue criminals.

The father was an actor and stage manager at the Ohnsorg Theater in Hamburg. She studied acting and has worked at the theater since 1960 in Ulm, Bremen, Stuttgart, Cologne, Berlin and Hamburg. If Alexander Kluge became her essential film director (“The Artists in the Circus Dome: Perplexed,” “Germany in Autumn”), Peter Zadek (with whom she lived for a while) was her theatrical awakener. That’s where crucial things came together: a destructive lust against everything small-town in Germany; feverish ambition against medium, tepid temperatures; Joy in everything that threw itself into the orderly ways of whispering honesty.

Years ago, Hoger returned to Zadek once again: in his production of Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Vienna Academy Theater. In the marital hell drama (with Gert Voss as her partner) she was, so to speak, a crocodile that had been lying dormant in the mud of relationships for centuries, waiting for the opportunity to bite. A fossil of feelings. Waiting as an act of violence, words like blows. Compelling, shocking, how a woman’s heart beat against walls in an armor forged from scars of humiliation and punishment. Morse code from the mental dungeon. Alice in Wonderland. Trembling with fear, I already know that this fear will soon cool down. When she wished her husband dead, it remained a secret whether it was greedy anticipation of liberation or a horrified anticipation of coming loneliness. The tension Hoger and Voss brought to the stage against each other and with each other was so breathtaking, so concentrated, so needle-sharp and strikingly casual that you wished the stage was empty. Because you don’t need anything to see, where all playing is one wonderful sight. Moments when there was an opportunity to once again stand stunned – that is, losing your usual composure – before the art of acting. Hannelore Hoger has now died in Hamburg at the age of 82.