New Release "Give Me Some Time"
In the Düsseldorf train station area lives a man named Hurtz. From his balcony, he can look into the windows of a studio where comedians often wreak havoc. Sometimes these comedians look back, and then they get inspired by the people watching. This is how it happened that Mr. Hurtz was watching when Achim Hagemann and his friend Hape Kerkeling were working on a duet. They wanted to present this, dressed as Polish classical musicians with almost real accents and glued-on beards, to a benevolent crowd of culturally interested people and to throw these people into a bit of confusion.
"The wolf, the lamb, on the green meadow," they wanted to sing with feeling and then interrupt the performance with a bang. And because Mr. Hurtz was watching, the 't' was taken from him and his name was brought to explosion. "Hurz!" it was said, most explosively, which startled the listeners on site but highly amused the television viewers at home. It was one of the early kamikaze actions with which Hape Kerkeling proved to his environment what it can all take when he just does it.
Time and again, the man, whose real name is Hans Peter Wilhelm Anna Maria, but whom everyone knows only as Hape, has appeared in foreign clothes. He mocked the federal presidential protocol when he arrived in 1991 disguised as a queen and claimed to be Beatrix of the Netherlands, and in 2009, he even meddled a bit in the Bundestag election campaign as the sleazy Grevenbroich star reporter Horst Schlämmer. He held a press conference as Schlämmer, during which the present journalists actually asked about political programs and not about what the whole disguise was supposed to mean.
He once again proved that Kerkeling knows where to start when it comes to fooling people while remaining close to the populace. No one can mirror reality so beautifully distorted that it almost becomes recognizable like he does. The native of Recklinghausen has absorbed strength and knowledge from many years of trying. He was the silly little Hannilein and the overzealous late-night show host on the TV show "Totally normal." He has played strange women like the therapist Evje van Dampen and over-the-top men like the southern German fool Siegfried Schwäbli. He has hosted shows that flopped and made films that struggled to get by.
His biggest success ultimately came outside of television with a diary about a break. "I'm off then" was the title of his report on a hike on the Camino de Santiago, which sold millions of copies and dominated the top positions in the bestseller lists for weeks. The combination of book success and Horst-Schlämmer triumph catapulted Hape Kerkeling definitively out of the mediocrity of the comedy landscape shaped by private television. Meanwhile, many regard him as something like the new Loriot. The comparison to the grand master may provide Kerkeling with double satisfaction, as Loriot caused a painful failure when the career was supposed to begin. In 1977, twelve-year-old Hape applied for the role of the child Dicki in the Loriot sketch "Christmas at Hoppenstedts" and was rejected.
His films like "Samba in Mettmann" or "No Pardon" still have many fans, even though it has been several years since they were shown in cinemas. "No Pardon" was adapted as a musical in 2011 and is running at the Düsseldorf musical theater "Capitol"; although Kerkeling is not seen on stage in this production, he works behind the scenes. On new projects and new characters. Just so you know.
