Otto Sander - character head with a sonorous voice

Unforgotten are Otto Sander's roles as Kapitänleutnant Thomsen in "Das Boot" and as trumpeter Meyn in "Die Blechtrommel". The Hanoverian with the sonorous voice would have turned 80 on June 30th.

by Stefanie Grossmann

"Age is like wine, it has to be a good vintage," goes a well-known saying. 1941 must be a good year - at least for actors. He has produced stage and film greats such as Bruno Ganz, Jürgen Prochnow and above all Otto Sander. Unforgotten are his roles as Kapitänleutnant Thomsen in "Das Boot" or trumpeter Meyn in "Die Blechtrommel". The actor died in Berlin on September 12, 2013.

Otto Sander:Peine's most beautiful child

When Sander was born in Hanover on June 30, 1941, red hair, fair skin and freckles were not necessarily ideal of beauty. His paternal grandfather is said to have remarked when he looked into the cradle:"The child has red hair, but hopefully that will grow out." At the time, little Otto didn't notice anything - not even that a Peiner newspaper voted him the most beautiful baby in town. Sander spent the first years of his life with his parents in the small town in Lower Saxony. As the firstborn and long-awaited heir, he is the pride of the family. Later, two brothers and a sister complete the Sanders.

In the small town of Peine, the residents look out of the window and form an opinion about him. Later, Sander wonders, "What will people say about my game?" The actor talks about the shyness that has accompanied him throughout his life - even in his work as an actor. Despite all the attention, he only has a low level of self-confidence.

The theater stage plays a role early on

After a three-year stopover in Oberbruch near Aachen, the family moved to Kassel in 1954. For Sander, the years in the Hessian city are among the best of his youth. He founded a jazz club, drove a moped, performed existentialist plays with friends and discussed with the artistic directors of the Documenta. "Being avant-garde was pretty easy back then, at least in Kassel," says Sander. He remembers his first public appearances:"I did it as a pantomime at the proms of various dance schools. With a white face like Marcel Marceau, red clown mouth, cutaway and Stresemann pants, I looked like a cockchafer." In the mid-1950s he made his first appearance as a schoolboy as an extra in the Kassel State Theatre.

Otto Sander came to acting in a roundabout way

Because his father considers acting to be an art that does not make a living, Sander initially begins studying theater and German in Munich as a compromise. The father already sees his son as a teacher or even better as a school principal. But Sander doesn't feel like he's in the right place at the university and passes the entrance exam at the renowned Otto Falckenberg School for Acting and Directing without any problems.

From Düsseldorf via Heidelberg to Berlin

In 1965 Sander accepted his first engagement at the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele - a small independent theater with avant-garde ambitions. He gets 430 marks a month and makes his debut in 1966 in the play "Joel Brand". His next stop is the Heidelberg City Theater, where he works with director Claus Peymann, among others.

But Sander is looking for a challenge and applies to the Berlin Volksbühne. In doing so, he moves from the periphery to the centre:"The stage is twice as big, and the theater and the city are ten times bigger." The fee also almost doubles to 1,050 marks per month. After his breakthrough in Peymann's production "Sonntags am Meer" Peter Stein brought Sander to the newly founded Schaubühne. There he plays in almost all important plays under his direction. In the 1970s, the experimental stage on the Hallesches Ufer achieved world fame with actors such as Sander and Bruno Ganz. In 1979 Sander left the ensemble and worked on well-known stages in Bochum, Vienna and Berlin with well-known directors such as Peter Zadek, Luc Bondy and Leander Haußmann.

Meret and Ben Becker - Sander gets a family

Otto Sander's center of life remains Berlin. In 1973 he moved into an apartment in Wilmersdorf with fellow actor Monika Hansen and their children Ben and Meret Becker. They come from Hansen's marriage to director and colleague Rolf Becker. Like Sander, Ben Becker is red-haired and always pale. "Right from the start I had the feeling that there was an inner relationship between us," says Sander after meeting his foster son for the first time.

"The Man in Pajamas" - First attempts at film

In the 1960s, Sander took on his first roles in short and graduation films from university graduates, although at the time "it was frowned upon to act in films in addition to theater work," as he later reported. As a contrast to the often serious and difficult plays, he has a soft spot for comedy. He considers it a difficult genre:"Making viewers laugh is the most serious thing there is." Since the comedy was not held in high esteem at the time, Sander wants to give it a fresh start. And that works - for example with films like "The Man in Pajamas" (1981), for which Sander received the Ernst Lubitsch Prize.

"Angel Cassiel" - Subscribe to tragicomic characters

Much better known, however, are his roles in which he mimics tragicomic figures. It is mainly characters who do not appear to be the favored ones at first glance who have to struggle with something or have to submit. It stays that way later:In Wolfgang Petersen's "Das Boot" he is the desperate lieutenant captain Thomsen, in Volker Schlöndorff's "Die Blechtrommel" the eternally drunk trumpeter and in Wim Wenders' "Himmel über Berlin" the struggling angel Cassiel.

In the 1990s, Sander became the darling of the public as Lansky in the "Polizeiruf 110" film adaptations from the Brandenburg province. In it he can be seen, which is very rare, together with Monika Hansen and Ben Becker. In the first episode "Totes Gleis", director Bernd Böhlich focuses on people who are cut off from the world and dreaming about their dreams. The film also convinces the critics and is awarded a Grimme Prize.

Sander honors "well-hanging voice"

Anyone who has not seen Sander in the theater or in films may know his voice, which makes him unmistakable. Sander himself once described them as "deep, gentle and unfathomable - simply well hung". This makes him popular not only as a voice actor, but also as an interpreter for audio books and readings. In 2010, Sander received the German Reading Prize for his many years of service to the German language. The actor initially recovered from cancer that became known in 2007. In 2011 he is back on the set and shoots the comedy for seniors "To the horizon, then left!"

Sander once said in an interview:"With this appearance you are not taken seriously as a man. You can only be an intellectual or a joker". He did both - and he was taken seriously.