Obituary for Peter Simonischek: A down-to-earth dreamer

At the Cannes Film Festival, everyone was talking about actress Sandra Hüller again. Just like seven years ago when she triumphed in Maren Ade’s astute comedy “Toni Erdmann”. And this title character, a juggler with a wig and legendary insane teeth, was played by Hüller’s congenial partner and film father Peter Simonischek. Both were then also ripe for the Oscar.

Peter Simonischek has just appeared at the Berlinale in February in Berlin as one of the protagonists in Lars Kraume’s colonialism drama “The Measured Man”, which was released immediately. In it, Simonischek, born in Graz in 1946, shows a Wilhelminist-racist anthropology professor who can certainly make a heart out of his den of murderers.

To unite the melodically grounded Austrian as the supposedly soulful with the old Prussian gentlemanly character suited Peter Simonischek. For he was as good a romantic spirit as an intelligent dreamer. Completely surprising for outsiders, this great comedian died on Whit Monday in Vienna at the age of only 76.

A guy like a tree. This phrase fits here. The tall, vital theater, film and television actor, who with his silver mane looked dazzling to the last, possessed the art of making the monumental appear fragile and the stout (like the pained, joking Toni Erdmann) very branched, playful, enchanted . The famous sentence of his even more famous compatriot Max Reinhardt, that an actor always kept childhood in his pocket and in his heart as an eternal treasure, applied to Peter Simonischek.

At a private party years ago in Berlin, an important World Cup game was going on at the same time. The host couple’s television was in the double bedroom, and through the half-open door I suddenly saw Peter Simonischek lying alone on the covers of the double bed. I looked in, asked if I could watch something, whereupon the massive Simonischek exclaimed “Yes, of course!”, slipped a little to the side, and critics and artists were not on the same bed, but quickly on first-name terms. Football was our theater back then.

We last saw each other last spring at the Berlin Academy of Arts as participants in a multi-day symposium on the director magician Klaus Michael Grüber. And immediately Grüber’s productions at the Schaubühne were ghostly present again. Simonischek remembered every detail of performances that have long since become legends.

How he woke up in bed with Udo Samel in 1988 in Labiche’s “The Rue de Lourcine Affair”: woken up from a drunken night, the intoxication of which confused their brains to such an extent that it resulted in a mad comedy that dissolved all bourgeois identity and self-confidence. Or shortly thereafter, also under Grüber’s direction, Simonischek participated in Kleist’s “Amphitryon” together with Jutta Lampe, Otto Sander, Gerd Wameling and again Udo Samel in the tragic, magical self-division into gods and humans and literally lovers of madness. He, who was already Apollo in Peter Stein’s Oresteia.

Whether handsome or dim-witted, there was always his mixture of grandiosity and grace, of pathos and subtle irony. Also unforgotten, like Simonischek in Yasmina Reza’s “Art” from 1995, well beyond the turn of the millennium in one Trio triomphal the Schaubühne with Udo Samel and Gerd Wameling gave the apparently only trusting among Parisian smartheads.

Simonischek in particular, as a refined, conservative macho and sympathizer, made it clear that Reza’s world-wide hit play is not about comedy or even kidding of modern art, but about the realities (and illusions) of male friendships.

He was a down to earth dreamer. A heavy one who made the weighty easy, quite different from all the earlier, traditional heroic actors on the big stages between Berlin and Vienna. More or less incidentally, he also played the eponymous character in “Jedermann” more than a hundred times at the Salzburg Festival, allegedly a record. But he could only smile about that, although the amount of the fee pleasantly outweighed the artistic shoal of the tourist spectacle.

His breakthrough was once in Düsseldorf in Schiller’s “Kabale und Liebe” with his furious Ferdinand, who danced on tables and whose Luise played his first wife, Charlotte Schwab, who soon followed. Their son, Maximilian Simonischek, is now at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. If you see him there as Major Tellheim in a remarkable “Minna von Barnhelm”, then for a few minutes you think you see the father in the talented son. Peter Simonischek was very proud of that.