Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff: That’s why he was the best show master


Not Gottschalk, not Jauch, but Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff. For many, he is considered the best show master. Today he would have turned 100.

Everything was better before. Someone like Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff would have countered the sigh of the whitewashers with relish, something like this: “The older I get, the better I used to be …” Oh yes, he was. And the longer he is no longer with us, the brighter his star shines, at least for the TV greats that have remained with us.

For Günther Jauch or Harald Schmidt he is a “charming myth”, a legendary entertainer, one of the greats in German television entertainment. For many young people, the name is hardly common anymore. After all, Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff has been dead for almost 23 years: he was “the nation’s coolie”. And it only existed once. His 100th birthday would be on April 27th.

That’s how it all started

With his ARD quiz show “One will win” (EWG) with eight candidates from different European countries, Kulenkampff became the undisputed king of Saturday evening entertainment in the 60s, 70s and 80s, with fantastic ratings. When his show was “only” 82 percent, he would say: “If people don’t want to see us anymore, we’ll stop.”

Kulenkampff moderated 89 episodes of “EWG” from 1964 until the end of 1987, and until 1990 he was in front of the camera almost 2,000 times with his “Nachtgedanken” at the end of the ARD broadcast. A few smaller formats followed, with which, however, he was no longer able to build on the great successes.

His life away from the camera

He comes from a wealthy Bremen family of merchants and artists. A grandfather was a pianist and music professor, another relative, Georg Kulenkampff, made a career as one of the most famous German violin virtuosos. While his older brother Helmut Arzt and later professor of anatomy at the Saarland University Hospital, Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff studied at the drama school of the Deutsches Theater Berlin after graduating from high school (1939).

In 1941 he was drafted into the military and came to Russia to serve in the war, a traumatic experience. In 1947 Kulenkampff was to become director of the Bremen theater. He turned down the offer because at 26 he felt too young for this post – and went to Frankfurt to the Theater am Zoo (now the Fritz Rémond Theater). With this change he showed his undisguised character: He did not want to stay on a stage in Bremen whose boss he could have been …

A wife all his life

In Frankfurt he also met his wife, the Austrian actress and later children’s book author Traudl Schwarz, whom he was so enthusiastic about that he married her on May 11, 1948 after 14 days of acquaintance. The marriage (three children) lasted a lifetime.

Basically, he “just” wanted to be a good actor who would play major leading roles on stage, like General Harras in “Des Teufels General” by Carl Zuckmayer, one of Kulenkampff’s great theatrical successes. But the Bremen merchant’s son had to support his family – and hired himself on the side at the Hessischer Rundfunk, initially as an announcer on the radio, later – because he was able to chat so charmingly – with his first TV show “Who against whom?”, Which immediately made him a crowd favorite .

His steep television career

His unique career would no longer work today. Kulenkampff would be far too independent and unadjusted for today’s conditions, he would have constantly violated the laws of political correctness, according to which a moderator has to act largely as a political and cultural neuter. But even then he caused a lot of talk.

The first major scandal was triggered in 1959 when he said at the moderation of “Quiz Untitled”: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, in the Federal Republic of Germany, in the GDR …” The major parties were upside down, Kulenkampff’s greeting would amount to “recognition of the unjust state in Central Germany”. Such were the circumstances, what sounds absurd today was normal at the time.

Always trouble with the Union

He also got into political trouble with the Union parties with his sympathy for the SPD, especially for the SPD Chancellor Willy Brandt. He caused a stir with his harsh criticism of CDU General Secretary Heiner Geißler. Kulenkampff later apologized to Geissler.

His spontaneity, the great strength of the gifted entertainer Kulenkampff, was also his weakness. “The charmer” and “Mozart of the chatty tone”, wrote the “Spiegel”, “unabashedly looked at Uschi’s legs” (show assistant Uschi Siebert – the editor). “And then came his slightly suggestive compliments for the assistant’s outfit. Uschi, dressed like a female pralinee, smiled.”

Small personalities in between

These small peculiarities were part of the show’s repertoire, so that the “taz” freaked out in 1992 and perceived “Kulenkrampff” as having a “sleazy slipperiness paired with the joviality of a car salesman”.

Six years later that sounded much more conciliatory. Kulenkampff died of pancreatic cancer in his adopted home, Austria, when he was 77. The “taz” wrote in its obituary that Kulenkampff understood entertainment “that came across as very British by German standards: sarcastic, sometimes biting, now and then political – in the thoroughly leftist, at the time mainly social-democratic sense … He always came across as serious, so distinguished, detached and polite that no one could mend his stuff. ”

Actually, he was a sad person, who throughout his life could not get over the bad experiences as a soldier in Russia (where he had amputated four frozen toes) and the accidental death of his four-year-old son Till. And who would have preferred to shine as an actor rather than a TV star.

“I think he didn’t take television too seriously,” says Harald Schmidt. Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff himself saw it like this: “When we started with television, we wanted to open a four-star restaurant – now we have a chain of snack bars.”

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