Hans-Peter Hallwachs was what is often said to only exist in American films: a character head, immediately recognizable, gaunt, sinewy; On the autograph cards he handed out he was standing in an open white jacket, the top button of his black shirt unbuttoned, hands in his pockets, only the faintest tinge of a smile on his closed lips.
And those who did not recognize him by his appearance recognized him immediately by his voice; always slightly rough, laconic, aloof, distant. When Südwestfunk cast the Raymond Chandler crime novels into congenial radio plays in the 1980s, Hallwachs was, from the very first spoken sentence, the best possible voice for these hardened, world-weary private investigators who “only get over it because they know they can soon have to get over it again” – to quote a sentence from Edward Boyd’s radio play “The Devil is Always Painted Black”, in which Hallwachs speaks a kind of Philip Marlowe, Glasgow variant.
Just as the Germans are married to crime fiction, Hans-Peter Hallwachs was also inextricably linked to crime fiction, mostly as a detective or supervisor, sometimes also as a suspect. 19 times “Murder with a View”, 16 times “Tatort” (he was also there in the very first one as a Stasi man), 15 times “The Man Without a Shadow”, 14 times “Your Order, Father Castell”, 13 times “Der Alte”, also “Letzte Spur Berlin”, “Großstadtrevier”, the Kluftingers, the Donna-Leons, the SOKOs, “Siska”, “Derrick”, “Wolffs Revier” – you will probably find this out on closer examination that there is no German crime series in which he has not appeared at least once.
His filmography spans over 200 titles, if you count every single episode it’s more than 300; an – incomplete – radio play list comes to a good 150 productions. Of course, these are often only appearances that last a few minutes, but he is always unmistakably reminiscent: “He always played leading roles for us,” says the statement from the family, who only now announced his death on December 16th.
He did very little in the theatre. That had to do with his being booked out for film, television and radio plays, but also with the director’s theater, which he didn’t get anything from. In one of his rare interviews in Berlin’s “Tip”, he spoke of a director at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus: “With ‘Clavigo’, for example, there was someone who, as I noticed during rehearsals, hadn’t even read the play. Where it says literally that there will also be a doctor, he had overlooked that. I mean, you have to imagine that. Then he kept having cramps and was incredibly angry. It even escalated to him saying if we did it the way I suggest where would he be. Then you would no longer recognize his direction.”
The “Wallenstein” production didn’t fare any better either: “All colleagues were against this terrible work, but you couldn’t have got three together who would have stood up. Neither did I, by the way, and I really blame myself for that today. I wouldn’t have had to wait for three, I would have had to oppose it alone.”
Perhaps his ubiquity on screen and silver screen also had something to do with his theatrical resignation. Not that it was always better in the film. Hallwachs didn’t shy away from talking tacheles there either. “It was shocking,” he said of his experience on Fabian, the film that made him famous. “And had something to do with director Wolf Gremm’s dilettantism.”
He had a certain respect for Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, the director of “The Summer of the Samurai”: “That was the first person I know to say: ‘You, I don’t know how it is with actors’.” And : “Blumenberg has talent, a feeling for acting qualities, and he didn’t fall out of the crown to listen to my suggestions.” The greatest praise at the time was given to a film school graduate with whom Hallwachs had shot a “little television play”: “A film that It was a pure pleasure.” The talent’s name: Oliver Hirschbiegel (who later directed Untergang).
When it comes to Hallwachs’s Omni guest appearance, it’s easy to forget that he’s also played leading roles, and quite a few. The best known is that of the moralist “Fabian” in the first film adaptation of Kästner’s big city novel (1980). In his very first film – Schlöndorff’s “Mord und Totschlag” (1967) – he was the lover of the Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg, who helps her dispose of a corpse. And in the French biopic “Schliemann – The passion of his life” (2002) he played the title role. In general, the series of historical figures he embodied is illustrious: Ferdinand Lassalle, Willy Brandt, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Günter von Drenkmann (one of the first RAF victims).
A few times, this embodiment of the cool power man and unapproachable loner, who liked to practice Japanese archery to concentrate (who in Germany would have played the double role of swordsman and businessman in “The Summer of the Samurai” better) also allowed himself comedy. Yes, this Consul Canon in Bully Herbig’s “(T)Spaceship Surprise – Period 1” is really Hans-Peter Hallwachs. He died in Berlin at the age of 84.
