Atze Schröder: The Minipli man turns 60

Hugo Egon Balder (75) once certified him “zero talent”. 30 years later, the whole Republic loves the man with the Minipli and the pilot glasses. From the toddler to the pensioner: Nobody can escape Schröder’s charming blue eyelet. The comedian’s 60th birthday nevertheless remain question marks. How did the art figure Atze make it into the heart of the Germans? What tragic life story hides behind the wig and tinted glasses? Why does the true “Atze” prefer a bike than Porsche? And why should nobody know what is in their ID?

The approach to humans behind the curly art figure initially creates dizziness as after driving in the chain carousel on the Cranger Firm. This is due to the numerous, fine personality layers around “Atze Schröder”, which he is only deliberately exposed to. Rather, he has been feeding the fictional biography of his Ruhrpott Proll since the mid-1990s. As a result, both CVs cheerfully blur. Who is who? And who says what? As accessible as his humor, as obviously his successes and so undeniably its popularity may be with the masses: the man who is Atze Schröder made it difficult for a long time to get closer to him.

Everything could be so simple. A year after his birth in 1965, the Atze actor moved to Münsterland to Emsdetten with his family. There he grew up in modest but protected conditions in the middle of a very musical family. His two -year -old sister, who has lived in the United States for 40 years, once called him “Atze”, he “club”. She let him dance to piano music in pantyhose à la Nurejew, as he (77) revealed. At that time, the siblings talked about why guys with mini plates and proll manners “always get good women”. So they raised the artificial figure Atze Schröder from baptism.

He had a particularly close relationship with his father until his death in 1987. He not only took over the love of music-Atze was drummer at the age of thirteen-but also an indestructible arsenal of jokes that later founded his comedy career: “My father was a Günter-Pfitzmann type, he knew every joke of this world,” as he (45) revealed. In 1996 he was booked with his stupid trio “The Proll” for the Kiel Week. The catch: the three had separated shortly before. In the expectation of playing “three hundred drunk sailors”, he drove to Kiel alone.

There he suddenly faced 10,000 expectant spectators – and mastered the evening thanks to his father’s joke repertoire with flying colors. Atze was booked for an extensive live tour and received his own comedy series “Alles Atze” from RTL from 1999. The dark side: At that time some fans meant too well. Every Friday evening they celebrated parties after “little wacking “art in front of his former home in Emsdetten. Since then, his private life and his true identity have been particularly sacred. He regularly opposes all those who call his bourgeois name or want to show him without a wig: “There is no bit of pregnant. Either you are going on or you have to live with it.”

Already at the end of 1997 he performed in the then comedy Olympus “RTL Saturday night”. Even drunk from his performance, producer Hugo Egon Balder visited him in his wardrobe. The comedy Godfather gave him the advice: “Leave it, you have zero talent,” said Atze. The rest is comedy history. Atze hurried from record to record in the nineties and filled, far ahead of Mario Barth and Co., halls with five -digit viewers. If he did not exactly appear as a stand or a comedy price, he just moderated the award ceremony himself. In those years, the Porsche proll actually drove from the stage privately a Zuffenhausen product-but only briefly: “I stood at a traffic light with the car, looked at a shop window and thought: ‘Now I look just as stupid as the guys I make fun of.'”

The ATZE actor no longer has his own car, he prefers to ride a bike. Occasionally he borrowed the Japanese small car of his “pearl”. Both have been living in Hamburg for more than five years: “We bought a barrier -free apartment, that says it all,” said the comedian. Atze Schröder has learned the continuity, the calm and simplicity of happiness. Only occasionally a – rather irrational – fear of existence comes out: “I come from a poor family. You never get rid of the fear that you will be standing without coal at some point.” Then asked how long he wanted to appear, he jokingly replies: “I will probably do it until the middle of eighty – then I will increase the workload.” From his inheritance, he draws the confidence for such bold statements: “I put the curtain aside in the morning and look forward to the day. That is what my parents gave me. The talent for happiness.”

The wig and glasses are constants. People below have continued to develop steadily over the decades. If he was advertising for meaty sausages years ago, he does vegan today. With the Nature Conservation Foundation, he planted 10,000 trees to the so-called “Atze-Wald” in the Bad Segeberg district. He donated his profit of 500,000 euros to Günther Jauch (69) to the “Madamfo Ghana” organization, which is committed to combating child slavery in Ghana. There are now several schools initiated by Atze Schröder. Schröder is committed to his own therapy sessions in which he has worked through his partly tragic family history. In conversation with Ingmar Stadelmann, he speaks of several suicides within the relationship. The extremely successful podcast “supervised feeling” with the friend of the psychologist Leon Windscheid (36) is expressly devoted to deeper topics.

He took his most effective Katharsis on February 6, 2020 with “Markus Lanz.” As the son of a Wehrmacht soldier, he met the Holocaust-surviving Eva Szepesi (92). He went to Szepesi from his feelings and apologized on behalf of: “I’m sorry.” Never in the past thirty years man has been so openly visible to all eyes behind Atze Schröder. This key experience inspired him for his autobiography “blue-eyed” and taught him humility: “When I overturn, I want to be forgotten in peace.” Fortunately, there is still a lot of time until then.