For Hans Rosenthal’s 100th birthday: The tragic life behind “Dalli Dalli”

He was heard briefly again, although that is actually not possible. On March 9, 2025, Hans Rosenthal’s unmistakable voice was sounded about the 60th anniversary of the radio broadcast “Sonntagsrätsel” – with the help of modern AI technology, 38 years after his death. A suitable memory, because on April 2, the birthday of the popular entertainer marks the 100th anniversary.

Hardly anyone would have doubted that the energetic moderator would experience this milestone birthday himself. But the popular showmaster died in 1987 at the age of only 61.

He was a child of RIAS (radio in the American sector). In the West Berlin Funkhaus he went in and out of 1948, previously he had trained as an assistant to director at the (East German) Bundfunk from 1945. At RIAS, he developed and moderated numerous popular formats such as “Who asks, wins”, “Fun must be” and “The sounding Sunday puzzle”.

However, Rosenthal’s great popularity only came with television. After an intermezzo as head of entertainment at the Bavaria film company in Munich, he became one of the best known and most popular showmaster in German -speaking countries with ZDF. His most famous show was “Dalli Dalli”, a advice game for Schnell thinkers that Rosenthal had also developed. From the premiere on May 13, 1971 to 1986, he moderated all 157 episodes of the monthly evening show.

A highlight of each program was his famous “lace” jump. When a candidate had reached a particularly large number of points, Rosenthal asked the audience: “You are of the opinion that it was …?”, What the spectators in the choir answered: “… great!” And “Hänschen”, as millions of fans lovingly called him, jumped up with an extended index finger.

Then the 75th “Dalli Dalli” show on November 9, 1978 – and Rosenthal desired. The broadcast date falls on the 40th anniversary of the November pogroms of the Nazis from 1938 that this has to be postponed. The ZDF rejected, Rosenthal wore black and had opera music played in the room breaks instead of the usual hits.

Finally, the autobiography of Hans Rosenthal was published in 1980 under the title: “Two lives in Germany. A German-Jewish history”. And then it became known to a wide audience that the funny Hans Rosenthal had an extremely tragic family background. He came from a Jewish family who was exposed to bad persecution by the National Socialists. In his book he wrote: “If the children of the neighborhood ‘Dalli-Dalli’ call me up, I think: Yes, I actually always hurried in my life. Not to run the luck, but to escape the misfortune.”

Born in 1925 as the son of the Jewish bank employee Kurt Rosenthal in Berlin, Hans am Prenzlauer Berg grew up. With the takeover of the National Socialists in 1933, a life began for the family in permanent fear. His father lost his work, fell ill and died of kidney failure at the age of only 36. His mother succumbed to cancer at the age of 42.

In 1941, Hans and his brother Gert Gert, who was seven years younger, were full ore and came to a home for Jewish children. The ten-year-old Gert was deported to Riga and shot there in 1942, while Hans was hired to do forced labor as a graved look in Berlin-Weißensee.

In 1943 the then 18-year-old Rosenthal managed to escape. He dipped in the allotment colony “Dreiebell” in Berlin-Lichtenberg and was hidden by three courageous women for over two years until the Red Army invaded on April 25, 1945 and he could get out of hiding.

During his career as a happy showmaster at Rias and ZDF, Hans Rosenthal has by no means hidden his terrible experiences, he only did not make his survival of the Holocaust a great topic, but – largely unnoticed by the general public – in the Jewish community of Berlin and on the Central Council of the Jews in Germany.

After the publication of his biography, the modest and humorous man in 1983 modest the ARD show “This only existed once – notes that were banned”, in which Hans Rosenthal impressively addressed the Naziterror in an entertainment program and finally spoke to the sentence that was valid to this day: “Everything started 50 years ago, and we can all only hope that this past has no future!”

In the period that followed, it was shown that Hans Rosenthal had not survived this dramatic life unscathed. Like his mother Else, he fell ill with stomach cancer, died on February 10, 1987 at the age of 61 and was buried in an honorary grave at the Jewish cemetery in the Berlin Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.

Hans Rosenthal left his wife Traudl (1927-2016), the daughter Birgit (born 1950) and son Gert (born 1958), who today works as a notary and lawyer in Berlin and takes care of the Hans Rosenthal Foundation. This supports people who are in need through no fault of their own – in the spirit of their namesake, who himself rely on the help of the help of courageous fellow human beings.