For Eddi Arent’s 100th birthday: fan favorite thanks to Edgar Wallace and Karl May

He was the tölpel on duty. The clumsy, the dussel, the meadow brush, the insulation, the Honk. But never the fool or the idiot. Whenever he appeared, you knew that something goes wrong. Nobody had it as awesome as Eddi Arent (1925-2013). So stupid, tapste and stumbled through 104 films and lots of sketch series, and the people laughed and laughed when they saw him, and he smiled back, in his fine and silent way, how only an Eddi Arent could smile.

For a few decades he entertained the German-language cinema and TV audience until it became quiet around 2002 and he died in 2013 at the age of 88. On May 5th he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. And we remember a concise face that is even more alive when his name is not only alive on YouTube clips.

As Gebhardt Georg Arendt, he was born in Gdansk in 1925, the city, from which the Nobel Laureate Günter Grass (1927-2015) also comes. The father was head of the local waterworks, in the same civil servant home, the actor Wolfgang Völz (1930-2018) was born five years later, with which he was later to have a film and TV appearances.

The young Arendt initially graduated from a humanistic high school before being sent to the Eastern Front with all the horror of the Second World War as a bloody boy. In contrast to most of his peers, he survived and decided to stand on the strange side of life from then on.

He began as a cabaret artist, the more difficult way of entertainment, perhaps also because he was able to entertain people so well in the post -war period. From 1948 Arendt played at the literary cabaret “Der Refinne” and even appeared in “The Mouse Fall” by Werner Finck (1902-1978), probably the most important German cabaret artist.

His pronounced eastern accent and probably also his emaciated form gave him a role in 1958 as an East Prussian camp in the war drama “The Doctor of Stalingrad”. After that, there was a sad and dramatic. Eddi Arent, as he was now called, made crime thriller career in 21 German-language movies after novels by British Crimean author Edgar Wallace. It started in 1959 with “The Frog with the Mask” and ended in 1966 with “The Secret of the White Nun”.

Eddi Arent played various roles, was Sergeant Haggett, the Butler Parker and Bonwit, photographer Edwards, the reporters Spike Holland and Josua Harras, neighbor Stone, Lord Selwyn Moron, Dr. Dr. Higgins, Smith, Finch, Hector. But he always remained Eddi Arent, Stoian facial expression, “servil, submissive, whimsical” ,.

Rarely were fools. He was a “gentle and strange counterpart to the strict Klaus Kinski”, which mostly gave the evil or crazy or both. Arent, on the other hand, spoke with immovable expression, stiff strange, “a prevented buster Keaton” ,. Other critics described his slapsticks and dry texts as the “shower powder” of this successful cinema series, whose artistic level was often underground. Then he looked like a solitaire with impressive mass effect.

The audience found him screaming, Eddi Arent became a real star with his supporting roles. He was only “a normal use actor,” he weighed off.

His roles in the Karl May films were similar. As a Greenhorn Lord Castlepool, sometimes with a tropical hat and butterfly network, between Winnetou (Pierre Brice) and Old Shatterhand (Lex Parker) through the house -baking wild west of German style and at least gave this series a distinctive form of humor: he became a cult figure: as “knight from the funny”, like the “world” titled.

He drove through the foggy nights of London and through the German Wild West, which was actually shot in the then Yugoslavia, set small, fine sparklers in cheap timpani and hit films. But at some point the cinema career was over. Apparently the market with 37 Edgar Wallace and 19 Karl May films was more than saturated. It got silent about Eddi Arent.

Although his popularity was unbroken, now television showed the movie productions in endless repetitions, but new offers from the film industry became increasingly rare. Then television jumped in the 1980s. From 1982, Eddi Arendt was able to develop his comedic talent again in the Sketch series “It is arranged”, and the lyrics also came from him. In his opinion, this format corresponded to humor, he described it as “the best I’ve ever done.

And on the side of Harald Juhnke (1929-2005) he was able to celebrate TV triumph with the sketch series “Harald and Eddi”. Four seasons were produced from 1987. Eddi Arent went to work so professionally, the winged word circulated under TV directors and producers: “Turning saving – shooting with Arent”. Nevertheless, there were hardly any connection orders left, the acting had been done for him. So it was also over with funny, Eddi Arent, “privately a thoughtful, read man” (FAZ), withdrew more and more.

His private life was scandal -free. In 1959 he married the hotel specialist Franziska Ganslmeier, with her and his son he lived in Vaterstetten near Munich. In 1993 he bought the traditional hotel “Neustädter Hof” in the Black Foree on Titisee, which became a meeting point for Edgar Wallace fans and where the Edgar Wallace Festival took place every year. In 2004 the company went bankrupt.

The reports of his bankruptcy drove Eddi Arent into deep depression, after all he became dementia. In 2011, after the death of his wife, he moved from his retirement home in the Bavarian Forest to Munich to his son, where he died on May 28th.

He understood the hype about himself, which was ultimately triggered by his artistic ability, but never loved. The true Eddi Arent saw himself like the figure in his sketch “Robert Redford at the bar” (with Harald Juhnke): “I sit here as a normal person, I have a normal glass in front of me and in my throat a stinky thirst, and I want to delete it now, and I am not prominent, I am not an artist and I finally want my normal peace.”