My grandparents came from Germany, before WWI, so I’m sympathetic to Germans and German accents.
Recently VW has run a few ads where they have a humorous grandfatherly German narrator. And I’m not sure it’s going to work. He sounds like Hogan’s Heroes’ Sgt.Schultz. Or like a voice that used to appear in Disney cartoons.
But there aren’t any current German voices around, are there? They’ve gotten a beating always being with the bad guys in war movies, so they seem to have dropped out all together.
I think the ad campaign can’t work because of that.
No, it’s defintiely German through-and-through. Sometimes they put a dash of Yiddish in there, but much like Einstein, most German Jews were very assimilated. (There were a large number of unassimilated Jews in pre-war Germany, but they were refugees from Eastern Europe).
Sergeant Schultz of the same series was also pretty sympathetic as a character. Of course, both were old-fashioned soldiers who didn’t like the Nazis much.
And Captain Potsdorf in Barry Lyndon, played by Hardy Kruger
Or Heinrich Dorfmann in the original Flight of the Phoenix, also played by Kruger . In fact, I believe that Kruger hates playing Nazi types, andconcentrates on sympathetic German portrayals.
Is that the same Captain Potsdorf who exposed our hero as a deserter from the British Army and so had him impressed into the Prussian army, (which Barry eventually figured a way to wriggle his way out of)?
Well, for a German, I guess that’s a sympathetic character.
(hijacking here) just about anything played by Hardy Kruger, or many of the other German (& Austrian) actors familiar to American viewers of old movies on TV: Hans Christian Blech, Gert Frobe, Oscar Werner, on and on.
Even when they were playing baddies, I like them for the naturalistic quality that comes through. Some humanistic, non-Shakesperean-laden acting traditon in their culture, I guess, that sets them above British or American actors playing German baddies.
And I’m not alone: when the Hillside Stanglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, were prowling LA for victims back in the 1970’s, one night while posing as cops they were ready to abduct a young woman, but let her go when they discovered she was Peter Lorre’s daughter.
