Dietmar Bär and the desire for pleasure
Dietmar Bär comes from Dortmund, but everyone knows him as Kommissar Freddy Schenk from the Cologne crime scene. Since 1997 he has been playing the blustering thicknesses alongside Klaus J. Behrendt. In the 1980s, Bär attended drama school Bochum, followed by engagements at the theater in Tübigen and Wuppertal. On 5 February 2011 Dietmar Bär celebrates his 50th birthday.
Meeting with Dietmar Bär
The tablecloths in the "Restaurant Sachs" in Berlin-Charlottenburg are white and strengthened, the light is muted, it smells of dark, noble wood. On the day ticket are Steinbeißer and Filetspitzen.
"This used to be my living room," says Dietmar Bär. For years, the "Sachs" a friend from Bochum times heard. In fact, the actor moves not only like a regular guest through the restaurant, but like his owner. As soon as he gets in, he asks where I want to sit, what I want to drink, if I am well. Then he casts his mobile phone, car key and baseball cap on the windowsill, tugs at his light blue shirt to get a breath of fresh air, and involves the waitress in a discussion about the quality of various types of mineral water: A jagged name dropping from sources in the Brandenburg countryside begins. When the drinks arrive, Bär lifts the bottle expertly: Hildon, an English brand. The whiskey among the mineral waters. The bottle costs around four euros in the shop.
"One of the best," sighs Bär and thanks exuberantly at the service. The first surprise: Dietmar Bär is much more polite than his "crime scene" alter ego Freddy Schenk. And he can be happy about a glass of mineral water like others over a huge chocolate ice cream.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Mr. Bär, are not you more likely to be met at a Cologne snack bar, drinking beer and eating sausages?
Dietmar Bär: Hah, so think so about me: staple currywurst and fries. Of course, that was the case in my youth in the Ruhr area. Two, three times a week we were safe at the Pommesbude. Today I eat at our "Tatort" - a snack sometimes fries - the man really knows how to handle fat and potatoes - but with sausage I fit. I do not eat a pig.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Why not?
Dietmar Bär: First my wife is a vegetarian, that affects me. And then I do not understand the people for whom food is nothing but energy. Luke up, food in? No! You have to look, taste. Pigs are scavengers. Do not get me on the plate.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Her father was a butcher. What does he say about that?
Dietmar Bär: My parents do not need to come with "organic meat". You still buy a lot in the supermarket. And when I'm home and my mother cooks my favorite dishes, I'm certainly not investigative and ask first, where from what comes.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: But you are already an eco?
Dietmar Bär: In the eighties I found eco to be more difficult. Whole wheat cake was barely edible, it tasted like pumpernickel with cherries on it. Today, that's different. Organic tastes, spelled bread is delicious. That's how it suited me. Because I do not want to torture myself. So: I'm rather ingredients fetishist. One who loves food.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And you have a close relationship with every lettuce leaf in your refrigerator.
Dietmar Bär: He is much too full for that. I have a base of ingredients that should always be there for cooking: butter, olives, Parmesan, lemons ... Also like a good goose liver.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What do you enjoy cooking the most?
Dietmar Bär: dishes that succeed me quickly, out of the gut. Hühnerfrikassee. Risotto. On many other things, lamb leg or pies, I still do not trust me ran. Other recipes I make persistently for it: My opponent of fear is called pizza dough, he sticks between my fingers or crumbles away. We both just do not get together.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Better to go to the Italian around the corner.
Dietmar Bär: I would rather go to the star restaurant, frankly. Since I experience regular taste explosions. There is mashed potatoes, which brings tears to my eyes because it tastes so much like potatoes. Sometimes this is very close to what I remember from childhood, about the mother, grandmothers and aunts.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: For this memory, you also have to be willing to spend a lot.
Dietmar Bär: Some time ago I was in the night supermarket because I wanted to buy a wine quickly. I paid nine euros for a bottle of something, at least it was Chardonnay on it. In the middle of the tongue this wine stopped. After that, I swore to myself: It does not work for me anymore.For cheap wine and bad food I'm too old. From a professional chef I once heard the saying: "Eating and drinking are the sex of old age." There is something on that. In the past - I was also a beer drinker - food intake was incidental. When I think of how many evil sausages I've stuffed into myself in the stadium or at the fair, just because it just fit. Today, all the trappings are more important to me. I want to have it nice.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Around the? Today, quite a cult is driven. A simple dinner is not enough, the perfect dinner? It must be.
Dietmar Bär: You do not have to participate in the whole story. I always try to find my own attitude to things and to see how something suits me. I've been trying to play golf for two years now. For many an elitist Schnöselsport. But no one forces me to pitch in pleated trousers in the club restaurant and open my family tree. I play in T-shirt and jeans - and do not even stand up as a rebel. Fortunately, the traditions have relaxed. I just enjoy golf, I'm in the air, I move ...
My ice cream belongs to me: Gourmet Dietmar Bär and ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN employee Anne Otto.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Are you watching your character?
Dietmar Bär: Everyone pays attention to his figure. Ottfried Fischer as Karl Lagerfeld. I'm no exception. The question is, if you succeed. There are always phases in which I say: I want to have two or three kilos less, otherwise I do not feel well, otherwise I am not agile. But I'm not aiming for a model figure.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Have you always had this nonchalance?
Dietmar Bär: In the drama school one is divided into types: the adolescent hero, the lover ... I came early into the category of "gravity". That never really got me. Over the years, I've found that for me as a serious actor there is always something to do in an ensemble. And if I fail, you can hardly replace me. In the meantime I even have to be careful that I do not take off too much. A pretty tough diet, I tell you.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: In the TV movie? Fasting à la carte? Play the heavyweight gourmet Gilles, who loses his sense of taste and has to fast. First he cusses, then he realizes: Abandonment has something.
Dietmar Bär: I liked the role. My wife and I have been keeping Lent severely for a few years now. There is no alcohol, no white flour, no sugar. In these six weeks, a lot happens inside me. I go to bed early in the evening, read tired, wake up sooner than usual, hear more of what my body tells me. Many people say that you have more time in such phases. Stimulants can determine everyday life very much. When I come home in the evening after a long drive home and pour out a glass of wine out of habit, it makes me feel sick again - even though I'm actually ready for bed. In the fasting weeks, such rituals fall away. I have already thought a few times: Man, that could go on forever.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And stop it.
Dietmar Bär: I'm just looking forward to eating again.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is there anything else you are really hungry for? A next career move maybe?
Dietmar Bär: Oha. With the word career, I'm struggling, I can not apply it to myself. "Career" fits better, it has something of planetary orbit - something pushes you, a lucky coincidence. That the director Dominik Graf asked me very early for one of his films. That the acting school Bochum took me at all. I associate myself in my career as a contributing factor, but that's about it.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Can not you enjoy your success?
Dietmar Bär: Yes, better today. I've become a bit calmer. This is due to aging. Meanwhile, I know while turning: I'm not here by accident, I belong here. I used to be more pressurized on set. And when I did not work, I got terrible existential fears.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Were they eligible?
Dietmar Bär: Do you know the idea "When does the dizziness fly?". I carried him around with me for a while. But the more I talked to others, the clearer it became to me: a classic. Self-doubt is widespread, even among great actors. And they also have their good things: they never get really tired, sat down and satisfied with them.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Your "crime scene" role has certainly made you safer?
Dietmar Bär: It brings me fun in any case. Even as a teenager, I loved this bittersweet "Tatort" feeling (more about this feeling in our fan mail on page 68): The weekend is over, the week is not there yet, and somewhere in between is this "crime scene" especially enjoys. Following the motto: I do not have to do anything yet, nor do I watch others at work. But of course that only works because the films are also of high quality, enthralling and exciting.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is it true that you're sharing a caravan while shooting with your friend and crime scene colleague Klaus J. Behrendt?
Dietmar Bär: For 13 years. This caravan is our refuge, our retreat. As we lie down at night turn on the ear or do a script review in the rain.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And there is never noise?
Dietmar Bär: only irritant topic: smoking. Klaus smokes, I stopped. That's why he must now in front of the caravan door. He also does it mostly. Only when I'm not there, he smokes me full of the shack. Well. I'm just jealous.
About Dietmar Bär
Dietmar Bär, Born in 1961, grew up in Dortmund, as the eldest of three children. His father was a butcher, his mother a housewife. At school he played drums and became involved in the Socialist German Workers Youth.
At the age of 21, he came to the drama school Bochum. Already during his education, he played various supporting roles on television, including in Dominik Graf's film "hits", for which he got a young talent award. Bär began his career as a theater actor, but soon gained his first experience as an investigator in various television crime fiction and was through the series "sports doctor Conny Knipper" in the 90s to a familiar television face.
In 1997, his friend Klaus J. Behrendt brought him to the "crime scene". As Freddy Schenk and Max Ballauf, the two Cologne commissioners have been in action for 13 years now. Dietmar Bär and Klaus J. Behrendt have jointly founded a relief project for street children (Tatort - Straßen der Welt e.V.). Together with old friends from Bochum, Bär also did something different in between - he planned and financed an ice cream parlor with organic ice cream.
