Jan Fedder: clear words, clear values
A real "Hamburg Jung": In the past, Jan Fedder was a choirboy in Hamburg's Michaelis Church.
Here at Michel I sang in the church choir, started with seven and then until my voice broke, "says Jan Fedder and climbs up the steps to the main organ of the Hamburg Michaeliskirche, which is considered one of the most beautiful Baroque churches in Northern Germany," namely soprano. " he, because more than 40 years later, his voice sounds as smoky as an overflowing ashtray, from at least two packs of cigarettes a day.When his voice deepened, Jan Fedder read the Christmas story for 14 years, in front of the altar, the church always crisp "And it came at the time when all the world was valued, and that estimate was the very first. , , "he can still do the text today.
"My father Adolf Fedder was church council and took over the pub 'Zur Überseebrücke' directly from the port of Hamburg from his father," says Fedder, "and that's right there," he points to the Gruner + Jahr publishing house, "where after the war everything was in ruins. " Mother Gisela, actually a dancer, worked in the Esso gas station opposite, so they learned to love each other. For Jan, the harbor area was like a giant children's playground, where he and his friends romped, digging in burned-out car wrecks, and assembling entire cities in an empty warehouse of wooden crates.
Jan Fedder prays to God every day
His playground was the area around the harbor.
Imagine worlds in which he dictated the rules, which Jan Fedder already liked at that time. Optimistic was the attitude towards life, despite rubble and ashes, because everything seemed possible and the harbor began to live slowly again. Today, only pure business is here. "Everything's gone", Jan Fedder regrets, "the showmen, the old pots, the pubs, only containers, wherever you look, not my world." Even the Reeperbahn no longer, where he drifted as a young man "as a rocker and Vollchaot" mischief, where problems were still carried out honestly with the fist, "today one occurs when the other is bleeding on the ground, that's no longer Neighborhood I know ". Only in the Michel he still feels at home as he used to, even if he rarely visits the Protestant church.
"I pray to God every day, we have a good relationship, we make love." Clear words, clear values, that's how Jan Fedder grew up and became a man who could not be bent, in any direction. Not by directors and certainly not by critics. A man who knows the Red Light District as well as on the stage of the former children's theater "Blob", in which he worked as a young man for almost 20 years. A full-blooded actor, who started out as a Krawallo with long hair and leather jacket in TV movies and now says: "Siegfried Lenz? I do not read that, I play it." The heart, as Woody Allen once described it, is just a very dilatable small muscle. "Jan is Kiezianer from head to toe, a Gesamtkunstwerk," says Peter Heinrich Brix, his colleague from the North German cult series "News from Büttenwarder", "if you leave him in his juice, something wonderful comes around."
Sensitive and loving, that's Jan Fedder.
His juice was always the neighborhood at the harbor, where Hamburg is the most honest, brutal and exciting. The wide view over the Elbe was enough to satisfy his wanderlust, so he could stay in Germany's north, "where much more is going on than in America, because it's basically boring," says Jan Fedder, "where I am." I do not have to speak a language, I do not have to go there ". He is loved for such sentences. He has become a popular actor, as has his great role model Henry Vahl. "He knows the guys he's supposed to play, so he puts his soul into it, and it's starting to shine," says his producer Markus Trebitsch, who credited him with the lead role in the Siegfried Lenz film "The Man in the Stream" , for which Jan Fedder got the 2006 German Television Award. "I always knew I could do that," he says, "now everyone knows it." Fine guy, hard dog, gifted character actor, also finds the producer and presenter Hubertus Meyer-Burckhardt, and actress colleague Mareike Carrière says about him: "Jan has a very delicate, but also an unfathomable soul .. If you look into it, you should be free from giddiness. "
When Heidi Kabel got the Bambi for her life's work seven years ago in Hamburg and stood confused on the stage, because she did not know where she was, Jan Fedder just went to her, took her arm and led Gently from the stage. And nobody noticed something. "Where it comes to the preserves," says Markus Trebitsch, "Jan is very sensitive and loving."
Whoever meets him for the first time does not think of the word "empathetic" as very first. Somehow it does not fit a man who made his first big appearance as Bootsmaat Pilgrim in "Das Boot" with the words: "Do you have hair in your nose? I have some in my ass, we can knot them together." In spite of his 56 years, he smokes and drinks quite excessively, "I'm a swallowing lion". The wild times, as he regularly drowned in the cult bar "Ritze", are over, but you know and greets him enthusiastically, as he poses in an ice-cold December night in a break from the "big city" in front of his old Mercedes in the silver bag road.
"I could still drink everyone under the table," he says and smiles. Sometimes he still wants. He likes things straightforward and direct. Awareness of mission, noble goals, that he can not serve, he has not grown up with that. "I want to have fun, make beautiful films, look forward to the day," he says in his smoky office in the old police station Mendelssohnstraße, location of all interior shots of the "big city district", "and when it's over, fat oak coffin, off in the celebrity Corner of the Ohlsdorf Cemetery and buried there. "
With his old Mercedes in the neighborhood during a break from the "big city area".
But Jan Fedder is still consistent. For 19 years he plays Dirk Matthies, the cult bulls in the evening series "Großstadtrevier". The role in which he now hatches like a preheated bathrobe, caused him at the time considerable headache. "As a TV bull, I was the laughing stock of the neighborhood," says Fedder, inhaling deeply, "but today, with so many colleagues unemployed, I'm glad I took the role." His alter ego, Dirk Matthies, casually wandered through the area, paying tribute to service regulations with a maximum of one eyebrow raised and, after work, probably "hitting the box" just as Jan Fedder himself claims.
But since he married Marion, the blonde, beautiful advertising saleswoman eleven years ago, is calm in the box, although women in his equivalent "like to be a bit droll," as he calls it and smiles very fine. He still keeps his bachelor pad in the neighborhood, but he lives with his wife Marion in an apartment in the middle-class Harvestehude and on his farm near Itzehoe. There he collects vintage, tractor, animal heads and exotic gems from all over the world, including a XXXXL underpants by Idi Amin, which has cost 1200 D-Mark, a tropical helmet by Albert Schweitzer, a condom automaton from the former Hamburg sex club "Salambo"; he uses the desk of Inge Meysel as a kitchen table.
He has the passion for hoarding from his grandfather. "When the sailors came back from their travels, they brought him souvenirs, he especially loved the shrimp heads from the South Seas," says Jan Fedder after a scene at the jetties and looks over the harbor, "he rented about 20 cellars to to accommodate everything.
Jan Fedder can not throw anything away
In a room, his own personal museum of local history, everything is behind glass, "which has made me what I am today," says Jan Fedder, "my old lego box, my exercise books, a walkman, old stool utensils, tools from my father , my Afghans coat from the seventies ". He can not throw anything away, he holds on, he does not want to forget. "Do you want to dance?", The mother asked her ten-year-old, because she wanted to arouse the artistic in him as a former dancer.
Jan Fedder was about to become a dancer, bent with 14 girls on the ballet bar, before he found that actors have much more fun in life than dancers, and enrolled at the Hamburg drama school. He visited in the evening, during the day he did his parents the favor and made a commercial apprenticeship. 42 years and about 400 films later, he still does not consider himself one whom the "Muse has smooched", as he calls it in his Hamburg-brash way. I can do it, I'm like an old circus horse, my jumps are getting lower, but the audience is still clapping. "
He has been shooting non-stop for many years, no matter how short and intense the night before. "Großstadtrevier", "News from Büttenwarder", during the summer break he stands for two television films in front of the camera. He works as grandfather and father used to work, "Honor, decency, diligence, not grumbling, but tackling, I like that," he says. "My father renounced our big business for us, because he relinquished his shop on time Closed at 6 o'clock.
That was a huge loss, but he did not want his kids to constantly see drunks. Also on Sunday was dense, there was the pub to the nursery, where the whole family sang and played. "During the week, when after a parent put on the ear and the other cleared the store, were allowed to Jan and his brother Oliver And when a drunk staggered in, they shouted, "Mom, there's another one coming." And then Mommy came with the shepherd and drove him away.
The team from the big city district is already waiting for Jan Fedder
"Six days of school, and on Sunday at nine o'clock singing here in the Michel. There was no sleep," says Jan Fedder, he is proud that this iron discipline is still in his bones, which he has preserved. And the dickhead. Therefore, he is also "a vegetarian with an occasional penchant for sausages", because he had to eat Königsberger Klopse with cold sauce in kindergarten. "Still had his cheeks full when my grandma picked me up at five in the afternoon," he says. One last look to the altar. He shrugs his shoulders, he wants to go, the team of the "big city district" is waiting. He still has to turn, and the light goes away slowly.
