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Willi Herren at the opening of his potato fritters shop near Cologne: Getaway car from reality TV
Photo: Julian Meusel / Eibner-Pressefoto / imago images / Eibner
He had the roof of his food truck reinforced, you never knew. Or: actually, yes. Willi Herren's mobile potato pancake stand, which he only opened last week, was supposed to be a second, more solid mainstay, his getaway car from the harshly twisted reality TV into the roughly rasped reality. But Herren still wanted to make sure that he could climb the roof of his deep-frying truck, which had just been stabilized as a precaution, to sing one of his Ballermann mood songs. He wanted to fry his potato pancakes, knowing that there was still a stage for him.
One would have very much wished that he could now, as a Brutzler, with a slightly reduced pace, take the decisive curve on his personal, very real hero's journey.
This educational trip is a classic motif of all trash TV formats, from which he has not omitted any of the big ones: Gentlemen was in the jungle camp, with "Celebrity Big Brother", in the "Summer House of the Stars", just recently with "Celebrities under palm trees." «.
His biography fit perfectly into the transformation template of an ideal-typical trash format candidate: Herren had success as an actor early on, then got drugged and faltered, fell over, got up, staggered again - and got up again.
It didn't always look elegant, but that's probably why you sympathized with him.
He had the heart to intervene
You didn’t have to love Willi Herrens, sometimes even quite loud TV personas, to be genuinely happy for him when things finally seemed to be stable for him, though superficially and viewed from a distance: The food truck idea was not a goodbye Germany «-eske spinning, but sounded like a good idea. In the riot format "Celebrities under palm trees" he finally countered gay-hostile sputum with courage and passion, when most of his fellow candidates were silent, embarrassed. And thus proved that he could jingle masterfully on the dramaturgical, occasionally crooked and rattling keyboard of this genre, but also recognized when limits were exceeded. And then had the heart to intervene. For reasons of piety, »Sat.1« now wants to do withoutbroadcast the rest of the episodes.
Just a few weeks ago, in »Nullzwei - der Köln-Podcast«, Herren told us how much he wanted to be on stage at an early age. His mother died young, he had just been there for nine years. As the only boy he played in the theater group of his school and was immediately caught when an older brother took him to the spectator day at »Lindenstrasse«: The scenery and the cameras immediately fascinated him - and Mother Beimer, from whom he signed an autograph fetched.
He made his first television appearance in the mid-1980s when he was around ten years old. Harald Schmidt brought him onto the stage in "WDR publik": In every issue of this program, Schmidt threw three tennis balls into the audience, whoever caught one was allowed to appear in front of the camera. The young Willi liked his mini-performance so much that from then on he sat in the audience again and again - and literally dived for the balls in order to be able to climb onto the stage again. He wanted so badly to be a part of this television world, popped flowers from the backdrop to hand them over to studio guests Inge Meysel and Willy Millowitsch, and finally, not even a teenager, turned himself in first to an extras agency and then to "Lindenstrasse" makers Hans W. Geißendörfer. Marie-Luise Marjan, mother Beimer herself, had previously told himthat the role of the very problematic school friend of Klausi Beimer is to be filled.
Willi's unconditional will convinced Geißendörfer, he wrote a biographical dangling about the role that explained the audible Rhenish touch of its actor, and from 1992 to 2007 Willi organized an ambitious portfolio of crash types in 170 episodes as serial break pilot Olli Klatt: As a youthful neo-Nazi He set fire to a refugee home, hushed up Lisa's pan kill on Pastor Matthias Steinbrück, then tried to force her into prostitution and juggled stolen hand grenades. Herrens figure regularly lurched out of bourgeois Lindenstraßler life with such maneuvers, but Olli Klatt kept appearing, kept coming back, at least that was what he had in common with his actor. In 2007 men was written from the series after repeated drug failures,To say goodbye, they built a bridge to reality for him: Olli Klatt was aiming for a career as a mood singer on Mallorca, they explained, and in fact Willi Herren did just that.
Undisguised humanity
He had already taken part in the jungle camp in 2004, took third place and regularly tuned into hits. For many loyal »Lindenstrasse« fans, the characters in the series felt familiar, like real neighbors, and through Herren's trash TV appearances, you quickly got the feeling that you knew the person behind them. Like real neighbors, she was not always easy to care for, occasionally shuttled between Cologne's cheerful nature and Wutbatz, cried and roared - and laughed again. Herren was always a valuable candidate because he seemed to be both experienced and clueless: of course, he knew the mechanisms of these programs, but he was always overwhelmed by them and showed scenes of undisguised humanity, sometimes exhausting, sometimes touching. He had retained the abilityto be genuinely appalled - about the disgusting things Michael Wendler put on his much younger girlfriend in the "summer house".
Herren himself willingly showed his injuries again and again on television. Last year he touched the otherwise rather crude loyalty test format "Temptation Island VIP" as a genuinely injured, buttery soul after his wife Jasmin had divulged his Nutella addiction in his absence. Herren was actually still palpable, not ripped off, even if in the past he had already illuminated plenty of dark moments on television - as if what had been damaged there was to be cemented again in front of the cameras. For »Explosiv« he was accompanied by RTL during withdrawal in an addiction clinic, on »Sat.1« breakfast television he told under hypnosis how he once walked through St. Anton under the influence of pills in his underpants. When he was filmed for a ZDF documentary in 2012,he repeatedly asked the camera team to hold onto it relentlessly when he was drunk and at the end, he said to Markus Lanz. He had already completed eight withdrawal treatments. "Do you know what you live for today?" Asked fellow guest Nina Ruge on this program. "For my children," said Willi Herren, his daughter and son, and for his grandchildren.
He still hopes that he will be hired again for a serious role, he said on the Cologne podcast.
In the meantime he has become calmer, sometimes even for himself, even if he of course still "loves and lives" television.
The only thing he no longer needs is the roar of the industry: "I've celebrated every party in my life."
Willi Herren died on Tuesday, the cause of death is still unclear.
He was 45 years old.
