Playboy forever: Rolf Eden has died
Created: 08/12/2022Updated: 08/12/2022 17:57
Rolf Eden 2021 in Berlin.
The former playboy died at the age of 92.
© picture alliance / dpa
Rolf Eden was once considered Germany's most famous playboy, the disco king of Berlin.
He played this role for a long time.
He has now died at the age of 92.
What not many know: His life had other facets than "Big Eden".
Berlin - Rolf Eden was a man who wanted to read his name in the newspaper.
He filed texts with headings like “He had 3000 wives” in files.
He was proud of these folders, no matter how many women there really were.
Only in old age did he sound more realistic, seemed to know that the time was of course slowly passing.
Eden has now died at the age of 92, his family announced on Friday.
With the man in the white suit, Berlin and Germany's talk shows are losing a phenomenon: a star in the nightlife of the old West.
With his disco "Big Eden" and many anecdotes, he shaped Berlin for years.
He liked to flirt with his reputation as a playboy, it was the role of his life.
"I give my card to a woman," Eden once said.
"If she's smart, she'll call." His neighbors in Berlin's villa district of Dahlem often saw a similar picture as reporters saw on a visit years ago: an older man with a tan in a tanning salon takes a young woman to the taxi in front of his front door .
His bedroom was the "study"
Eden liked to call himself an "exhibitionist".
He described his alleged program in detail to journalists: first semi-dry sparkling wine from the house brand "Rolf Eden" at the house bar, then a tinkled song on the white piano and finally the night in the "workroom".
That's what Eden called his bedroom, which had large mirrored ceilings hanging over the bed.
He kept records of such nights, he emphasized earlier.
For fear of AIDS, as security for alimony claims and as an evaluation scale - if the woman calls again.
White suits and pink ties were always ready, and in the city he used to be recognized by his Rolls Royce.
"7 children of 7 women": This sentence was part of his repertoire like provocations in talk shows.
But by then the scandalous and breathy "whoops" of the 50s and 60s were long gone.
Isn't that just a blended family these days?
Eden didn't like hearing that.
It sounded so ordinary.
His children and grandchildren shouldn't call him dad and grandpa.
"You must say Rolf," Eden said.
Everything else is bad for the image.
Rolf Eden in an open Jaguar in front of the "Big Eden" nightclub in 2002. © Tom Maelsa/dpa
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Things had gotten pretty quiet around him lately.
The documentary "The Big Eden" told about his life at the Berlinale 2011.
His girlfriend Brigitte, about half a century his junior, says: "He got stuck in puberty." His then 13-year-old son wished it weren't always "camera fuzzies" around his father.
His family fled with him to Palestine in 1933
In the documentary, director Peter Dörfler did not make the mistake of listing Eden's acts of foreign shame, but also showed a little-known side.
Eden was born in 1930 to a Jewish family.
The family fled to Palestine three years later from the National Socialists.
It was lucky that his parents were so clever and left Germany in 1933, Eden once said in a dpa interview.
As a young man he was a soldier in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948 in Izchak Rabin's unit.
As a young musician he lived in Paris.
There he read in the newspaper that Berlin returnees would receive a bonus of 6,000 marks.
So Eden opened his first jazz club in the 1950s in the Cold War frontline town.
He established striptease shows based on the French model, organized beauty contests in bikinis when bikinis were almost still considered a sin.
As a restaurateur and disco operator, he was always a bit ahead of the German times.
Playboy Rolf Eden and his "permanent girlfriend" Brigitte 2011 in Berlin.
© Hannibal Hanschke/dpa
Eden reportedly partied with the Rolling Stones and danced with Ella Fitzgerald.
Once, in an Eden bar, a dancer had her clothes pulled off her body by a horse.
He was a scene connoisseur who slept late in the morning.
Anyone who went on a class trip to West Berlin in the 1980s had to go to the “Big Eden” on Kurfürstendamm.
“Two things are important in a restaurant: the location.
And the owner,” he once said in an interview.
Rolf Eden (m.) at the premiere of the film 'The Big Eden' at the 61st Berlinale.
© Hannibal Hanschke/dpa
In business, he knew when enough was enough.
In his mid-70s, when there was a lot going on in East Berlin after the Wall came down, Eden withdrew.
He sold his "Big Eden".
Instead, he said, he was able to make a good living off his real estate.
He didn't want to let go of his image.
"A playboy is someone who enjoys every second of his life," was his credo.
He stood for a piece of old West Berlin
A city magazine once voted Rolf Eden the “most embarrassing Berliner”.
"So what?" he asked himself in the trailer for the film "The Big Eden".
That's a huge honor.
Like Harald Juhnke or Günter Pfitzmann, the aging playboy represented a piece of old Berlin.
With his salacious anecdotes, which not everyone found funny, he seemed outdated at some point.
When the Metoo time came and echoed, it had become quiet around him, Eden was already very old.
He wanted to be 100 years old.
"Always just lucky" - that's what the permanent optimist called his biography.
"It was like that, my whole life." dpa
