Actor Dirk Bogarde seeing the corpse of a "wretched little beast" with "hairy shins". - An interview

Bogarde & Fassbinder

Excerpts from an interview with Dirk Bogarde.

GI: Not to shift the subject too dramatically, but you actually saw Himmler’s corpse?

DB: [laughs] Yes, I did. Just after breakfast, too. Yes, he was lying there in the bay window of a little parlor In Luneburg. I was absolutely amazed, the wretched little beast. He’d taken cyanide. Terrible pair of old army boots on, hairy shins, and a blanket. I thought, God, you really have been the bogeyman of all time. He looked like a dead schoolmaster. Those things always surprise me in a war. The contrasts.

There is more good stuff in that interview.

Gl: I have a sequence of plodding questions to ask you.

DB: Plod on.

GI: In your memoirs, you discuss when certain shots were being prepared for The Night Porter and the local population saw you in an SS uniform. Contrary to what you had expected, they wildly applauded. What do you think about the reunification of Germany?

DB: It terrifies me. The episode you refer to, though, was In Austria, where they were much tougher, much more Nazi than even the Germans were. We were shooting a scene of The Night Porter in Vienna, outside the Karl Marx Hof of workers’ flats, where the revolution took place. I had to cross the street and exit into a car. And I said to Charlotte [Rampling], “I’m shit-scared.” I was looking very beautiful in my Nazi uniform, quite splendid – it’s built for that, you know, to strike reverence and fear into you. I went and sat in this little bar in somebody’s raincoat and kept my cap off. They told me, “We’ve got you a room in one of the flats where you can hide and no one will see you. The old lady’s very old and very stupid she doesn’t realize what’s going on. She’ll hide you, we’ll give a signal, and you take off the thing at the door and come downstairs and make the exit.” My God. I got into the flat. She was probably eighty and perfectly sweet. There was a canary in a cage, pictures on the wall of chalets and of her daughter and her son-in-law. I had to get rid of the mac and put the cap on and pull on my black gloves to wait for the signal. And she went on her knees and touched my boots, and said to my interpreter: “It’s the good days again.” It’s true! She asked if she could kiss my hand. What do I do? I gave her my hand and saluted and went down feeling ill. There was an enormous crowd – you couldn’t hide the fact we were making a bloody movie – and when I came out, it was like I was Garbo or Dietrich. And they were shrieking with joy and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” I should worry. And all the kids came running after me, to hold my hand, to touch the uniform – all of them.

And here comes Rainer Werner Fassbinder (the hypocritical frigtards in Munich even named a school after him). He loathed the Germans, vehemently.

GI: You know, I recall that even friends of Rainer Fassbinder, after a few drinks, would go on and on about how they were the good Germans, and then they would say things to me like ”Well, you know, the Jews are cheap … “with a big smile, and they didn’t mean any harm per se-

DB: No, but you see, it’s in them. Rainer and I became enormously good friends. As I’m very ordinary and proper, I disapproved of his group. I didn’t like them because they were destructive to him. But I was devoted to him, and respectful. Couldn’t stand his mother. One day Rainer said to me, after some conversation I had had with her, “Never, never, Dirk, ask anybody of your age-group here what they did in the war.” He loathed the Germans, vehemently. I had a room in the Bauscherhof hotel in Munich, and Rainer came around one night for a script conference or something. He was appalled when he got off the elevator; he was shaking-well, he often was shaking. He’d have taken a little white pill or whatever, and I said, “What’s the matter? Sit down.” So he sat down and said, “I’ve just seen the elevator doors. Have you seen them, the gold doors in the elevator? They’ve all got swastikas scratched on them from somebody’s key.” He couldn’t believe lt. He said, “You see, we’ll never eradicate it.” And he was beginning to get weepy. I said, “Come on, let’s pull ourselves together.” And I gave him a huge … well, half a bottle of brandy, I think, and he staggered out into the night.

Further down an observations that rings so true.

And the new rich are much worse than any of the old aristocratic Conservative families.

Gl: One last question. Do you find it easier to remain an atheist as you get older?

DB: Well, my father, who was Roman Catholic, had been through the First World War, and when my war started, he took me off to the train station and said, “Just remember one thing, sweetheart: He doesn’t keep His eye on the sparrows. He’s too busy with other things. So don’t be a sparrow.” I kept that with me all the time. But when I went through Normandy at the end of the war, that was the first time I’d really seen dead people in quantity. Half the marine corps floating around in the sea: they looked like pieces of seaweed. Then I saw my very first bulldozer – a little while later, in one of the orchards- and a great big black gentleman very happily digging away, shovelling everybody into this mass grave like a spin dryer, corpses collected from all over the place. I thought, Where Is Jesus? And in Belsen, crawling through slime, I saw babies stacked up like cordwood- I presume they were babies, they were little. Every time I say this, somebody will send me an American book called Wrestling with Jesus. And I don’t want it.

The whole Bogarde