Remember Colonel Hermann Dietrich in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That arrogant Nazi officer heading the excavation project that Indiana Jones thinks is a very bad idea? Yes, the one whose head satisfyingly implodes when the Ark is opened. I had a strange experience this week when his disembodied voice kept floating through my head. Or rather not Dietrich’s but that of the actor who played him: Wolf Kahler.
I’m in the last stages of working on a BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature called Requiems for the Firestorm - Dresden’s Musical Aftermath, which will be broadcast next Sunday, and we chose Kahler as the voice actor to dub a German-language interview I conducted with a former Dresden choir boy, Peter Franke. Now in his late eighties, Franke performed beautiful music as a child amid the rubble of the destroyed city after the war. Kahler is from the same generation, and his calm, well-aged voice seemed a great match for Franke’s thoughtful recollections.
As I sat there with big headphones on, listening to Kahler’s soft German accent transferring Peter’s words and emotions over into English, I couldn’t help but picture his 1980s face in Indiana Jones. The steely blue eyes, the chiselled jaw, his tall physique. He really looked the part of the classic movie Nazi of the post-war era.
And what a career he’s had of it! He still lives in London today and has had most of his success in British and American productions, often playing rather ghastly German types. He was Kaiser Wilhelm in the 1979 film The Riddle of the Sands, for instance, and a Wehrmacht general in Band of Brothers.
When Kahler was asked about this experience in interviews, he didn’t seem to mind the typecasting. In fact, he described playing Hermann Dietrich for Steven Spielberg as his favourite filming experience – “no question.” Whether that’s despite or because of his own connection to history, he didn’t say. He was born in Kiel in northern Germany in 1940, and his grandfather, Fritz Sachße, was a senior German naval officer in the First World War who wrote a book about his experiences as a POW in Skipton.
Hearing his voice in my ear while working on the BBC programme, I felt slightly awkward for involuntarily picturing him as Dietrich. There was no doubt he was the right choice. We needed an older male German voice to match that of our interviewee as closely as possible, and Kahler – who is a brilliant reader and voice actor – immediately sprang to mind.
Not that Kahler appears to have an issue with being one of the go-to German actors in English-language productions. He appears to have no problem even with having been offered so many Nazi roles. Many were high-profile acting opportunities in movie industries much bigger and more prolific than anything West Germany had to offer.
To this day, German actors seeking to make it in Hollywood or the international streaming industry are confronted with this dilemma: do they trade on their German accents and backgrounds and accept the many roles on offer in war movies, even if this means having to play Nazis? Or do they accept the limitations and challenges that come with being a German-accented actor who doesn’t want to be typecast in this way?
Arnold Schwarzenegger is an example of the latter. Originally from Austria, he moved to the US in 1968 with very little English. People told him that his strong accent and striking looks would make it difficult for him to be a leading actor in anything other than Nazi roles. In an interview, he reflected later: “It was very difficult for me in the beginning – I was told by agents and casting people that my body was ‘too weird’, that I had a funny accent, and that my name was too long.”
The obvious solution would have been to take on Nazi roles. Like Kahler, Schwarzenegger was tall, blond and generally had the looks and sound Americans associate with the stereotype. In another interview, he later recalled: “They said, ‘It’s not gonna work, you getting in the movies, and especially not being a leading man. They said it was ‘because of your accent.’ They said the German accent is scary for most Americans — it reminds them of the Nazis. ‘Yes, you could play a Nazi officer or something like that.’” He chose not to and eventually established a different profile for himself.
You might think this is a question only older German actors in the post-war decades had to ponder, but it continues today. Take Sandra Hüller, one of Germany’s foremost actresses, who played Hedwig Höss, the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz, in the 2023 film The Zone of Interest. She told The New Yorker that when the role first came up, she was sceptical: “I always refused to play Fascists – which, of course, especially in international productions, come your way from time to time as a German actress.”
“I didn’t like the idea of putting on a Nazi uniform like that, or using language like that—to get close to the energy of that, or to discover there would be fun in that,” Hüller said. “I have seen colleagues that actually have fun doing it. Maybe it’s still in their bodies from former generations, “ she mused. In the end, she accepted the role but vowed not to use her usual tool to get into character: empathy. There would be no connection between her and Hedwig Höss. She would play her without joy or emotion.
It’s not an easy path to tread, and German actors who are successful on the international stage have each found their own way to deal with this. Think of Christoph Waltz, whose roles as Hans Landa in the 2009 film Inglourious Basterds and as a bounty hunter named Dr King Schultz in the 2012 movie Django Unchained (both directed by Quentin Tarantino) invented a new type of German villain, tailor-made for Waltz’s face and mannerisms.
However they chose to respond to this dilemma, to Nazi or not to Nazi appears to remain a pertinent question for German and Austrian actors seeking to make their mark in the anglosphere.
In the previous generation, Anton Diffring seemed to often be the one playing these roles. Which, as a gay man coming from a Jewish family, must have been quite a complex set of thoughts and emotions.
Ahhhnuld is a real character. I was breaking my way into screenwriting in Hollywood with a side gig as a film journalist, and learned about The Terminator being made from an actor friend who was in it and told me it was going to be big. I did one day on location, to interview Ahhnuld - who at the time was a bit of a joke in some circles in Hollywood, including the one I ran in. They were shooting the scene where the Terminator kills the second Sarah Connor he finds, up in North Hollywood. Every kid in the neighborhood had quickly found out he was there and they were all gathered around the captain's chair he used when not shooting, set in the middle of the front yard. He was having a great time with the kids, letting their moms take photos of their son or daughter on his lap,and he was telling stories and it was altogether quite nice. When the shot was ready, he'd tell everyone he had to go to work, and if they would all be quiet, he'd be right back and they could all go back to having fun. You could have heard a pin drop on that street while they were shooting. When lunch break came, I accompanied him back to his trailer to have lunch and do the interview. I commented to him I'd never seen another actor do anything like that. To which he replied, "Then you have seen a lot of damn fools! Those kids - if it's not for them, I'm nothing! Of course I'm going to be as nice as possible to them." And that was the moment I realized he was the smartest guy I'd met in Hollywood. The movie made him the star he took the role to become, and nothing he did afterwards ever surprised me.