“Nothing missed in life”: actor Peter Radtke is dead

According to the actor, he could not give up the fight against prenatal diagnostics because, from a medical point of view, many artists were “disabled people” and were looking for artistic ways to express themselves “precisely because of their disability.” He cited Ludwig van Beethoven, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Friedrich Hölderlin as examples.

“I’ve always tried to build a bridge,” says Radtke: “People with disabilities are not that different from non-disabled people. When he co-founded the Munich “Crüppel-Cabaret” in 1982, he attached importance to the “C” in the name, because the “Krüppel Movement”, which was on everyone’s lips at the time and wanted to strengthen the self-confidence of the handicapped, naturally took part “K”. His autobiography “Half a Life Made of Glass” was published in 1985.

In the monkey house of the Berlin zoo

Radtke was always up for sometimes bizarre humor, so he took on the monologue role in Franz Kafka’s “Report for an Academy”, a play about the question of becoming and being human, in 1994 in the ape house of the Berlin zoo. One critic cheered: “You couldn’t have imagined it more brilliantly. Peter Radtke plays the man who was a monkey with forgotten grandeur. Surrounded by representatives of both genres, the zoo monkeys behind glass in their backs and the more or less human audience in front of him, he is through and through the border crosser between animals and humans. What Kafka thought up in 1917 as a surrealistic-philosophical reflection becomes pure life for Radtke! ”

Radtke played Kafka’s nightmares-tormented Gregor Samsa at the Burgtheater in Vienna and staged George Tabori’s “Goldberg Variations” in Regensburg. He could be seen as Oskar Matzerath, but not in the “Tin Drum”, but in the film adaptation of the “Rättin” by Günter Grass. In Ingolstadt he was the “Grand Inquisitor” in Schiller’s “Don Karlos”, and in a free production in the Munich Muffathalle of Zarathustra.

“Nothing Missed in Life”

“I’m not fighting for the cause of the disabled, but for a hopefully better society, and then hopefully people with a disability will also benefit from it,” said Radtke, who in any case did not quarrel with his life externally: “I’ve never had one Got a foot on earth and been to Africa, Asia and America! ”

In old age he sums up: “I believe that I have not missed anything in life that is so important that it outweighs what I have gained again in other ways.” And as a much-loved motto, he liked to quote a saying by the former Czech President Václav Havel: “Hope does not mean that everything turns out well, but that everything that turns out is good.”

Peter Radtke died on Saturday at the age of 77 in Munich. This was announced by the disability and media working group, which the actor himself founded, from today.

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