Til Schweiger: His program has always been disrespectful

It’s 2009. Eight years to go until #MeToo. And Til Schweiger teaches young women on television that Hollywood is just another word for sex on camera. So porn. In 2009, Til Schweiger was the head of the RTL casting show “Mission Hollywood”. It’s a celebration of misanthropy. A touch harder than GNTM.

Twelve young women compete for a mini-role in a “Twilight” episode (the winner actually gets to film, but is cut out of the film again) and act out movie scenes for Til Schweiger that include fake orgasms, lesbian kisses and striptease. In between they master completely realistic scenes such as acceptance speeches at the Oscars.

Lines of dialogue that they should memorize are, for example: “I put a whistle in my pussy”. If you fail, you will be punished. Like cleaning up dog poop in a pet hotel. Til Schweiger and his fellow judges, including Heiner Lauterbach and Moritz Bleibtreu, had fun. The opportunities were underground. The few who watch “Mission Hollywood” realize that the man is crazy. Respect is different.

Schweiger’s casting show is just one example. Time and time again, the actor shows up drunk on red carpets and award shows, slurs acceptance speeches into microphones, insults other actors, beats them up (e.g. Elias M’Barek 2015 at Berlin’s Borchardt celebrity bar), curses the media, his luxury hotel room at the 2022 Zurich Film Festival because the hotel’s decor is too colorful for him. The headline “Til Schweiger freaks out” has been repeated over the years in a wide variety of contexts.

Every hundred times he taps for a good cause. For refugees, against the right. His creed is “I will never play a Nazi.” Sometimes he overshoots and demands no corona vaccinations for children. The media (including us) are grateful to him for that. The headliner Schweiger works just as reliably as the successful filmmaker Schweiger.

But somehow the belief remains that behind the scenes everything is running smoothly and decently. That Til Schweiger is actually a good guy at his favorite place, filming. A fairly capable and reliable comrade (although his net worth is already €35 million). That he seems a bit in his roles. There are many ways to talk yourself into Til Schweiger.

Aren’t there always good reasons to be against the media? And isn’t it pretty cool that he always shows up in the baggiest sweater, even on the glitziest of occasions? And then he is such an involved father who likes to give his daughters way too many roles. And he makes such highly emotional, family-friendly and moving audience films as “Zweiohrhasen”, “Keinohrkücken” or “Honig im Kopf”, so one must be sensitive somehow. Or not?

Maybe. Perhaps Til Schweiger is overly sensitive. At least as far as his narcissism is concerned. Hypersensitive. Because, as well over 50 of those involved have now announced in the “Spiegel” and endorsed by Nora Tschirner, the biggest star of the Schweiger films alongside Schweiger, the universally brilliant filmmaker behind the scenes is as disrespectful, drunk and sexist as earlier.

So there is no conspiratorial, secretive silent community in which Til becomes a cozy daddy and makes up entertaining movies with his people, no, his nickname is “Imperator”, and that’s not meant to be funny. Nora Tschirner is right when she says that you have to confront yourself with the question of which side you are actually on.

So should the media. Perhaps it would have helped if a few of us hadn’t just held the camera to it while Schweiger cursed and swallowed, if he and the media hadn’t constantly encouraged each other in mutual hatred. If only we had written about him with more respect and not just treated him like the court jester of the German film industry.

Perhaps it would have helped if the likes of Lauterbach and Bleibtreu, who thought it was so funny to be on the devil’s jury in 2009, had cared for him as he stumbled past them on a red carpet or interviews about his – supposedly endured – alcoholism existed. To ask yourself now “What is actually going on with Til Schweiger?” is hypocritical. It was always there. In public. Why would he be someone else anywhere else?

The Schweiger case is a sad one. Of a man who no longer (or never had) control of his ego between inferiority complexes and delusions of grandeur. And from us, who liked to watch him do it without thinking.