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The Week in Germany: Culture February 23, 2007 Red Elvis Redux: German Documentary, Tom Hanks Movie
about American Crooner aka "Comrade Rockstar"
Denver-born singer Dean
Reed never made it big in the West, but in Moscow he was known as
"Comrade Rockstar", and had a huge following in eastern Europe,
South America, Iraq and Lebanon. His concerts were foot-stomping sell-outs
from Santiago to Baghdad, Warsaw to Helsinki, Budapest to East Berlin
in the 1960s and '70s. But, in later years, with his career in decline, his marriage shaky and
little prospect of his securing work if he returned to the US, a despairing
Reed drove his car to a Berlin lake and drowned himself.
That was on June 17 1986. Now, some 20 years later, a documentary movie
about the rise and fall of Reed, who was a friend of Salvador Allende,
Yasser Arafat and Daniel Ortega, was recently screened at the Berlin
International Film Festival. The 95-minute-long film, "Dean
Reed - The Red Elvis", attracted a lot of attention from people
living in the eastern half of the city, some of whom knew Reed personally
and regularly attended his concerts 25 years ago. As the film's director, Dresden-born Leopold Grün put it: "Reed's
life was a mosaic dominated by his longing for success and his naive political
engagement at a time when the world was divided by two major ideologies." By the time he was 23, the 1938-born Reed had dreams of becoming an Elvis
Presley-style singer in the United States, and even recorded ballads and
country-style protest songs on the Capitol label, albeit with little success.
Yet when he discovered his records were selling well in Latin America
he began touring extensively in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil.
By the late 1960s he was mobbed wherever he went, as Grün's movie
colorfully illustrates.
Reed, the pacifist, ripened into a Marxist in the revolutionary climate
of South America. He campaigned for Salvador Allende, and was pictured
congratulating him at his inauguration ceremony as Chilean president in
Santiago in 1973. By 1974, Reed was performing in the Soviet Union and across eastern Europe.
Interviewed in the film, Egon Krenz, who briefly succeeded Erich Honecker
as East German head of state in late 1989, says that after Reed's arrival
in East Berlin in the early 1970s, he was told what would be expected
of him. Soon Reed was busy visiting schools, factories and clubs, singing
his protest songs and spreading the gospel of Marxism to young and old
alike. In return, he enjoyed a privileged life, living in a lakeside bungalow
in Schmöckwitz on the eastern outskirts of Berlin, for which he paid
only a nominal rent. Aside from family members, contemporaries featured in the documentary
include acclaimed German actor Armin
Müller-Stahl, Isabel Allende, director Celino Bleiweiss, Chilean
Radio DJ Chucho Fernandez and American radio host Peter Boyles. Müller-Stahl
talks about Reed's immense popularity in the former East Germany at the
time: "He had an audience here, and perhaps he could also have had
one in America had he decided to stay there." "For young East Germans Dean Reed was, with his charm and handsome
looks, an American hero for us in cut-off East Berlin," said a middle-aged
woman after seeing the film. "It didn't matter that his voice was
not that special. He'd chosen to live among us. We liked that."
But attitudes towards the singer eventually changed. People gradually
tired of his voice, and his unquestioning loyalty to the Soviet Union.
On a visit to the US in the mid-1980s, Reed upset Americans by swearing
allegiance to Moscow while at the same time hinting that if folks were
nice to him, he might even consider returning home for good. They weren't.
Following an appearance on CBS TV's 60 Minutes show with famed
anchorman Mike Wallace, furious American viewers called and wrote in to
brand him a "Commie stooge".
Back in East Berlin, Reed's third marriage, to East German actress Renate
Blume, was in trouble. In a taped message made after the singer's suicide,
Blume's voice is heard saying how, on two successive nights, she and Reed
were involved in fierce arguments. The first night he tried slashing his
wrists, the next night he left the bungalow in a temper with some of his
belongings. That was, claimed the actress, the last she saw of him. Several
days later his body was recovered from the lake, along with a suicide
note. Reed's widow does not appear in the film. Grün says this is because
the actress has sold the film rights to the Reed story to Oscar-winning
Hollywood actor Tom
Hanks, who plans to make a
full-length feature film on the singer's life. (dpa) Links:
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