"Gentle, poetically desperate man" TV cult star Hermes Phettberg has died
Hermes Phettberg was the opposite of a conventional TV presenter.
Image: dpa
Phettberg lived out his sexuality openly.
Image: dpa
Hermes Phettberg was the opposite of a conventional TV presenter.
Image: dpa
Phettberg lived out his sexuality openly.
Image: dpa
Oddball, philosopher, entertainer - many roles suited Hermes Phettberg. The Viennese, who was dramatically overweight at the time, shaped his TV show with his wit and brashness.
19.12.2024, 09:00
dpa
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- Hermes Phettberg died on December 18 at the age of 72.
- The Austrian had been suffering from strokes and died lonely and impoverished.
- In the 90s, he made headlines with the late-night parody "Phettbergs Nette Leit Show".
- Phettberg spoke openly about his homosexuality and his penchant for sadomasochism.
You have to come up with this offer first: "Eggnog or Frucade?" This was the bizarre choice in terms of taste between creamy alcohol and sweet sparkling water that Hermes Phettberg offered the guests of his late-night parody "Phettbergs Nette Leit Show". In the 1990s, the corpulent Austrian was a kind of clever TV oddball - and thus a cult figure.
He shone with wit and mused with relentless openness about his sex fantasies, in which tight jeans and a cane played a central role. Late-night talk show host Harald Schmidt called him a "total work of art". RTL wanted his show, but the deal fell through.
Then it became very quiet around one of the most dazzling Austrians. Isolated, impoverished and marked by strokes, he became a sad anti-hero in a 2011 film documentary. According to his friend and carer Hannes Moser, Phettberg died yesterday, Wednesday, in a clinic in Vienna at the age of 72.
Phettberg described himself as a "publicist and wretch in Vienna". In the documentary "The Pope is not a jeans boy", his misery becomes abundantly clear. In 2011, a hunchbacked, unkempt man shuffles through the picture in a chaotic apartment, reaching for the handcuffs that have been hanging in the living room for 30 years.
Sensational viewing figures
One of the many references to the central struggle in his life. "I actually come from sexuality," said the self-confessed masochist, who liked to alienate or amuse his guests on television with his comments.
His show was actually theater, the venue a ballroom of the communist Communist Party in Vienna. First hundreds, then more than 1000 people came to see the 150-kilogram man with the long hair, scarf and suspenders. ORF added the "Nette Leit Show" to its program in 1995 and recorded sensational viewing figures.
The "Kronen Zeitung" was less able to understand people's amusement: "With this unacceptable show, the ORF dipped dangerously into the depths of the unappetizingly grindy. ORF doesn't need a witless mountain of fat who plays dumb and makes no secret of his moldy left-wing preferences," was the verdict of the mass paper.
Offer from RTL
As a fat gay man with a penchant for sadomasochism, Phettberg provided striking proof that there were other people besides the beautiful, strong and capable who had something to say, according to his director Kurt Palm. Der Spiegel was enthusiastic: "When Phettberg speaks, the seemingly repulsive, the inexorably disfigured body and the crooked mouth in the devastated face blur into the aura of a gentle, poetically desperate person."
This poet, a bank employee in his younger years, certainly didn't know how to handle money. In his peak year 1995, he told the audience, he earned 900,000 shillings (around 65,000 euros), but ended up with a "liquidity bottleneck" of 70,000 shillings. He could have followed the call of money if he had accepted the offer from RTL. But no agreement was reached on some details, Palm recalled.
Until the end, Phettberg wrote a column in the Viennese weekly newspaper "Falter" that was both unsparing and affectionate. "Every day my saliva is sucked out of my mouth, it's unpleasant," he reported in his last article from the clinic. "Merry, healthy and peaceful Christmas everywhere", the seriously ill Phettberg wished his readers shortly before his death.
