Ernst Jacobi
Over two hundred television productions sit behind this page, and three credits made it in. Ernst Jacobi worked where the German-speaking world's serious acting has always been done, on stage and on television: the Burgtheater in Vienna from 1977 to 1987, the Schauspielhaus in Zurich from 1987 to 1992, and a steady flow of television films around both. In 1975 he won the Berliner Kunstpreis for playing the schizophrenic poet Alexander Marz in one of them.
His screen reputation rests on a narrow, exact specialism: men who deliver terrible things in a reasonable voice. He was Loebsack in The Tin Drum in 1979, played Hans in Germany, Pale Mother the following year, and was cast as Adolf Hitler in Hamsun in 1996, which is the kind of casting that only goes to actors who can hold a room without raising the volume.
The best known of it outside Germany is a performance you never see. In The White Ribbon he is the old schoolteacher narrating the film, a voice recalling a village from a great distance, and much of the picture's unease comes from how gentle and how untrustworthy that voice manages to be at the same time. He died in 2022.
Movies (2)
TV (4)
Where to start with Ernst Jacobi
Begin with The White Ribbon, which is a strange recommendation because you will not see him in it. He narrates, and the film's whole climate of suspicion is partly a function of that voice: calm, reminiscent, quietly complicit. Then The Tin Drum, where he is very much on screen as Loebsack, in a film that made the German reckoning with the 1930s look like a fever rather than a lesson.
His third credit, Girl friends – Freundschaft mit Herz, is ordinary German television and only for people curious about what two hundred TV productions actually looked like. Hamsun, in which he played Hitler, and Germany, Pale Mother are not among the credits listed here, and that is a real gap: both sit closer to his centre than anything above.