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Ernst Wiltmann
Parry Sound, Ontario
Tom Hanks new film project : Dean Reed
The Elvis of the East Bloc
As a blond Sonnyboy he stormed the U.S. charts - he changed to rock and roll Bolsheviks and moved to East Germany. Then Dean Reed in the East was a world star in the West nobody knows about it. In the coming weeks will determine whether Hollywood star Tom Hanks film Reeds life.
It was an end, as befits a true pop legend. pumped full of drugs drove the singer's face down in the water when the police took him on 17 June 1986 found. He had filled stadiums, movie successes celebrated, had their own television shows. Companies had adorned with his name, politicians sought his close and beautiful women. Now he was dead
However, with Elvis or Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain, or all the other departed early from the pantheon of pop never called his name in a Atmzug. He was an international star, certainly - but unfortunately in the wrong part of the world: Instead zugekokst to end up in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills, who died from an overdose of sleeping pills in Lake Zeuthen in East Berlin: Dean Reed from Denver, Colorado, USA - the Elvis of the East Bloc,
Behind the Iron Curtain, he was in the sixties and seventies, a living legend. "From the Berlin Wall to Siberia Dean Reed is the tip of communism in Pop", reported the perplexed reporters of the magazine "People" in 1976 probably no less astonished readers. "After President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, he is among the Russians the most famous Americans." And two years before his death, the New York Times "Reed appointed quite a splash with respect to the" Johnny Cash of Communism ".
Number one in front of Elvis Presley and Paul Anka
Everything began in 1959, the year died in the Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens and Elvis duty performed his military service in Germany. The radio stations from Boston to Santa Barbara in that year a droning song called "Our Summer Romance" up and down until he had risen to No. 2 in the charts. Sung was the sweet summer of a 21-year-old abandoned Meteorology student named Dean Reed from Wheat Ridge, a suburb of Denver at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
It was a hugely promising start to a possibly large Popzukunft for the ultra-conservative son of a high school teacher who in 1938 came on a chicken farm in the Midwest to the world. Father Reed was pop music for an "international communist conspiracy" to chose her son Dean profession - and he played his sentimental songs soon no longer just before a home crowd, but also in South America. There, the fans chose the blond Sonnyboy 1960 favorite pop star of the continent - from Elvis Presley, Paul Anka, Ray Charles. From 1965 he had his own "Dean Reed Show" in the Argentinian TV, every Saturday at 21 clock.
This, however, it was over now, right as 1966 military coup on the Rio de la Plata and the Gringo blonde with the amazing stroke among women dropped immediately from the country: The superstar had criticized U.S. nuclear testing and the war in Vietnam. In 1965, he had gone even as a member of the Argentine delegation to the Soviet-controlled World Peace Congress in Helsinki. Reed was repeatedly arrested and threatened.
Traffic jam in Moscow because of a U.S. country singer
In Moscow, meanwhile, recognized the propaganda potential of the rock and roll Bolsheviks. A handsome cowboy with flattering voice, while ideologically established and proven in the anti-imperialist struggle - of which there were not too many. So Reed was invited on tour by the Soviet empire, as the second American artist ever to the Pete Seeger folk bards. He gave 39 concerts in eight cities, tens of thousands crowded all the sports arenas, to listen to the cowboy from the heartland of the class enemy. As Reed was in Moscow on foot along the Majakowskiring, it came to traffic congestion.
Reed's next career step was more capitalist logic: He settled in Italy and tried as a film actor. In Rome's Cinecitta, he made B movies and spaghetti westerns - in one of them, the Spanish-Italian Western comedy "Adios, Sabata" was, after Hollywood star Yul Brynner ("The Ten Commandments"), his opponent - still running the strips from time to time back late at night on TV. The Italian authorities in vogue, the political attitude of the foreign worker from the United States, however, just as before, the Argentinians. After Reed had demonstrated outside the U.S. embassy in Rome against the Vietnam war, they conceded in 1969 unceremoniously his work permit.
So was the first back to South America to make the election campaign in Chile for his friend Salvador Allende. A few days before the presidential election in early September 1970 Reed staged a pathetic patriotic protest: everywhere Before the U.S. Embassy in Santiago de Chile Reed publicly washed the American flag, the Vietnam War opponents rather burned. "This flag is soiled with the blood and tears of thousands of Vietnamese women and children," Reed, said, "I wash this symbolic flag of my country, the United States of America."
"You are the best looking one of the world"
Then came a rainy November day in Leipzig 1971st The guest star in America, just returned from a tour of nine Soviet republics, had presented his new film Chile at the International Documentary and Short Film Week, as it at the closing reception a green-eyed East German human being would. "You are the best looking man of the world," she says to him. Wiebke, a teacher separated from her husband, Reed left his first wife, Patricia - and draws 1972 in the GDR.
A communist country singer from the USA fits Honecker perfectly into the concept - with the politically correct "man from Colorado" (the title of his broadcast from 1977 DDR TV show) as a projection can rave about the East Germans quiet a bit for the otherwise proscribed America without to get the wrong idea. Reed even the stereotype of the "good" Cowboys with gusto. In the DEFA film "Blood Brothers", for which he writes the script, he is in 1975 at the site of DDR redskin Gojko Mitic a reformed U.S. cavalrymen, who breaks up after a massacre of Indians, only the U.S. standard, and then Cheyenne followed: The film is his final breakthrough in the GDR.
Also, the Stasi overestimated the "clear political standpoint," Comrade Rockstar, they will in 1976 under the code name "Victor". Reed complained that in 1978, when Honecker importunities of the Stasi and the liaison is over, you see him by - the blonde is too valuable in the propaganda battle. And not just as a guest on "A boiler Entertainment. 1978 Reed made worldwide headlines when he was arrested after an appearance of solidarity to farmers in the U.S. Province. Per hunger strike, he brings the reporting in motion, celebrities such as Joan Baez and Pete Seeger to appeal to U.S. President Jimmy Carter to intervene and is released as Reed after eleven days, he for millions of fans throughout the Eastern bloc is no longer just a star, but a hero.
Strange anachronism
The golden years are slowly but over. Reed gets the Soviets nor the Lenin Prize for Art and Literature, the first foreigner. In the GDR, appears an official biography, and in the Pomeranian Pasewalk will combine a bakery named after him. But when East Germany began in the early eighties to provide tens of thousands of applications for leave, the U.S. citizens residing East Berlin a strange anachronism. The marriage to Wiebke fails, his Western clothes "Sing, Cowboy, Sing" flops. The sales of his records fall from the mid-eighties, and a film project in which he had invested a lot of hope burst.
In April 1986, Reed has his last major appearance. In the CBS program "60 Minutes" on U.S. television, he must once again defend the Berlin Wall and Ronald Reagan accused of state terrorism. Six weeks later, the star is found dead in knee-deep Lake Zeuthen, near his villa on the Rauchfangswerder, with wrists slashed and an overdose of sleeping pills, brand Radedorm. Erich Honecker himself orders after reading the suicide note to cover up the suicide, the 15 sheets, written in shaky capital letters, appear only after the turn on again. As reported cause of death of the GDR evening news a "tragic accident".
Three and a half years after Reed's wet end, the Wall fell, East Germany passes away and with it the entire Soviet bloc. The world in which the "Red Elvis" was a world star, is no more. But despite - or perhaps because - it in no one really knew victorious West, "The Man from Colorado" attracts more than twenty years after his death, interest. On the Web maintains an active fan base his memory, dozens of books and documentaries have taken on since 1990 with the case. The dubbing is now possibly imminent. Hollywood star Tom Hanks has secured many years ago the film rights to the life of his countryman in 2003, he met in Berlin with old companions like Egon Krenz and Wiebke Reed. Last year, Hanks has extended the option again, must decide by early summer 2008, he says. More trade rumors already were drifting by potential locations in eastern Germany, the beginning of the recordings was imminent.
A Hollywood film about Dean Reed - it would be something like bringing home a lost son. And Reed were finite, the Cold War which he never could be: a real world star.
Hans Michael Kloth
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