Atze Schröder reveals his family’s dark story

For more than 25 years, he has embodied the classic Ruhr area macho Atze Schröder, who likes to drop a politically incorrect joke with his Minipli wig and aviator glasses. This artificial character even has its own (art) biography on Wikipedia. The real person Hubertus Albers (56), on the other hand, remains deliberately in the dark. Albers also lets the Atze speak in public. Now he is stepping out of his self-chosen shadow for the first time in his biography “Blue-Eyed: My Life as Atze Schröder”.

He describes tragedies in his life, with rather shadowy stories, from whose maelstrom only therapy helped him. “Very healing,” says Schröder. When he appeared on Talkmaster Markus Lanz in February 2020, he cracked the show character’s armor for the first time and gave an insight into his true self. The book is now a kind of double album version of that.

“I wanted to apologize for my father’s crimes”

In an interview with the celebrity magazine “Bunte” he said: “My place was next to the daughter of the Holocaust survivor Eva Szepesi, I had the thought that the children of the victim and criminal generation would sit together here. As a young man, my father Hubert had been on the side of the perpetrators, experienced terrible things and committed crimes as a underage tank driver during the war. I wanted to apologize for my father’s crimes.”

In his youth, this same father was his “dad and best friend”; a very close relationship for a long time. The relationship with the mother, on the other hand, would have been difficult to tense until shortly before her death in 2013. Once hooked on his own family saga, Schröder began to grapple with it. Dark stories emerged. His grandmother took her own life. It was not the only suicide in the close family circle.

violence in the family

In his research trips over generations he was confronted with bad conditions. There was a “hell at home” in his father’s family, he reports. Beatings and harshness were the order of the day for the great-grandfather. This would have manifested a certain longing for death and depression in the family. “We talk about this quite openly in the fourth generation when we meet,” says Schröder.

After all, such tragedies would run into genes. Only by confronting it would he have progressed for himself. “I can only recommend everyone to work on their past and do therapy. Otherwise everything else means suffering.” For him, life has become noticeably easier as a result.

<!–

–>

<!–

–>