Albert Hetterle was born in Petersthal a few weeks after the First World War had ended. His father was a farmer. Petersthal was a small village near Odesa. It had been settled by Black Sea Germans a century or so earlier. Hetterle studied pedagogy and was also trained in acting by Ilse Fogarasi. In 1936 he became a trainee-actor with the Odesa Theatre Collective. This was a German-language traveling theatre company in the Odesa region. In 1937 he joined the same company as an actor.[2] During the early 1940s Ukraine was occupied by Germany, and although fighting across much of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine region was savage, in Odesa, which in 1941 was administratively transferred to Transnistria, Hetterle was able to continue working in the German-language theatre.[2]
In 1944, however, as the tide of World War II turned against Germany, there was a massive relocation of ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe towards the west: Hetterle moved to what would shortly be redesignated as the Soviet occupation zone within what remained of Germany. Along the way, at one stage during 1944, he was employed in Troppau as an official of the Hitler Youth organisation.[3] He was briefly conscripted for military service, but early in 1945 he was released again for reasons of "serious illness".[2]
From 1945 till 1947 he worked at the Chiemsee Peasant Theatre (Chiemseer Bauernbühne). Then, till 1949, his theatre career took him to Sondershausen, with subsequent engagements in Greifswald, Altenburg, Erfurt (1951–1953) and Halle (1953–1955).[2]
Maxim Gorki Theater
In 1955 he was recruited by Maxim Vallentin [de] to the recently established Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, where he took the part of Karl Moor in Friedrich Schiller 's Die Räuber. For Hetterle, this was the start of a partnership with the Maxim Gorki Theater that would last for more than three decades.[4]
Starting in the late 1950s, Hetterle also made frequent screen appearances in cinema and on television. This included a lead role in the television version of Die Übergangsgesellschaft which was shown on East German television during the country's actual transition year, 1990.
^Harry Waibel (2011). Diener vieler Herren : Ehemalige NS-Funktionäre in der SBZ/DDR. Lang, Frankfurt am Main. p. 137. ISBN978-3-631-63542-1.
^ ab"Berliner Intendant Albert Hetterle gestorben". Die Welt (in German). Deutsche Presse-Agentur. 18 June 2006. Retrieved 15 June 2015. Der frühere langjährige Intendant des Berliner Maxim Gorki Theaters, Albert Hetterle, ist tot. Der Schauspieler und Regisseur starb am Sonntag im Alter von 88 Jahren in Berlin. 'Wir trauern um einen verehrten Theaterkollegen, der vielen im Haus als Intendant und Schauspieler in bester Erinnerung ist', sagte Theaterchef Armin Petras.