Albrecht Schuch

The scene we remember from All Quiet on the Western Front (2022) is a goose. Kat, a cobbler who cannot read, steals it from a farmhouse in the dark and shares it out among boys who have not eaten properly in weeks, and Albrecht Schuch plays the handing-out as if it were Christmas and he were the father. Edward Berger's film cuts Remarque's people down to bodies in mud, and we said so; Schuch is the exception. Whatever warmth the film has, he brought it, and he brought most of it without speaking, in the way he tears the bird and watches the others eat. It was the only stretch of the film where we felt something other than dread, and we were grateful for it.

He was well known at home long before that. Schuch trained at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig from 2006 to 2010 and went from there into the ensemble of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin; film and television followed from 2010, including Measuring the World (2012), in which he played Alexander von Humboldt. The turn came in 2019 and 2020, with two parts about as far apart as parts get: Micha, an anti-aggression trainer, in Nora Fingscheidt's System Crasher (2019), and Reinhold, a volatile gangster, in Burhan Qurbani's Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020). He took the title role in Lieber Thomas (2021), then Kat, and has since led Peacock (2024) and Stiller (2025).

What connects these, by his own account and by the account of those who have watched him, is that he works from the body first. He has said he prefers physicality and body language to dialogue, and he researches his way into people, family history included. That is what we saw in Kat: an actor in a film that gives its people little to say, making the part out of how a man carries a stolen goose across a field. He has also said that one of his biggest fears was that the film, "even by accident, could glorify war". It does not, and Kat is a large part of the reason.

The caveat is ours rather than his. We have reviewed one of his films, and in it he had a supporting part in a picture we thought superbly made and thin on people. The reputation was built in German cinema we have not yet written up, on parts that are, by their description, louder and stranger than the cobbler. Berger gave him a goose and a dark field. Fingscheidt and Qurbani, on the description of the parts alone, gave him a great deal more to do, and we would like to watch him do it.