"I played Vladimir Nabokov's hero Hermann Hermann in Despair, from a script by Tom Stoppard, for Rainer Werner Fassbinder," Dirk Bogarde once recalled. "Rainer took me aside one day and asked me about the script. 'What is this?' I told him it was a pun, a schoolboy joke. 'Oh yes, ' he said. There is one thing about German humor which the English always forget. It is no laughing matter."
Sources
Nicholas Wapshort, The Times, March 18, 1983
