Six bags of paint were thrown at 49-year-old Schweiger’s house in Hamburg on Sunday night, while the car of his girlfriend Svenja Holtmann, 26, was set alight and completely burned out.
“A paint attack took place on Sunday night against a house in Hamburg-Nienstedten. A car parked in front of the house was set on fire and completely destroyed,” police spokeswoman Sandra Levgrün told the Hamburger Morgenpost newspaper.
Schweiger and Holtmann were not home at the time.
Although he has had some success in Hollywood, including his part in Quentin Tarantino’s World War II blockbuster Inglourious Basterds, Schweiger mostly makes German films. He has recently garnered mixed reviews for his appearance as a detective in Germany’s favourite television detective series Tatort.
On Monday a group claiming responsibility for the attack sent a letter to the Hamburger Morgenpost.
The letter said it was in reaction to Schweiger’s last film Schutzengel, or Guardian Angel, in which he portrays a German soldier who returns from Afghanistan with trauma from an attack.
This glorified the violence in Afghanistan, the letter suggested. “German war operations with all their consequences should be considered normal and fair and accepted,” the letter said. But the “victims of German troops” such as the more than 140 civilians who died in 2009 when a stolen fuel tanker was bombed from the air, were not mentioned by Schweiger either in his film or interviews, the letter claimed.
His agent refused to comment on the attack.
Schweiger told the Stern magazine last September when promoting the film that his character was a hero only because he had done something heroic in trying to save his comrades. “But Max does not do well. He suffers being a hero, and feels responsible that his friend lost his legs. I don’t think our film glamorizes its heroes,” he said.
The Local/hc
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