The following interview appeared in the Chicago Tribune March 19, 1987.

KLEMPERER'S ROLE IN 'CABARET' IS NO KLINK-ER.

Actors never tire of saying how much their parts mean to them. Werner Klemperer, when expounding on his role as a persecuted Jew in the musical "Cabaret," can pretty much prove it.

Klemperer barely escaped becoming a victim of the Nazis himself. Better known as the squirming, shifty, perversely lovable Col. Klink from the long-running (and forever rerunning) television series "Hogan's Heroes," Klemperer became famous by playing a Nazi. (The actor doesn't quite see Klink that way. "Klink was an accommodator, a total bureaucrat," Klemperer says. "He would have been the same if he had worked for General Motors.")

But in "Cabaret," playing at the Chicago Theatre through Sunday, Klemperer sets the record straight, as it were. He plays Herr Schultz, a Jewish shopkeeper, in the early days of the Nazi rise to power. During the play, he loses his non-Jewish fiancee, who is frightened off by the growing anti-Semitism deftly chronicled in the story.

Presumably, after the play's action ends, the character goes on to lose his little fruit shop and his life, partly because he doggedly believes that the Nazis are only a small and short- lasting political oddity. Near the end of the play, Herr Schultz announces he is moving to another apartment in a nearby square. That square is within 200 yards of where Klemperer, then in grammar school, was living with his family when they escaped from Berlin two months after Adolf Hitler took over. Thanks to the prescience of Klemperer's father, Otto, the renowned conductor, who called the family from Switzerland and ordered them to flee, Klemperer, his mother and sister escaped the fate of many of their neighbors. Klemperer remembers these neighbors as being a lot like Herr Schultz.

"Herr Schultz is middle-aged, rather gentle and representative of the average German Jew of those days," Klemperer says. "He believes in his country as an American would believe in his. He says, 'Come on, folks, everybody take it easy, and things will be all right.' There were thousands like him, and they were all killed."

Klemperer took the part for a number of practical show-business reasons. He liked the idea of working with director Harold Prince. He had been in few musicals and never one on Broadway, where the tour is headed. He also was drawn to the challenge of playing a sympathetic character, not his usual type of role.

But, on a deeper level, he also thinks "Cabaret" may be more pertinent today than when first performed 21 years ago.

"On the first day of rehearsal, Prince announced to us all that the one thing to remember is that the play is about avoidance," Klemperer says. "We put blinders on and don't see what's happening all around us, just the way we walk to avoid a bag lady on the streets of New York.

"Then, Prince showed us a photograph of a group of faces, staring miserably into the camera, horrible, frightened faces," Klemperer adds. "And he asked us to guess what the photo was. We all agreed it had to be taken during the Nazi regime, probably at a concentration camp.

"Prince said, 'You're wrong. It was taken during the race riots of the '60s.' So you see, it was an American thing. I think we live in a society today with problems a lot of us avoid. We are somewhat frivolous, having a hell of a good time and hoping problems will be solved tomorrow."

Indelibly etched on the national consciousness as Col. Klink, Klemperer regards that fate with philosophical and pragmatic good cheer. His contractual arrangement in terms of rerun benefits was a lucrative one, enabling him to pick and choose his roles.

"And it's nice to be recognized, to be appreciated," adds Klemperer, a gentle, elegant, affable conversationalist. "When I walk on stage, I get a hand, and of course it's not because of what I'm about to perform. It's because everyone's glad to see Col. Klink. I only worry if the applause isn't as strong or stronger after the end."

In the 15 years since "Hogan's Heroes" ended production, Klemperer's media profile has been a modest one. He has done virtually no films ("To tell you the truth, nobody's ever asked"), only an occasional guest television spot and a couple of pilots.

But he has been busy. Serious stage work in recent years includes Robert E. Sherwood's "Idiot's Delight" in Washington and "Hang on to Me" (an adaptation of a Maxim Gorky work employing George Gershwin music) in Minneapolis, both projects from the young director Peter Sellars, now on leave of absence after a shaky period as artistic director of the American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center.

Thanks in part to early training in serious music, Klemperer has found another career in orchestral narration. In addition to the standard concert hall narration for "Peter and the Wolf" and "Carnival of the Animals," Klemperer has served as spoken vocalist for more serious works, such as Roberto Gerhard's "The Plague" and Igor Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex."

He has worked with all the leading American orchestras, including two appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the late '70s. The Boston Symphony recording of Schoenberg's "Gurrelieder" using his narration won a Grammy award.

"It's very interesting to be standing between a giant orchestra and an audience and participating as if you were a singer," says the actor, now in his '60s. "It's very satisfying for me."