Obituary – Carl Hegemann: An undisciplined thinker

As is well known, Germany is a decent country. So it is also disciplined in the theater, at least in the audience hall. But when you were sitting in a premiere and from some corner you heard someone talking, sometimes gently withdrawing your voice, then associating again gently again, explaining pictures, recognizing external texts, disclosing references, then these productive moments of interference were most likely from Carl Hegemann.

He couldn’t help it; Once the thinking machine had been started, there was no back. He was an undisciplined thinker. You like to forgive him because it was not uncommon for his explanations to be more interesting than what happened on the stage.

Born in Paderborn in 1949, he studied philosophy, literary and social sciences in Frankfurt am Main, at a time when an open, critical thinking was cultivated here, and did a job about Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Karl Marx. His path led him to the theater from university operations, where he was a lecturer for a few years.

It would be idle to list the different stages where he worked. A theater cannot be embezzled: the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin-Mitte. Exuberant and quick, as he was, he came and went again and again between 1992 and 2017. At times he was chief dramaturge here. It was the formative years under the director Frank Castorf who have their place in theater history.

As an intellectual sparring partner of the same director Castorf, he worked, but also as a companion for Christoph Schlingensief, after his death as his chronicler. Most recently, as a production dramaturge, he accompanied Jette Steckel’s productions. No, Hegemann did not make it comfortable in his thinker pose, but got into new things, aesthetic, mentally.

In conversations he was sometimes hard to brake, jumped from politics to art and philosophy, commented on the current events, showed cross connections and soon triumphed with a cheeky but clever and spontaneously developed idea. He remained interested in his interlocutors, as in any apparently everything, and always remained in a good mood. In it he was Brecht, whom he appreciated, which he could not fully trust as a classic because of his status, certainly close: Thinking should be pleasure.

Carl Hegemann also looked like an exotic in the theater because his once very honest profession, that of the dramaturge, had changed enormously over the decades. Among the project managers and hard workers, PR machines and trend hunters of the present, he stood out as an enthusiast for art and more imaginative, but also more inconsistent, never opportunistic employees.

Hegemann referred to Ilja Ehrenburg’s remark more than just once when communism has been reached and all economic problems are cleared, then the actual tragedy of people begins: mortality. Carl Hegemann died on May 9th at the age of 76. The theater loses a personality with him for decades that knew how to create unrest in the most beautiful way.