Theater: Pleasant East-West Passages | nd-aktuell.de

How do you tell your own life when you’re a director? Manfred Karge opts for a multitude of small scenes, a mosaic of fragments of life. The minimalist narrative gesture shows the efficiency of someone who is more familiar with the dramatic than the epic field. In his moderation at the book premiere in the former Jewish orphanage in Berlin-Pankow, Friedrich Dieckmann also speaks of “succinct clarity,” which sets the tone for this book, which is rather brief for a long life.

The subtitle reads: “Actually, I’ve always been lucky.” An astonishing summary for someone who initially had it just as difficult as other children born in 1938. A child who closely observed the terrible things at the end of the war. They are images that are burned into his mind to this day. He only found out about the first misfortune of his life later: his mother Anna Karge died of puerperal fever seven days after his birth. The father, a worker in the Silbermann & Co. millinery factory, is there with his child but no wife. The factory canteen lady offers her father her help – “and I came to live with a mother”. Luckily, at the end of the war he lost his father, was arrested by the Soviet secret service NKVD, and died at the end of 1945 in the Ketschendorf camp near Fürstenwalde. One of those life wounds for which Heiner Müller found the picture would scar, but crookedly.

How his stepmother then obtains the death certificate, which secures seven-year-old Manfred a small orphan’s pension, is one of those masterpieces of the inventive will to survive that no playwright could have invented. Any luck? Yes, Karge insists, even though both his father and his biological mother are dead when he starts school. Because it begins again in the fall of 1945 in post-war Germany, liberated from fascism – and Manfred Karge, whose future prospects could hardly have been worse at that point, will then become something. Can study in the GDR, becomes an actor and director, comes to the Berliner Ensemble, where the strict Helene Weigel becomes the artistic mother of choice.

The theater, writes Karge, became his real home. He was less interested in film. But almost everyone knows him from a Defa film: Gilbert Wolzow in Joachim Kunert’s film adaptation of “The Adventures of Werner Holt” based on the novel by Dieter Noll, filmed in 1964/65. Half of the children had to become soldiers at the beginning of 1945. Wolzow is the counterpart to the rather hesitant and thoughtful Werner Holt (unforgettable in this role: Klaus-Peter Thiele), a charismatic force on behalf of Hitler’s Germany’s final victory, which must be achieved by all means. A seducer to the bitter end. Anyone who has seen Karge in this role knows that they have looked into the abyss of murderous heroism.

With Matthias Langhoff, Karge began to view theater differently than before: as a meaningful spectacle. The Volksbühne under the Swiss Benno Besson flourished in the 1970s, not least thanks to the directing work of Karge/Langhoff. Their first collaboration resulted from their time at the Berliner Ensemble. The desire to exploit a gap in the Berlin ensemble’s schedule brought them together: “We knew an old photo from 1928. It showed a scene from the song play ‘Mahagonny’ that Brecht and Weill made for the Baden-Baden Music Days had. In the middle of the scene there was a boxing ring, the actors acted in the boxing ring. As I said, an old, scratched photograph, but it exuded a tremendous atmosphere.”

They suggested “Mahagonny” to Weigel as their joint directing project, and she agreed. But then the disillusionment: The text of the “Mahagonny Songspiel,” as they have to say in the Brecht archive, is considered lost. Without further ado, they decide to “produce the text themselves.” A mischievous prank that (almost) no one notices. The evening will be a great success.

The consequences of Biermann’s expatriation also affect Benno Besson. The Volksbühne success story ends, he is fired – and Karge/Langhoff also leave. In the mini-chapter “Cognac and pretzel sticks” you can read in just under two pages (like so much in this book, you would have liked to have found out in more detail) how a conversation with Culture Minister Hans-Joachim Hoffmann went in the fall of 1977. Hoffmann was considered a liberal and was asked to resign by Politburo member Kurt Hager in 1988 because he spoke out in favor of Gorbachev’s perestroika in the German theater magazine “Theater Today.” “When the conversation turned to Wolf Biermann’s expatriation, he made it clear to us that he didn’t like the matter and how it went.” After the conversation, both received an exit visa for three years.

Karge is also continuing his collaboration with Langhoff in the West. At Claus Peymann’s in Bochum they first staged “Dear Georg”, about the death of the expressionist poet Georg Heym, who collapsed and drowned while ice skating on the Havel with his friend Balcke in 1912. Karge plays Heym, at the express request of the author Thomas Brasch, who also became a kind of ambassador for the GDR theater against his will in the West. The collaboration with Langhoff ended in the 80s. No argument, but the similarities between them had exhausted themselves. Karge notes: “The friend / Now a lone fighter like me.”

In Vienna in 1986, Karge brought “The Fall of the Angel” by Franz Fühmann to the stage. His brilliant essay “Before Firemouths” appeared under this title. Experience with Georg Trakl’s poem” from the Rostock Hinstorff Verlag in the West (I would have expected the reference to the original title, however). The great thing about Fühmann’s essay is the artful connection of Trakl’s apocalyptic poetry not only with the First World War, but also with Fühmann’s own war experience and the Stalinism of the early GDR period. Perhaps this is the most insightful and at the same time most intimate book about German history ever written.

In 1987 Karge came to Edinburgh, where the young Tilda Swinton played in the British premiere of his successful play “Jacket Like Pants”. Karge’s book tells of these and other strokes of luck, always sparing with words and emotions, rather in a protocol style.

Karge’s great achievement is almost neglected: Shortly before the end of the Peymann era at the Berliner Ensemble, he initiated a series of well-known and unknown GDR dramas, which were staged in the garden house, which unfortunately no longer exists. Pieces from Heinar Kipphardt to Alfred Matusche, Georg Seidel to Lothar Trolle. A treasure trove that appeared under the title “Storm the Heights of Culture” (together with Hermann Wündrich). Those heights that Heiner Müller smugly said would have to be bulldozed before they could be stormed. Which once again addresses the entire GDR in its tragicomic dimension.

Manfred Karge: Actually always lucky. Encounters and incidents. Verlag Neues Leben, 191 pages, hardcover, €20.