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Götz Schubert - born in 1963 and emerged from the Ernst Busch drama school in Berlin - is an extreme actor.

In the theater (currently at the Hamburger Schauspielhaus), on television (for a good six million viewers in the crime series “Wolfsland” and most recently as the head of the medical association in Ferdinand von Schirach's “Gott” - all still in the ARD media library), in the cinema (in Heinrich Breloer's "Brecht" as Ernst Busch).

He can bring the Berlin Wall to collapse with his genitals (he did a good 200 times in Thomas Brussig's “Heroes we we” at the Deutsches Theater).

He can be gentle (like Meno Rohde in the film adaptation of Uwe Tellkamp's “Der Turm”), commissioner (in “KDD”) and a British country gentleman (in the “Inspector Jury” series).

One likes to listen to him.

His voice is deep and round, now and then the Saxon peeps through her singsong.

Thomas Brussig: How it shines

I have a story with Thomas Brussig.

Or rather, with his picaresque novel "Heroes like us".

When it was dramatized and staged by Peter Dehler at the Deutsches Theater, I was Klaus Uhlzscht for ten years and 200 performances from 1996, Brussig's hero who brought down the wall with his companions.

I like Thomas Brussig because of his wicked humor and sharp eye.

“How it shines” came out at a time when the ultimate reversible novel was still being sought everywhere.

Brussig managed to describe this crazy time of upheaval with lots of little stories, situations and characters.

As I reminded her myself.

How people from East and West collided, took advantage of each other's emergency situation, ignorance.

In addition to a great deal of curiosity about each other, which there was also at the theater immediately after the fall of the Wall, there was also a lot of mistrust, a lot went wrong there.

While reading, I remembered my first meeting with a woman from West Berlin.

My wife and I were on the Kurfürstendamm on the first day you could go west.

A Berlin grandmother came up to us, didn't look so incredibly wealthy and asked us: “Are you from the East?” - “Yes,” we said.

Then she gave us 80 pfennigs and said: "Buy yourself a coffee." That was our welcome money, so to speak.

Brussig writes of such misunderstandings in a tragicomic and grand style.

That's why it was a very important book for me.

Brings the wall down: Götz Schubert as Klaus Uhtzscht in Thomas Brussig's "Heroes Like Us"

Source: picture-alliance / ZB

Alexander Volkov: The clever Urfin and his wooden soldiers

There is an initial spark for every reader.

For me it was “The Wizard of the Emerald City”.

Actually, this is a series of ten books that contain a number of motifs from the "Wizard of Oz".

I was most impressed by the second volume.

"The clever Urfin and his wooden soldiers" is the name.

Urfin is a little shy of people and builds wooden toys that make children shudder.

And devices that always go wrong.

Somehow there is a curse on his work, which is why he becomes more and more grim and bitter and lonely.

What found food is for evil.

Source: private

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At some point he meets an owl and comes across a powder that brings dead objects to life.

From this he builds his wooden soldiers and conquers the magic land.

This is a super cool, evil character, a character that has shaped me a lot.

Because he is ambivalent, not just an evil one who goes into the world and does bad, but someone who is evil because of an injury.

I took the book with me to school and read on during the breaks.

At some point I went to the bookstore every day and asked when the next part would finally come.

As a library kid, I was lousy.

Mainly because at some point I increasingly forgot to bring the books back.

Fortunately, a friend of my mother's worked in the library and was able to mitigate that a bit.

Still, they were terrible corridors.

Friedrich Wolf: Kiki

Source: private

One of the most impressive fairy tales I came across was "Kiki", Friedrich Wolf's story of a dog.

I had that in a magical edition, a little book.

“Kiki” tells an autobiographical story.

Immediately after the start of the Second World War, Wolf was brought to Le Vernet, to a French internment camp for former Spanish fighters.

“Kiki” takes place in this camp.

Kiki is an English shepherd dog who has become the darling of the camp inmates.

Until he is discovered.

The fact that the dog dies in the end bothered me badly.

What has impressed me even more, and still impresses me, is how Wolf also talks about war and deportation and injustice almost by the way, without ever having the feeling that I was agitated.

That is the great quality of this fairy tale.

I later learned who Friedrich Wolf was: naturopath and opponent of paragraph 218 and communist.

He fled the Nazis to Moscow, wrote plays like “Professor Mamlock” and co-founded Defa.

He was the father of Markus Wolf (the head of the Stasi Headquarters Enlightenment) and Konrad (the film director).

"Kiki" opened a door for me to think and feel.

Cornelia Funke: The Dragon Rider

When I got into the pleasant situation of having children of my own, we loved reading aloud.

That was quite selfish.

There were great children's story books in the GDR, but there weren't a lot of books either.

Not everything from Michael Ende, for example.

I didn't discover Roald Dahl until I had children.

And then came Cornelia Funke.

Especially the "dragon rider".

Not only because it's brilliant and full of great characters, full of mythical creatures, but because Cornelia Funke does not claim a fantasy world, but tells it from a real world.

That she insists that there are still places in this real world that few know of, that are wondrous and untouched, that have secrets, and where things are possible that we as adults no longer believe in.

And we also learn from the book to look out into the world with an open look, to remain curious and not to give up before the time, to believe that everything no longer makes sense.

Uwe Tellkamp: The tower

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After seeing the film adaptation of the “Tower”, many of my colleagues said that they didn't even know that there was such an elitist class in the GDR as that of the Weißer Hirsch in Dresden.

For them, the Osten was a prefabricated building and Andreas Dresen's “half staircase”.

I come from a small town.

Pirna is not far from Dresden.

I grew up in a very musical household and was brought up in a humanistic way - close to the Protestant church.

Which was not just a question of faith, but rather stood for a specific social class.

The educated middle class met in my parents' large circle of friends; my father was a graphic artist.

That came very close to Tellkamp's Tower Society.

And what Meno, the lecturer, who I was allowed to play in the “tower”, experienced, my father also experienced in his area.

I was able to tell my parents' generation in the “tower”.

How politics ended up talking into artistic decisions, how one had to bend, which feint to use.

Like Meno, who is asked to delete text passages in a novel that he considers important.

And in the end, he manages to get the book to appear at all.

In the theater, for example, we built in things that we knew they'd be guaranteed to work off in such a way that they didn't even notice other things that were perhaps much more important.

Many directors I got to know are desperate at some point, however, because their contemporary films have been talked into so much according to the motto "But our party comrades are not like that" that they have only made historical films.

Victor Witte: Here I am

Victor Witte, this is my son.

He studied in Hildesheim.

The novel was published five years ago.

“Here I am” was his debut.

When he was working on it, he was often with us and then sat in the middle of our everyday life.

He just sat there and when I asked him if he could open the door when a parcel carrier rings, he was there, he said, “I'm not there, I'm working.” Writing is hard work, knows me since then.

For his novel, he has gathered all kinds of things that are difficult to sell.

An unsympathetic hero, a first-person narrator, a harrowing but hardly effective plot, barely two days in the life of a young man in his gang.

I was a bit nervous because at one point he asked me if it was a problem if he used certain names.

And because at some point it transpired that he would draw from his biography.

That wasn't so bad then.

After all, we now know that he applied to an acting school and auditioned without telling us anything.

He still regrets that, he says now.

Cixin Liu: The three suns

I have a weakness for crazy things.

For fairy tales, for - as they say - big and small children, which is not entirely wrong in my case, because sometimes I am a bit childish at the reception.

I always have a hard time with science fiction literature when it gets too abstract.

Good science fiction - there it is not unlike the films and novels of the GDR, which at some point fled completely into the historical - told through a distant mirror of our world, our present.

Science fiction is also about stories about being today from a different point of view, from which one would like to find out something about oneself and about how one would behave, for example in the regime that Liu Cixin is talking about.

It's about people and how they move in a dictatorial system, how quickly they reach their limits and how their attitude collides with the ruling party.

It's not that far from the “tower”, from “how it shines” and my biography.

Alexander Granach: You, my dear piece of home.

Letters to Lotte Lieven from exile

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Of course we know about exiles, about people who had to flee from the Nazis after 1933. But since this correspondence I have known how this exile really felt.

Alexander Granach, whose “Da geht ein Mensch” every drama student has read, writes to his wife from everywhere where exile has driven him.

Soviet Union, America, Switzerland.

A book full of incredible stories.

Granach reports when and why he had to keep going.

Von Brecht and Eisler before the McCarthy Commission.

Of the desperation with which exiles defended their status against other, newly arriving exiles.

Those who weren't so keen to put in a good word for their compatriots because they could ultimately be competitors on the job market.

There are much sadder stories.

For example, from a film by a German exile that was made during the Stalinist purges.

When the film premiered, a third of the ensemble was no longer alive or gone.

Granach himself was told at some point that he should disappear because otherwise he would be picked up the next day.

There are also love letters.

It is poetic. Full of beautiful pictures and in beautiful language.

Very touching.

Philip Roth: My life as a son

There was a director who was something of a theater father to me.

That was Thomas Langhoff.

And one day he read “My Life as a Son” by Philip Roth.

"Here," he said.

"It's good," I said and got the book.

Well, with a theater man like that, you're not always one heart and one soul.

One fights against him too.

And I thought maybe I should learn from this how to behave.

The book is about the death of a father and the son who takes care of him.

That shook me for a long time.

It prepared me to say goodbye to my father.

At some point, however, I also understood that Langhoff did not mean it as a textbook.

That he read it because it reflected his relationship with his own father.

And then I learned something more fundamental.

That the first impression, the first thought, is not always the right one.

That before I make a judgment, I need to know more about the circumstances why someone does something at a particular moment.

That now ties in with books like “The Tower” or “How It Glows”.

Immediately after the fall of the Wall, we were very quick to judge the people in this system, about Stasi employees.

And then it often turned out that the biographies weren't black and white, but gray, that you have to know what danger you could run into, what hardships you were exposed to.

What you accepted and where you drew the line.

There are very, very many more nuances in life and in the world.

I am just noticing that you can learn that from almost all of my books.

I am grateful to them for that.

Protocol: Elmar Krekeler

Investigating in Görlitz: The inspectors Viola Delbrück (Yvonne Catterfeld) and Burkhard "Butsch" Schulz (Götz Schubert)

Source: picture alliance / dpa / Molina Film / MDR / ARD