If there is once again bad dumpling, oiling or carrioning in the ubiquitous microports on a theater stage, one wonders whether it couldn't be better.

Or whether it couldn't be done differently.

Oh yes, for example when Dieter Mann appeared, an actor and speaking artist of the highest grace.

In his autobiography “Beautiful Imagination” he said: “I am partisan of a precise theater in which more is communicated than murmured.

Language is important - otherwise I'll be offended, as a viewer and as an actor. "

It is this clear stance that distinguished Dieter Mann, who was born in Berlin in 1941, as a person as well as an artist and also as artistic director. So he switched to the passive resistance of his parents, who had lost everything including the hope for better times in the Second World War and would have preferred it if he had remained in his solid lathe apprenticeship after graduating from the Arbeiter-und-Bauern- Faculty at the Berlin drama school in 1962: “From top turner to top actor” was the headline of the GDR media.

While still a student, the director Friedo Solter brought him straight to the German Theater in 1964, once praised as a house with one of the best ensembles in the whole of German-speaking countries. He was not only firmly committed there until 2006 - as an honorary member since 2004 - but also artistic director from 1984 to 1991. His intellectually penetrated, sensitively balanced roles, never drawn down like a buddy, made him a formative actor on stage and in front of the camera, first in eastern, then in unified Germany. To represent many figures, Goethe's Clavigo (1972), Antonio in his “Torquato Tasso” (1975), Lopachin in Chekhov's “The Cherry Orchard” (1984), the Wehrhahn in Hauptmann's “The Beaver Fur” (1993), Odysseus in "Ithaka" by Botho Strauss (1997),Schiller's Wallenstein (1999) or his Philip II in “Don Karlos” (2000), finally Shakespeare's King Lear (2008).

With the monologue “Fülle des Wohllauts” from Thomas Mann's “Der Zauberberg”, directed by Marcus Mislin, he empathically unfolded his narrative-musical cosmos in perfect symbiosis, connected by the power of two sovereign, ironic hearts. He defined his artistic ethos as “surrender yes, surrender no” and as work on the sense of possibility, as a Robert Musil understood it, in order to wrest a dimension, a color, an unimagined cipher from reality. He stayed in the GDR “because I believed that we would move forward” - and out of gratitude for the development he was able to take as an “unskilled child”, which he is convinced would never have succeeded in the West . In summer 2020 he received the honorary award of the German Acting Award for his life's work.Dieter Mann will be eighty on Sunday.