Suddenly the living room table turns into a reading stage, a moment out of the blue.

“I'm going to practice, says my father,” says Edgar Selge.

And how this celebrated actor says this sentence and thus slips into a text that he wrote himself: The whole Munich late summer afternoon disappears around us at the living room table for a short time.

Tobias Rüther

Editor in the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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It is really a wonderful late summer afternoon in Munich, the sky is actually bright, the row house that Edgar Selge lives in with his wife Franziska Walser is just around the corner from the Nymphenburg Canal, outside, on the quiet street, the neighboring boys are playing.

Edgar Selge bought cheese and bread and plum cake for his visit, but you hardly ever get to eat because there are so many questions about the book he wrote: “Have you finally found us” it says.

Remembering the family, death and life

It is a reminder book of family, death and life and art, literary in tone, autobiographical in substance: one learns something from the childhood and early youth of the actor. That he stole his brother and embezzled the class fund to go to the cinema. That he reenacted the bombing of Rotterdam by the German air force in the pear tree in his parents' garden. That two of his four brothers died dramatically. And that his father hit him again and again. Above all, one learns that the great actor Edgar Selge is apparently also a great author. He has now brought it to life.

So at the living room table in Munich it's also about when Selge knew that he had found the right tone for his book.

So Selge responded to that in the first paragraph of this book.

Fell right into his own prose from the interview.

It wasn't the first passage he had written for the book, but Selge knew when he had it that he had it.

“I'm going to practice,” says the father

“I'm going to practice, says my father, disappears into the wing room and closes the door behind him.

He spends almost every free minute on his instrument and practices.

I stop in the hallway and actually have nothing to do.

But it's not that boring for me.

I can listen or talk to myself.

Sometimes someone comes by and talks to me. "

Edgar Selge speaks these sentences with that casual intensity that carries his entire book.

You automatically look for parallels to the actor's art of representation, but then you quickly realize that these parallels are only superficial: Actor and author combine the same intelligence and intensity in expression, but the author is an independent figure and also a new appearance: Edgar Selge only started writing five years ago.

The actor Selge, 73, on the other hand, looks back on a career spanning more than forty years on stage and in front of the camera.