Writing, acting and staging belong together for Klaus Pohl - and he can do everything.

Gladly with a Borsalino on his cheerfully bright head, he is a charming, eloquently brilliant plant that can only flourish in the anarchic juggler humus of the theatre.

He was born in 1952 in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where his parents had fled from Silesia after the Second World War.

His classmates never let him forget that he was a stranger.

The trained greengrocer works as a waiter in Munich, soon moves to Berlin and completes an acting course.

He works in film and television, has been a member of the ensemble at the Burgtheater for around 25 years, and writes plays, screenplays, radio plays and essays.

Among contemporary German authors, he was seen early on as a nose for current problematic issues: Klaus Pohl wrote about a village in which locals, refugees and those returning from the war did not get along after 1945 ("Das Alte Land", 1984), about Stasi involvement, hardly that the Berlin Wall had fallen (“Karate-Billi Returns”, 1991), about xenophobia and right-wing radicalism (“The Beautiful Foreigner”, 1991), about the socio-economic imbalance after 1989 (“Wartesaal Deutschlandgulenreich”, 1995) – and with "Manni Ramm I" a "melodrama from the soccer world, dedicated to the great soccer player Helmut Rahn" (1994).

More of a corner pub than a living room

Not from the ivory tower, but rather from the street, Pohl lets his figures stand in life more than at vernissages, come more from the corner pub than from the living room of the affluent middle-class.

The often derogatory use of the term "utility pieces" doesn't bother him, it reminds him of Brecht.

They were staged in Hamburg at the Thalia Theater and the Schauspielhaus, at the Vienna Burgtheater or the Zurich Schauspielhaus by directors such as Jürgen Flimm, Achim Benning, Jürgen Bosse or by Pohl himself.

In 1992 he moved to New York with his wife, the actress, director and singer Sanda Weigl, a niece of Helene Weigel, where the family still mostly lives.

Of course, he never lost sight of Germany with its checkered history.

For example, he published the novel “Die Kinder der Prussian Wüste” (2011) about Thomas Brasch.

Then he seemed to have submerged a little, it became quieter around him.

But suddenly Klaus Pohl is back on all stages - with his phenomenal novel "To Be or Not to Be", in which he recalls Peter Zadek's production of "Hamlet" in 1999, in which he played Horatio: a stroke of genius.

Today this wonderful free spirit of theatrical air is seventy years old.