Wunderkind: Portraits of 50 Contemporary German Artists

Wunderkind: Portraits of 50 Contemporary German Artists

2008 – 2016

Rory MacLean

Contents

writers

Thomas Brussig

Michael Schindhelm

Susanne Schädlich

Torsten Schulz

Tilman Rammstedt

Roland Boden

visual artists

Friederike Feldmann

Reinhard Kleist

Jorinde Voigt

Martin Dammann

Barbara Breitenfellner

Felix Gephart

Kerstin Hille

Gerhard Mantz

Michael Müller

Erika Hoffmann

sound

Manuel Göttsching

Campino

Shantel

Berge

Stephan Krawczyk

Clemens Schuldt

Marc Weiser

Frieder Butzmann

Ben Klock

Hans Peter Kuhn

sculptors/architects

Nadine Rennert

Hans Scheib

Jens Casper

Reiner Maria Matysik

Gloria Zein

Mentalgassi

Jürgen Mayer H.

Alexandra Martini

filmmakers

Christoph Hübner

Uli Gaulke

Ilona Ziok

Marco Wilms

Bettina Blümner

Boris Hars-Tschachotin

performers

Clemens Schick

Ulli Lommel

Pigor

Bas Böttcher

Sibel Kekilli

photographers

Joachim Schmid

Göran Gnaudschun

Günter Karl Bose

Werner Bartsch

Günther Schaefer

Introduction

What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a young man or woman to make their own journey, to travel outside the flow yet to be a part of it? And where does their voyage begin? In imaginary childhood games? In a chance encounter? With inherited enthusiasms? At the sensitive core of the human heart?

Over the last eight years, I have tried to answer these – and other – questions in almost one hundred interviews with working German artists. I have looked at how a childhood obsession or spark of inspiration develops in the creative imagination. I have followed the journeys of a platinum rock star and a struggling caricaturist, walked beside best-selling novelists, and traced the story of the godfather of techno. I’ve tried to understand how these individuals have succeeded, where they have stumbled and fallen, and how they’ve survived.

Most of the interviews took place in Berlin, Europe’s capital of reinvention. That city’s identity has always been based not on stability but on change. Over the centuries Berlin recreated itself from a mean and artless outpost to Hohenzollern garrison town, the ‘Babylon of the world’ during the Weimar years, Hitler’s capital of war and then the flash point of the nuclear age. The divided city then emerged from the Cold War as a virtual blank canvas. After 1989 thousands of German and foreign artists aspired to create a new artistic life there, a kind of ‘artsy communism: a creative utopia of collaboration and acceptance infused with a pioneering spirit’, according to the writer, critic and cultural journalist Kimberly Bradley. In its crumbling tenements and vast, peanut-priced studios, they jumpstarted ‘a greater community of musicians, club kids, and visual producers colonising the abandoned inner city, working together mixing genres and scenes.’

In those early days Tacheles was central to Berlin’s new understanding of itself. Only three months after the fall of the Wall, a group of artists had occupied a war-damaged building on Oranienburger Strasse in the old East. The five-storey ruin, which had served in its time as a department store, an SS headquarters and a propaganda cinema, was within weeks of demolition. But the artists – calling themselves Künstlerinitiative Tacheles – fought for its preservation, and found themselves at the heart of an experiment in the power of the imagination. Huge murals were emblazoned on its blitzed exterior walls. Steel sculptures advanced from its doorways onto the street. Layer upon layer of graffiti covered its stairwells, and rubbish collected in its alcoves like organic works-in-progress. Over the next 25 years hundreds of artists from around the world worked in its 30 studios: painting canvas, moulding clay, developing images, composing music, interpreting and distilling life.

‘Tacheles is a guerrilla movement. It’s a bastion,’ one resident artist-cum-squatter told me in 2010. ‘But today we’re under siege.’

By that year too much money had started to flow through swiftly gentrified Berlin for its artists to remain a guerrilla movement, let alone be communal and bohemian. Tacheles may have wanted to endure as an independent, public art house but Berliners – or at least their leaders and institutions – preferred sure profit over a utopian ideal. Within 24 months apartment prices in Mitte quadrupled. Aspiring painters and dancers took to worrying more about rent increases than their inner muse. Overnight the rent on the Tacheles building was raised from 50 cents to €17,000 … per month. When the co-operative did not pay, the property was seized and slated to become a €400 million ‘signature’ development of inner-city squares, apartments, restaurants and exclusive shops.

This speed of change – in reunited Germany as a whole but especially in Berlin – made it an ideal place in which to observe the forces and sensibilities that make and sustain (or undermine) an artist. On the following pages are interviews with 50 men and women who during those years chose to follow their passion, to break rules and make new ones, to reinvent themselves like the city itself. It is in no way a definitive list. My choices were guided by instinct, by serendipity and by the desire to produce a rounded, inclusive and informative portrait of individuals for whom creative work is the very point of being alive.

I believe that the creative spirit transforms the world. A gift of talent is bestowed on an artist and he or she labours in its service. The fruit of their toil is then offered to us all, where it in turn can awaken our individual gift or dream. Some of the artists interviewed believe that art is a weapon, others that art can heal, many found their voice in defiance of communist repression or capitalist materialism, others cite Russian literature, Christian iconography, Joseph Beuys, even Elvis Presley as their inspiration. In these pages all have aspired to articulate their creative process from a sensual, sensory or intellectual starting-point to the full expression in aesthetic beauty and purity of idea, and so remind us that there are as many ways of living and thinking as there are individuals.

This book would not have been possible without the support of the Goethe Institut, especially Jens Boyer, Sabine Hentzsch and Elisabeth Pyroth. All interviews are dated and appear in their original form, so as to be true to their time, and all have been updated with new information. Titles of books, songs and artworks have been translated – or not – at the request of the artists. As much of their work slips between disciplines, from poetry to photography and performance for example, chapter groupings should not be considered fixed or definitive. I am grateful to Katrin MacLean for translations and so much else, to Finn MacLean for the cover design, to Kerstin Hille for her wonderful illustrations (or better, illuminations) and above all to the artists themselves – free thinkers who turn the ordinary into the extraordinary and trusted me to share their ideas, stories and journeys with you.

Berlin 2016

Thomas Brussig

Early autumn leaves crunched and crackled under my wheels as I cycled along Pallas Strasse to lunch. Thomas Brussig, the cheeky, thoughtful, 43 year old Wunderkind of the new (East) German literature, had offered me a choice of Berlin restaurants. ‘Viennese schnitzel or Korean Catholicism?’ he had said. ‘It’s your call.’ I’d chosen Korean Catholicism of course; how could I do otherwise in reborn, open-minded Germany?

We perched on stools by the window, eating a spicy hot pot from heavy stone bowls, surrounded by Biblical quotes. The Korean waitress wore the Icthys Christian fish symbol on her apron. I wondered aloud about the importance of that other doctrine in Brussig’s work.

‘I grew up under communism,’ he told me. ‘Of course I was luckier than others. It was not so cruel for me because the times were changing. But there was a lot of anger in those days. I have paid in my life for writing my books.’

Brussig’s most successful book is Heroes Like Us, a bold and hilarious comedy of terrors set around the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s now been adapted for screen and stage, as well as translated into almost a dozen languages, but before all that it was a runaway best seller in Germany.

‘When the book was first published, there was a kind of relief in the east that you could make jokes about totalitarianism. People were happy that such a funny and crazy story could be brewed from those days. And in the west, reading about East Germany had always felt like a duty. Heroes Like Us demonstrated that reading about that life could be enjoyable. That’s the power and freedom of laughter!’

Brussig once said that East Germany makes a good story because there were so many absurd situations. In Heroes Like Us he wrote of the absurd iniquity of a death strip cutting through Berlin’s heart, of U-Bahn trains running beneath it, of a child spying on the Stasi, and of the penis responsible for bringing down the Berlin Wall.

‘I learnt a great deal from writing that book. For me, it was a kind of investigation into how literature works. I discovered the importance of exaggeration, of pushing ideas and characters further and further.’ He pulled a bottle of cola from the cooler. ‘I loved writing it. After all, if the author doesn’t enjoy writing a book, how can a reader enjoy reading it?’

Born in old East Berlin, Brussig had no early ambition to be a writer. In school he trained as a builder and found odd jobs as a museum guard and hotel porter. His spell in the Volksarmee was unhappy, not least because he had difficulty in wielding a weapon. But he discovered a love of reading, and that gave him a passion for words.

‘When I was young I had no clear direction for my life. Through reading I discovered that words could articulate my contradictory emotions. Suddenly I saw that I wasn’t alone, and I became fascinated by the ability to express myself on the page. So I started to write as a means of helping me to make decisions. Then I saw that I had a talent for it.’ Brussig laughed at himself. ‘In other words, I began writing because I didn’t know what I wanted to become, and in the process became a writer.’

Brussig is a humble man – no designer shades, no mobile phones cluttering the table – yet he radiates a boyish excitement for the unexpectedness of his success. He has written five other books, including Am Kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee which has been filmed by Leander Haussmann. At the moment he’s busy sketching out his next two books, as well as negotiating a movie contract. Refreshingly his interest in the cinema seems to be motivated – at least to some extent – by his hunger for life. ‘Film business people throw the best parties,’ he confided in me. ‘If I didn’t write screenplays I wouldn’t get invited to them.’

Beneath the walls of Biblical quotations in the café, our conversation turned both to Berlin (he considers the city to be free of dogma and autocrats, where rich and poor, young and old, can equally fashion a good living) and to Germany itself. Naturally – given his background – he is fascinated by questions of identity and nationalism. I reminded him that he once expressed a fear that a reunified Germany might ‘in a great failure of imagination’ carry on where it had left off in 1945. Unexpectedly he revealed that this fear of his had been swept aside by football.

‘During World War II the Nazis abused patriotic feelings. They created heroes who later turned out to be murderers. Then in the Sixties intellectuals responded by banning certain words and emotions. Since those days, there has been a little man inside every German head telling us not to trust our feelings.’

He swallowed a mouthful of cola and went on, ‘But during the 2006 World Cup, Germans realised that this had changed. We saw – in a kind of patriotic virginity – that we could show our pride, and still be liked. This in turn helped us to like ourselves again. We felt a healthy new patriotism that celebrated our technology, our generosity with development aid, our protection of the environment, our society that is totally non-unilateral. Strangers put their arms around each other and sang the national anthem. We realised that we were patriots of a new stripe. What a miracle!’

I told Brussig of my conviction that this change had come about as a consequence of Germans taking responsibility for their history. Modern Germany – in a courageous, humane and moving manner – has unearthed and memorialised its past for the psychic health of the country.

‘You are partly right,’ he replied. ‘Events often leave their traces in architecture, and we are good at preserving those buildings as witnesses to history. Usually. But of the socialist period that I knew, all that remains now is the TV Tower at Alexanderplatz. The Palast der Republik has been demolished, despite many protests. The Rathauspassagen has been westernised. Lenin’s monument has been removed even though he can’t harm anyone any longer. Above all I feel so sorry that nowhere can we still see a long stretch of the Berlin Wall, in all its naked brutality.’

If not the Socialist monuments themselves, Germans have Brussig’s remarkable books to remind them of that dark, bitter history, and his rich satire to help them come to terms with the emotion and pain of division. As he writes at the end of Sonnenallee, ‘Happy people have bad memory, but rich memories.’ At the end of our meal beneath the gospel, Brussig added, ‘Heroes Like Us is of course an ironic title, and irony is a very good means of creating distance and enabling one’s emotions to be examined.’

September 2008

***

Today Brussig remains at the heart of literary Berlin’s reflection and reinvention with his latest novel Das gibts in keinem Russenfilm and the libretto of the long-playing Udo Lindenberg musical Hinterm Horizont.

‘Since 2008 I’ve lost 15 kilo in weight,’ he writes with tongue still firmly in cheek. ‘Wonder how I did it? By not eating after 5 p.m. and by becoming a father. Plus I have discovered a secret recipe for sustaining a good mood; write children books. I am working now on a remake of the East German classic, Auguste, the Christmas Goose. Its author Friedrich Wolf was a doctor, dramatist, Moscow refugee during the Nazi years and the father of two sons: Konrad, who became a famous director and patron of my film school, and Markus who became the infamous Stasi spy and inspiration for John Le Carré’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold. Working on Friedrich Wolf’s children’s book always puts me in a good mood, yet I can’t help but wonder; what will become of my son?’

www.thomasbrussig.de

Michael Schindhelm

‘My identity is unfinished,’ said Michael Schindhelm when we met at his home on the Côte d’Azur. ‘I have lived abroad for so long that I don’t necessarily consider myself to be much of a German artist. Yet Germany and the German language remain central pillars in my identity.’

Schindhelm’s remarkable life journey has taken him from quantum chemistry through literary translation to theatre, film, television and books. He has worked in Basel, Berlin and Beijing, lived in Moscow, Dubai and Hong Kong. His colleagues have been as diverse as Chancellor Angela Merkel, with whom he worked as a chemist in the 1980s, and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. He is an advisor to the Zurich University of the Arts and a member of the board of trustees of the German Food Initiative Welthungerhilfe. Around the world he now lectures on – and tries to define – ‘global culture’.

Schindhelm’s journey began in Eisenach in 1960.

‘The East Germany that I grew up in was a kind of prison,’ he told me. ‘My home was near to the West German border. I could climb a hill near our house and see that country. Yet I couldn’t visit it. It was nearly impossible to imagine freedom, except by watching West German television. This had an enormous impact on my development as it forced me and my family to live a double life: distrusting the reality around us, depending on personal, private values.’

As a young man Schindhelm felt no sense of identity with East German society. Like many of his generation, he felt that he had to ‘camouflage’ himself. In order to escape the ‘prison’ he went to Merseburg’s School of Natural Sciences, because it exempted him from military service, and then moved to the Soviet Union to study quantum chemistry.

‘Suddenly I was free of my provincial country,’ he recalled. ‘The university was a kind of global village with students from Oman, Mauritius, Vietnam, even the UK. I immersed myself in its international community.’

In the USSR Schindhelm broke rules, as he has continued to