Barbara Wurm (BW): Sandra, we are very happy that you are here at the Forum with this film. When did your interest in Einar Schleef begin? And when did it become so strong that you knew it would become a film?
Sandra Prechtel (SP): Unfortunately, I haven't seen a single stage production by Einar Schleef, even though I've been living in Berlin since '91. I was always at the Volksbühne, following the Castorf era. And when I did go, it was to see Heiner Müller at the Berliner Ensemble or to the Deutsches Theater. So I didn't know him as a theater director or as an author, but got to know him as a painter, even though that's actually the least known aspect of his work. He says of himself that he failed as a painter because he has too much training and actually only produces plagiarism. But I didn't think that at all. In 2008, I was in Halle an der Saale, not far from Sangerhausen, his birthplace. And there was an exhibition in an empty Karstadt building [a department store chain] by a man called Einar Schleef, the painter. I was really blown away by these huge panel paintings. Much of it comes from the Germany cycle. There is a great series called ‘Klage’ (Lament), which features life-size telephone booths with a lonely man inside, talking on the phone behind the glass, his image blurred. He painted this in West Berlin as an expression of his absolute isolation when he fled to the West. Then I bought the photo book ‘Zuhause’ (At Home) with photos he took as a young man in his hometown. And they also impressed me very much. But what impressed me most were his texts. The initial spark for the film came in 2019, when a big Schleef evening was held at HAU [in Berlin] on his 75th birthday. There were already documentaries about him. Fabian Hinrichs gave a great speech, Masha Qrella set one of his stories to music – that's when I really fell in love. Especially with the documentaries. Experiencing how he speaks, how he moves, his very special gestures and facial expressions, his stutter, which also plays a big role in my film.
Carolin Weidner (CW): What happened next?
SP: I realized that there was no long film about this person, and the decision was made. Since then, I've been deeply immersed, especially in the diaries. That was my main source before I went to the archive. I had never made an archive film before and I am used to shooting with a question in mind, which means that the material is already shaped. And now I suddenly had these endless mountains of material. He also took thousands and thousands of photos. The diaries—I don't know how many pages there are. ‘Gertrud’ is a thousand pages. I wasn't sure what it would mean to work my way through it all. But the crazy thing is, and I can say this even now: the fascination has never waned. It's completely crazy. It doesn't wear off. It's just turned into an ever-greater closeness.
The fascination has never waned. It's completely crazy. It doesn't wear off.
CW: Was it easy to gain access to this material?
SP: I was incredibly lucky. There was a film by Heiner Sylvester, who knew Schleef from his time in East Berlin. He filmed with Schleef in '92 and '93 and made a film. I contacted him and he simply gave me 40 hours of footage. He said, ‘Here, come to my house and copy it all.’ Of course, there was a getting-to-know-you phase, but he really trusted me. That was incredible. And then another miracle happened. There was another film about Schleef, ‘Faust als Emigrant’ (Faust as an Emigrant), made by a woman. But she didn't want to give me the material, and then tragically, she died while I was already editing. Her widower then made all of this footage available to me as well. That was about 20 hours. My whole concept shifted because I didn't know there would be so much footage of Schleef. I thought I would mainly edit the film from diary entries and photos.
CW: Were there additional audio recordings, or did you extract the soundtrack from all the film footage?
SP: I think my greatest find was actually the audio files in the archives of the Academy of Arts. They have the entire estate, apart from the visual works. That's where I discovered that Schleef had been recording himself the whole time. It started back in the 1970s when he was directing a play. Or for his novel ‘Getrud’, which is about his mother and is written in the first person. He becomes Getrud in this text, which he read to himself over and over again, trying out different voices. The way in which he speaks the role of the mother with a more feminine voice or with an angry one. That was like a key, because it allowed me to construct the moments for which I had no audio recordings of him in such a way that you can really hear him, that you can feel him. In these intimate recordings, you can hear him walking around his apartment. You can hear the floorboards creaking, the birds outside, the ambulance. You can hear him breathing, and because of his stutter, his breathing is also part of his speech. That was an incredible find. Without it, the film wouldn't have turned out the way it is now.
You can hear the floorboards creaking, you can hear the birds outside, the ambulance. You can hear him breathing.
CW: Did you set yourself a deadline for working on the material? I can imagine you could go on forever.
SP: Exactly—I just couldn't stop. When I started editing, I didn't feel like I had an overview at all, but I thought I had to somehow clear a path. And the most difficult part of the editing process was that we kept getting new material. There was a photographer who always photographed him in Frankfurt, Ute Schendel, and suddenly she called me and said: ‘Yes, Sandra, I've found a suitcase now too. It's full of videotapes I shot during Schleef rehearsals.’ And then suddenly another box of videotapes arrived. And that's how it went the whole time. That's basically how I got to know Schleef's entire circle.
BW: That's actually typical of him – he automatically formed a kind of cluster. So this circle of friends, fans, employees, colleagues, it's all somehow very homogeneous and almost harmonious, considering that he was such a controversial figure. How did you work with the editor?
SP: It was important to me that it was someone from the East, because I myself come from the West. And then it was someone whose uncle was a big Schleef fan and who is also from Berlin: Olaf Voigtländer. I came up with him because he edited major archive films, RIEFENSTAHL [2024, directed by Andres Veiel] and BEUYS [2017, directed by Andres Veiel], which are very different in style, but I definitely needed someone who had experience with archive films. And it was a great working process. He didn't know much about Schleef, but at the same time we had many conversations about East-West issues, about things that I, in turn, couldn't really assess. That was a very good compass. Everyone who worked with the material was immediately drawn in. And the fact that Schleef provoked so many contradictions and was so often pushed to his limits because he encountered so much resistance—I think that's something that is sorely missed and appreciated today. Perhaps because there is hardly anyone who is so unopportunistic.
[...] that Schleef provoked so many contradictions and was so often pushed to his limits because he encountered so much resistance – I think that's something we miss and appreciate so much today.
CW: How did you approach the work of editing?
SP: You think carefully about where to open these windows into his biography, where to remain in the theatrical examination of reality. You can't just pull that out of a chronology. Because he develops formally from production to production, but that is also always a reflection of social conditions. And that was a criterion for me: which plays do I choose? They are the ones in which I see the themes that Schleef's work stirs up in me. That is German history and the theme of war. It also really creepily topical, I could hardly bear it. So that was our path, and I also knew that I had to end with the Nietzsche performance.
CW: I'd like to briefly return to the East-West theme. I came across an interview with you in ‘Der Freitag’ with Matthias Dell from 2008, on the occasion of your film ‘Sportfreund Lötzsch’. In it, you say: ‘Conversely, I would like to see more people who grew up in the East taking an interest in the Federal Republic, looking at it with their own eyes and giving me a different picture.’ Did Schleef fulfill that wish for you to some extent?
SP: Yes, absolutely. It's crazy that I said that in 2008. Because ultimately, that was what interested me most about Schleef: his view of Western society. In the early 1980s, he gave an interview to Hessischer Rundfunk, which also appears in the film. It was a succinct description of society, as concrete as only Schleef can be. Never from above with some theory, but rather he just observes how people drive cars. He describes how people crowd into the subway and those going in don't let those coming out get off. It's also his theme that war lives on, lives on in people. At the same time, it's completely non-ideological. And his view of the East is just as uncorrupted as his view of the West. He doesn't pit one system against the other, but sees the same ruthlessness in both. At some point, that infiltrates him. The result is a great deal of despair and negativity.
CW: How did it affect you to deal with a person and his pain so intensively for so long?
SP: I actually didn't feel well at times, but that was also because the material was too much for me. It was a mixture of many things. Of course, it plays a role: he went through severe depression, and that is very noticeable in the texts. At the same time, I think that at the moment I can almost only respond with quotes from Schleef. He once said very beautifully how sad he finds it that it is often no longer possible to ‘pump yourself up’ with authors such as Goethe, Schiller, or Hauptmann in stage productions. For him, these are artists who put their whole lives into their work—and that should actually shine through again. In the case of Schleef, this is extreme.
He doesn't view the world from the outside, he suffers it. And yet he has tremendous energy and strength.
Despite his capacity for suffering, I would describe him less as depressed and more as someone who cannot keep his surroundings at a distance. He doesn't view the world from the outside, he suffers it. And yet he has tremendous energy and strength. I really hope that this comes across in the film, because this energy has always carried me away enormously. And when I read further in the texts, especially in the diary passages—he himself calls them ‘lamentations’—this becomes particularly clear once again. They are not actually diaries, but books of lamentations. You can only read them in limited doses; you have to pace yourself. But nevertheless, when he speaks, he has such power. I was able to pump myself up with him. I also imagine that we would have gotten along well. But maybe I would have just been a spoiled West German brat to him.
CW: Did you double check with people from his circle throughout the process, show them scenes?
SP: Yes, I did that with Heiner Sylvester and especially with Hans-Ulrich Müller-Schwefe. The latter was his editor and also dramaturge in all of his Frankfurt theatre productions. He basically ensured that Suhrkamp printed all of Schleef's texts in the 1980s. He accompanied the project the whole time, read the first draft of the treatment, and I always had the feeling that he approved of it. He does miss the very funny Schleef a little, but the rehearsal material, which conveys the dedication with which he worked with people, shows the joy and happiness, and that comforted him.
BW: I'm still thinking about the diverse and complex image of Germany that emerges in your film. Can you elaborate on how you reflected on this and made your selections?
SP: First of all, it emerges along the lines of the theatre productions. Elfriede Jelinik, whose ‘Ein Sportstück’ [Sports Play] he directed, deals with National Socialism and German history anyway. ‘Gertrud’ is a biography spanning a century, about a woman who was born in the German Empire and experienced Hitler's Germany, then the GDR, and then reunified Germany. Schleef himself saw this biography in exactly the same way. Someone said it was a biography ‘from underneath’ because it is so close to German sensibilities. A second editor who was involved in the film at the end, Katja Dringenberg, says you can smell the sauerkraut, the German stuffiness. Between sauerkraut and Nietzsche, so to speak. And then, of course, there was ‘Faust’. That was a key for me. I read Schleef's book ‘Droge Faust Parsifal’ (Drug Faust Parsifal) and ‘Faust’ is simply the work he dealt with most. He reads it as a blueprint, so to speak, in which National Socialism is already looming. In his Frankfurt poetry lecture on the subject, he utters the incredible sentence: ‘Weimar and Buchenwald belong together.’ For me, this sentence is the core of the film. I also had material from Schleef in New York. And what does he do? He quotes ‘Faust’ on the Hudson River. That's when I realized that this is also the theme of the film: his many attempts to escape. He keeps coming back to this prison of his own biography, which is both his origin and his roots. This tension is also evident in his love for Schubert and songs like ‘Der Wanderer’ (The Wanderer): Songs of homelessness. Who has an unbroken relationship with their origins, family, country? Schleef found a precision of expression for this that I have rarely seen elsewhere. For me, ‘Der Wanderer’ is actually Schleef himself.
He keeps coming back to this prison of his own biography, which is both his origin and his roots.
CW: I watched your films LIEBE ANGST and ROLAND KLICK – THE HEART IS A HUNGRY HUNTER and I think that overall there is this eerie continuum of war. In the Klick film, David Hess even says about Roland Klick: ‘The war wasn't over for him.’ It seems to me that this carries over to your protagonists as a whole.
SP: I think that comes from psychoanalysis, where they say that in every family there is someone who bears the cross. Someone who takes on the family history. And in my family history, that was me. I definitely want to revisit it, but for LIEBE ANGST I first needed another family to confront myself. Maybe it also has something to do with teachers. I studied with Hella Tiedemann, who in turn studied with Adorno. That probably influenced me. My father was also very interested in the history of the GDR, so we traveled through the GDR as early as 1990. The first thing I noticed there was that ‘the war hadn’t finished’, because all the war damage was still visible. Also, part of my family comes from Berlin, but unfortunately, nothing is left of it. The other issue, and I find this much more terrible, is that I feel I now have to deal with the subject of war—how it is talked about and how it appears in the media. In my next project, I wouldn't look back, but rather look at ‘What's happening right now?’ I think Schleef is a sad prophet in that regard. The downfall of the GDR, the neo-Nazi scene – he saw it all coming very early on.
BW: What fascinates you about the film portrait genre?
SP: To be honest, I've never thought about it, but it's a very good question. Ultimately, it always works when something first moves me not on an intellectual level, but on a very emotional level—when someone tells me something that I probably wouldn't be able to put into words myself. Both Schleef and Klick could be my fathers; they belong to the father generation, the war children generation. My parents were born during the war. And I think I wanted to understand something about this generation through these characters. My own father didn't express himself artistically, but maybe that was exactly the impulse. A portrait is ideal for this because you have the material and can build your own image from it. With Schleef, I only chose the works in which I felt that he brought himself to the stage—Faust, for example: Martin Wuttke as Faust is also Schleef for me. From sound, images, language, texts, photographs, and Super 8 material, I was able to form an image that perhaps conveys a German feeling—one of many possible ones.
