Theater, Manufacturing, and the Ship of Women: Interview with Stefan Schutz

Abstract

Schuitz: I think the decisive factor was being powerless against a state, against people who have power. The only possibility to defend myself would be to express my rage in the theater, or to paint pictures, or to compose music. I happened to start to write. I think it was a strong reaction against the atrocities of institutions. It was a reaction that had a lot to do with my life up till then it still has to do with my life now. My love for the theater was almost inevitable. Both my parents were actors; my mother was a dancer, too. Yet my actual involvement with the institutions of theater has always been quite marginal, and often by chance. When I was seventeen years old things were going terribly for me; at one point I just left home and took off for the border to get to my father who lived in the West. This was the spring of 1962, just after the Berlin Wall went up. I crossed the border in broad daylight of course I was caught. I was still a minor, so I was lucky and was only in jail a couple of months. When I got out there was no way that I could have finished school. I didn't want to work in a factory, so I went to acting school and got my diploma. I had jobs here and there, but nothing really worked out. Then in 1970 I suddenly got my draft notice. After half a year in the army I was in total shock. It wasn't an act to get out, I was really sick it was absolutely psychological. They had to discharge me as unfit for service. After that I got a job in Berlin at the Deutsches Theater. We started working on Lumumba by Aim6 Cesaire. It was a very good play, and the work on the production was exciting. But there was a lot of criticism of the production on the part of the authorities, and we became involved in heated arguments and debate. The upshot of it was that the production wasn't approved and it never got onto the stage. I had been a member of the Party, the SED, for a few years, and around the matter of the production I was expelled. I was forced to leave the Deutsches Theater, too. I was so enraged that at one point I sat down and wrote a play about it all, a theater farce. There was no other way for me to defend myself. That's how it all started.