Theatre maker Claus Peymann dies at the age of 88

Berlin. Hanover: "At borders, I always say: You're examining the wrong place. The dangerous part of me isn't in my suitcase, but in my head." This quip comes from Claus Peymann, provocateur by principle, self-proclaimed king of the theater, and longtime artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble. Now the theater rebel has died in Berlin at the age of 88.

Peymann – born in 1937 – first made national headlines in 1974. The then Stuttgart theater director donated for dentures for the imprisoned RAF terrorist Gudrun Ensslin. In the book "Peymann from A to Z," he notes that this was an act of charity: Ensslin's mother had written to him that the dentist in Stammheim drilled without anesthesia. From 1986 to 1999, Peymann was director of the Vienna Burgtheater. There, he caused a scandal in 1988 with Thomas Bernhard's "Heldenplatz," which exposed Austrians' connection to National Socialism. From 1999 to 2017, the artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble played the "fang in the ass of the powerful," offered former RAF terrorist Christian Klar an internship, and quarreled with playwright Rolf Hochhuth, who died in 2020, over the use of the building on Schiffbauerdamm. Peymann's companions included US director Robert Wilson, authors such as Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek, and his friend George Tabori, whom he described on his 100th birthday as a "life clown" and a "big, bad child" even in his advanced years.

That would probably also be a fitting description for Peymann, who brazenly interfered in Berlin's theater politics and, for example, loudly criticized the involuntary departure of Frank Castorf as head of the Berliner Volksbühne. "I am the theater of tomorrow!" Peymann cheekily declared at the age of 72 before a visit to the Leipzig Skala in 2015.

In personal conversations, he was surrounded by an aura of megalomania, yet mingled with charm and a twinkle in his eye. The foreword to his autobiography states: "He is the childish, advertising-savvy agitator who, in his sandbox, makes the earth shake with shovels and buckets." Peymann described himself as an incorrigible do-gooder. "When, for example, Picasso paints 'Guernica' in response to the bombing of Spain, thereby triggering a scandal, that is a form of awareness-raising." And the same is true of theater: It can uncover hidden truths.

However, it's no longer so easy to spark a debate with theater. "Because people can't get excited about anything anymore; they just want to have short-term fun. Then I feel like an anachronistic mammoth. But they've survived quite a long time, too."