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Jutta Lampe in the film »Sisters or The Balance of Happiness« 1979
Photo: ddp images
Her soft, sad face was often marked with pain and rarely with shy joy.
This face stands for a lot of what was great and creepy about the sensitivity art of the West Germans before the fall of the wall.
The actress Jutta Lampe was a star actress at the Berlin Schaubühne;
Solveig in Peter Stein's famous "Peer Gynt" production from 1971.
And she was a defining face in the Federal Republic of Germany's auteur cinema through roles in Margarethe von Trotta's films, including “Die Bleierne Zeit” from 1981. “I dreamed of you,” says journalist and terrorist sister Juliane, with Jutta lamp in her ponytail embodied bundled red hair while visiting her imprisoned sister (Barbara Sukowa) in prison.
"I dreamed that I would set you free."
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Jutta Lampe in Peter Stein's »Cherry Orchard« production, Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, 1989
Photo: Ludwig Binder / ullstein bild - Binder
Actress Jutta Lampe, who died shortly before her 83rd birthday in Berlin, combined the dreamy and the combative in many of her roles in a gorgeous way.
She was born in Flensburg, grew up in Kiel, danced ballet as a child and learned her trade in Hamburg from the acting teacher Eduard Marks.
Then, at the age of 29, she met director Peter Stein in the Bremen theater.
It was a »life encounter«, she said about working with Stein on Schiller's »Kabale und Liebe« production.
In her previous theater roles, she often felt "pushed back and forth on the stage," said Lampe in an interview.
“On the other hand, we sat with Stein and talked for a long time about each sentence and what it means, what is meant by it.
At some point we went on stage and Stein said, calm down, just be who you are and try to understand the meaning of this text. "
Highly intelligent radiation
Oh dear, how soft as wool and therapy group-like sounds the description of this collective search for meticulous text penetration today!
Fifty years ago it was almost revolutionary.
As an artist collective, Lampe, her temporary partner Stein and a dream team of great actresses and actors such as Edith Clever, Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz moved to the Berlin Schaubühne in 1970, which was then located on Halleschen Ufer.
A co-determination model inspired by the struggles of the 1968 stipulated that in the Schaubühne "all artistic employees in the selection of plays and program policy" were allowed to have a say in practically equal terms.
This led to loud internal palaver and the indignation of conservative city politicians.
The CDU man Peter Lorenz assumed that the theater people were "activities clearly directed against the existence of the city".
In fact, the directors of the house soon cared less about politics than careful exploration of classic and halfway current theater literature.
In the early 1970s, for example, Klaus Michael Grüber staged Shakespeare's "Hamlet" - she was Ophelia - and Horvath's "Tales from the Vienna Woods" with a lamp.
In Stein's 1974 staging of Chekhov's “Three Sisters”, which was soon to be canonized, Lampe threw herself face down on a divan in the role of Mascha, and she was also an acclaimed star in works by the supersensitist Luc Bondy.
The strangely clumsy way in which she moved her slim body, the always a little sluggish look, her melodious, always a little singing voice gave her the aura of a highly interesting, highly intelligent radiation.
Among the directors of the German auteur cinema, Margarethe von Trotta was evidently by far the only one who understood Lampe's complicated art of representation as an invitation to cooperation.
"Perhaps a soul, a spirit"
In Trotta's 1979 film »Sisters or the Balance of Happiness«, as in »Die Bleierne Zeit« two years later, Lampe is the more down-to-earth, more tangible, smarter and more painful of two sisters.
In the first of the two films, she sits smiling at the wheel of a BMW driving along a wintry country road, in the second she poses for a camera on a summer balcony - and in both scenes you immediately understand that Jutta Lampe is actually the one on the screen too Had the strength for even bigger, wilder, perhaps more popular roles.
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Jutta Lampe with Rüdiger Vogler in the film »Die Bleierne Zeit« (1981)
Photo: United Archives / imago images
She was expressly praised by priestly theater fans like Botho Strauss, in whose plays she made splendid appearances, for largely staying away from film and television work.
On stage she became a legendary actress even in her lifetime.
In 1999 she left the Schaubühne ensemble after almost three decades, not without expressing her sadness.
Jutta Lampe wasn't a princess, she was a queen and the pea.
Despite all her vulnerability, he always experienced her "as a grande dame," said the current Schaubühnen director Thomas Ostermeier on Thursday about her on the phone, a "special refinement" had distinguished Lampes Spiel.
In 2007 she reported in an interview with FAZ journalist Irene Bazinger about herself: »I never felt like a broken person.
There were problems, fears, feelings of guilt, I did psychotherapy to come to terms with myself.
But I always knew that there was something in me, maybe a soul, a spirit that I wanted to bring to life. "
In all of her roles, Jutta Lampe told of the pride, the cleverness and the modesty that speak from these sentences.
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