Dieter Mann - obituary: The art of the narrow lip

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Dieter Mann, celebrated on the theater stage: "I don't know if I would have been as possible in the West as I was really allowed to be in the East."

Photo:

Event press Hoensch / picture-alliance

In the role of the rebel, he became famous.

You can find that ironic, because rebelliousness was quite foreign to him all his life and he liked being partisan of a noble concept of culture.

Dieter Mann, who has now died at the age of 80, was considered the James Dean of the GDR in the 1970s, at least that's how it can be read.

This was due to the leading role in Ulrich Plenzdorf's play Die Neue Leiden des Jungs Junge W., which was also published as a novel, and which Mann played more than 300 times on the stage of the Deutsches Theater from 1972 onwards.

Outstanding, serious, strict

A guy with long, tousled hair, dressed in wide trousers and a waistcoat reminiscent of a hippie, that's how you see him in theater pictures from back then, crouching proudly on a step, his eyes concentrated and grimly lowered to the ground.

He resembles a bit - in the role of the madly in love Plenzdorf hero - the Doors singer Jim Morrison, who also always carried out his work in the service of art with great seriousness.

Dieter Mann was an outstanding, serious, strict Berlin actor and yet a darling of the audience.

He played in various "Polizeiruf 110" episodes during the GDR era.

He appeared in the film »Berlin Around the Corner« (1966) by Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, which was censored by the censors, and in comedies with titles like »Yes, That's a Man I Am!« (1982).

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he appeared as BKA chief Horst Herold in Heinrich Breloer's RAF film »Todesspiel« (1997) and as Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in Oliver Hirschbiegel's bunker drama »Der Untergang« (2004).

Above all, however, he was a Berlin theater star who, in his early twenties, already inspired the then important critic Herbert Ihering, who described him as "thinking, witty, boyish, protesting, enthusiastic".

"With caution and prudence"

For a while Dieter Mann also had power in the stage business.

From 1984 to 1991 he was director of the Deutsches Theater, at least in part co-determined by the ensemble.

The actress Barbara Schnitzler, who was Mann's partner for a while, praised him for doing the job “with caution and prudence”.

He himself said that he sees himself as a fighter for a "precise theater" in which "more is communicated than mumbled.

Language is important - otherwise I'm offended, as a spectator and as an actor.«

The performance artist Mann, trained in the later Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, which at the time had a different name, came from a proletarian background.

His father was toiling away as a laborer when Dieter Mann was born in the middle of the Second World War, and his mother earned extra money with sewing work.

At the age of 14, Mann began an apprenticeship as a lathe operator.

According to socialist custom, the employees of the company received free tickets for the theater and opera, which is how his enthusiasm for the stage began.

A government scholarship helped him to copy his high school diploma.

While he was still studying acting, he was engaged at the Deutsches Theater.

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Dieter Mann, 2009

Photo:

Uwe Zucchi / dpa

Looking back on his career, Mann formulated the perhaps somewhat stilted but beautiful sentence: "I don't know whether I would have been as possible in the West as I was really allowed to be in the East." He also retained his fundamental loyalty to the GDR after reunification.

This proved his straightforwardness, but was also interpreted by some as political and biographical dogmatism.

»Devotion yes, surrender no«

Mann played at the Burgtheater in Vienna and at Frank Castorf's Volksbühne, directed by the host.

He took on a role in the hit television series »The Last Witness« for 32 episodes.

He appeared, reliably with tight-lipped accuracy, as a reciter of high literature.

He was much employed and celebrated as a radio play and audio book speaker.

The critic Irene Bazinger called Mann's life review in book form »witty« and »modest to the point of vulnerability«.

Mann did not write the book himself.

It consists of conversations with the theater critic Hans-Dieter Schütt, who has admired him since his early years.

In it, the artist says of his ties to the GDR that he always “believed that we would make progress”.

Elsewhere in the book, the award-winning actor Dieter Mann, who died in Berlin on Thursday, formulates his working motto: »Dedication yes, disclosure no.«