Eat.
The great theater maker Jürgen Flimm is dead. Memories of a man who had an opinion on everything from streusel cake to Shakespeare.
Encounters with Jürgen Flimm were pure surprises. When it came to operas, he ranted unasked about weaknesses in the German defense (in football!). Our last meeting was about Shakespeare, but Jürgen Flimm spent a quarter of an hour in his Berlin director’s office raving about the crumble cake he had served up especially for the guest from the Ruhr. “The king of cakes!” exclaimed the still unmistakably Cologne-born Jung, munching with relish, only to churn out wonderful printables seconds later: “Of course Kohl would be a Shakespearean character, this old man who can hardly speak anymore. This life before that: the coup attempts against him by people he took. That’s theater stuff. He’s finished, then suddenly the wall falls and he grows up again. Then the donation scandal – and years later his successor came and gave him herself as a stamp: a flattened, rasterized large photo on cardboard. What a crash! It’s tragic, funny, everything is there.” Flimm laughed heartily.
The man was always a gifted entertainer. The theater that he gave to his audience for almost 60 years at all his stations from Cologne to Salzburg to what was perhaps the most important time at the Hamburg Thalia Theater (15 years!) was in the best cases the opposite of an audience refusal that was also on the rise for a long time. How Flimm – often in the sensuous stage designs of Rolf Glittenberg and Erich Wonders – read “King Lear” as a glamorous, bloody thriller, how his “Faust” brooded in the oppressive narrowness of Murnau’s famous silent film, how he let it rain a hundred punch lines when he Nestroy celebrated, these were always testimonies that good theater is great seduction.
The great director Jürgen Flimm died at the age of 81
The disarmingly affable “et is wie et is” should certainly not cause anyone to doubt Jürgen Flimm’s sense of power. He could also deal with politicians. He was ambitious, he took what he could get. Sometimes you didn’t know how he did all that: head of the Salzburg Festival and partly the Ruhrtriennale at the same time (2005-2008), no one was able to do that before or after. Even if some critics saw his artistic star on the wane: Jürgen Flimm’s crowning glory was, from 2010, the directorship of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. The doctor’s son also held on to the office when he suffered a life-threatening stroke almost ten years ago. He fought back, his time only ended in 2018.
This great German theater maker died on Saturday at the age of 81. Mischievous, always straightforward, melancholic and highly gifted string puller. An unmistakable has left the stage. It grows back little from its stroke.
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