2023-10-21 17:04:00
Berlin, we are sitting in the empty director’s meeting room. Iris Laufenberg, the new one at the Deutsches Theater, is absent. Tilla Durieux is leaning on the floor in an oval frame, painted by Franz von Stuck as Circe, in front of a poster from which Ulrich Matthes grins. And one of the house’s female ensemble stars is waiting at the large table with a glass of water: Maren Eggert. She was born in Hamburg in 1974 and completed her acting training at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich from 1994 to 1998. After a guest engagement in Zurich, she played at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, where she met her husband Peter Jordan, and was then a member of the ensemble at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.
She has been working at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin since autumn 2009. Maren Eggert and Matthias Brandt were awarded the German Critics’ Prize in 2008 for her performance in “The Woman at the End of the Street”. In Dominik Graf’s “The Vow” she portrayed Bettina von Arnim. Television audiences know her as police psychologist Frieda Jung, who she played alongside Axel Milberg in the Kiel “Tatorten” from 2003 to 2010 and 2015. In 2021 she received the Silver Bear at the Berlinale and the German Film Prize for her leading role in Maria Schrader’s “I am your person”. Below, Maren Eggert speaks in her own words about the books that have shaped her reading life.
Haruki Murakami: Wild Sheep Hunt
I’ve read almost everything by him. I like how he shifts reality between worlds. I find that particularly exciting. And that’s what I like to look for when I read. I read a lot of fiction and like to immerse myself in other people’s fantasies. For me, this goes back to my childhood. What I particularly like about his heroes is that they cook a lot. This one warms up coffee regularly, very strange. By the way, I’m prone to cooking and eating in books!
I’ve never been to Japan, I wanted to, then came Fukushima, and then we had children, so that’s taking a while now. I came across the book through a friend, as I generally like having books recommended to me. And we found the unnamed first-person narrator’s enthusiasm for his girlfriend’s ears particularly fascinating. By the way, I no longer know how it will turn out. This happens to me often. But it’s fine. I can read the books again with peace of mind.
Otfried Preußler: Krabat
I read a lot as a child and there are a lot of things that influenced me. But this is an advanced children’s book that grabbed me even more than his other books, precisely because it is so mystical, but still realistic. There’s also a love story, a murder mystery, it’s set in the past, and it’s scary. I have a penchant for lonely main characters and was rooting for how difficult it is for Krabat to find a friend. I later found the magic aspect again in “Harry Potter”.
I haven’t seen the film adaptation because I usually don’t like what it does to my reading fantasies. But I’m now seeing with my children that the film adaptations are becoming more and more dominant. My children prefer to read funny things. When I think of old mills I always think of this book. And at some point I would like to take a look at this Lausitz landscape.
also read
also read
Preußler’s lost years
Siri Hustvedt: What I love
A women’s book, as people like to say. I recently had a long conversation about it with my colleague Moritz Grove, who knew it very well. When I read it again, my father had just died, and because I had once again forgotten the ending, I was completely lost in the boy’s death in this double family portrait. But the other boy also fell into drugs. A sensitive topic that I have been confronted with again and again in a professional context throughout my life.
I myself come from a very sheltered background. This touches me, worries me and takes me away, which is why I keep dealing with it fictionally. Why is this happening? And why in this way? Addiction, crashes, the loss of a healthy mentality, that also runs through the content of my job. And because it has to do with fiction, I’m obviously looking for other fictions; I could also read non-fiction books. But I also definitely have a scientific streak.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: Awakening lions
I received the book as a gift. The Israeli author tells about a couple from a changing perspective. He’s a surgeon who runs over an illegal immigrant and commits a hit-and-run. And is later caught by his widow, who forces him to help her people free of charge. This is a really exciting, great book. Not too exciting, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep. A change from poems and long-winded things. I like to read things like that in the evenings. Since I had the children, however, I like to get up half an hour earlier in the morning and read the more difficult things. This stimulates me for the day, is like an anchor, and also a little meditative.
John Irving: The Hotel New Hampshire
I read that very early on and over and over again because I somehow felt a kinship with this unconventional, constantly moving family. They have such a certain way of dealing with each other that I immediately felt at home. They are such touching characters, like how the sister develops into a self-confident woman. I myself am more influenced by a hierarchical male world, which is why I like characters who demonstrate this to me differently. Even then, I didn’t like the film adaptation at all. Probably because it’s a favorite book that I’ve referred to again and again. The South Americans with their ghosts, on the other hand, I don’t really care about them; somehow I like North American sagas more, and much later I was fascinated by Jonathan Franzen’s “Corrections”. Not so fond of his later books, but pretty much everything by John Irving.
Source: A. Röckl / DT
Judith Hermann: Summer house, later
After graduating from high school in Hamburg, I went to Berlin to simply work and be somewhere else. That was in 1993. When I read the book back then, it somehow fit my attitude to life and reflected it. Now I may not be able to do much with these situational, laconic stories, characters and encounters in and around Berlin, mostly without a plot. Every time also has a feeling for life – it may have just fit the feeling at the time and his, i.e. my, time. But now I realized that the volume was only published in 1998, when I was already at the Falkenberg acting school in Munich. So that means I projected my Berlin sentiment into it, interesting. I’m not really a fan of short stories, but I was drawn to this book at the time. Nobody knew where to go or what would happen to him. I was a little out of the ordinary back then and wanted to get into art, which was totally unusual in my family.
Emily Brontë: Storm Heights
I hesitated for a long time between this book and Charlotte Brontë’s very different Jane Eyre. But in any case it had to be one of the two. What I admire about the latter is the orderliness, the psychological perspective that she has on the characters. Charlotte gives even the dark a form. And with Emily I like that incoherent, emotional, thoughtless quality.
That sounds so cliché, but I find the unbridled passions of the characters, the bottomless, destructive nature, written by such a young woman, particularly remarkable. Especially how she describes nature. When I first read this I thought: Yes, that’s how love has to be. So powerful, so big that you don’t even know where to put it. Of course, that’s where my dramatic streak comes out.
Heinrich von Kleist: Prince of Homburg
For me, Kleist is the master, I have a dislike for Goethe and Schiller, they are too perfect for me. And I don’t particularly like her image of women, there’s a lot of resistance when playing, it’s too heady for me. I also have an aversion to Goethe’s life, the narrow life of Weimar. Kleist is always on the brink, but then life goes wrong. He attracts me.
This situational language, these ahs and ohs. Where is that located in the body, or emotionally, what is that supposed to express? And in this piece, again a hierarchical men’s story, especially. I can almost every word of the text, also because, when I was fresh out of school, I played a lady-in-waiting in the Dieter Dorn production at the Kammerspiele. Of course, I also learned to play Natalie, but I was particularly impressed by Gisela Stein as the elector.
Bernadine Evaristo: Girl Woman etc.
I just read that. I loved how different biographies are interwoven here from a people of color perspective. Always told from the respective perspective, but with points of contact, so that a kind of novel emerges. There were completely new living conditions for me, especially due to the very successful change of perspective. Each person is described in a different, appropriate language. Some women I like, some less. But I understand them as they have been analyzed. This was fun for me, as I always have to take on the role of strangers on stage and study characters. I’m looking for these new perspectives that move me out of my known world.
Stefan Zweig: Maria Stuart
Also an absolute favorite book. Even though it’s actually so old-fashioned. He has done an excellent job of creating a fictional biography here. I don’t really know who Mary Stuart was, but his empathy makes me identify with her. I don’t find anything historical there, but rather it comes very close to a character and the circumstances of the time. With Schiller it’s more focused on the conflict with Elisabeth, but both are great roles, I couldn’t decide which one I’d rather play. I want to understand people and contexts that have influenced a biography. Here I find it totally successful and fascinating. I feel safe in Zweig’s language.
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