Dear Fellows, welcome to Berlin!

Am 28. Januar habe ich für die neuen Fellows der The American Academy in Berlin die key note speech gehalten.

Hier mein Rede:

Dear ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for inviting me here.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today.

Dear Fellows, welcome to Berlin!

Many of you are engaged in creative work in a field, that cannot and should not be contained by borders. You`re exploring, both geographically and intellectually.

I grew up with fairy tales: primal narratives, that expanded my horizon and sharpened my awareness for transformation and enchanted places; they spoke to me of destructive forces that cannot be reasoned with and helped me to understand the incomprehensible.

And then one day, the wondrous world of Walt Disney entered our german children’s rooms and our imagination drifted into other dimensions.

I remember a precious picture book - it was the story of Mary Poppins - and there was an image that particularly fascinated me.

It shows Mary Poppins and the children as they visit the street artist Bert on a grey, unfriendly, very boring day, and Bert has just finished a colorful picture in chalk on the pavement: it shows a beautiful shimmering landscape, a bright carousel in the distance. The children stand there - bewitched - and admire it. And so Mary Poppins takes them by the hand - and of course Bert as well - and she tells them to close their eyes – and with no hesitation they leap straight into the picture, and when they open their eyes again, they find themselves inside the vibrant landscape.

A painted piece of art, a work of imagination, became reality. It turned into a place you can step on. A place, where most likely something unknown will happen, something unpredictable – yet unmistakably exciting –. And the little group is transformed as well: they wear marvelous clothes and they feel good about themselves, because they know for sure, that nothing can ever go wrong and they are sheltered and cared for by someone who knows the way through.

What had fascinated me so deeply about this image, was the fact, that the boundary between reality and imagination – which as a child appeared to me an impassable threshold – was overcome.

(And in the simplest way of all: you just take each other by the hand, close your eyes, and jump!)

In a way, this vision seems to have manifested in my life.

When I chose this profession, my decision might have been driven – at least to a certain extent - by the desire to unite those two worlds. Because as an actress, I move permanently along the boundary between reality and imagination.

Usually, my work begins with the script, which is actually nothing but plain white paper covered in black letters. And it’s my faculty of imagination, that transforms those marks into a living human being.

I return to the text again and again, hundreds of times, even when I already know it, until finally the obvious meanings dissolve – predictable conclusions, simplifying observations and stereotypes just fall away until the text is no longer the totality, but only the surface – the tip of the iceberg. And now my imagination begins to unfold and I let it move around playfully and with absolute freedom. Through repetition, my mind penetrates the layers and finds a way into the human character. Its as if I find a road that takes me across the devide, and little by little, something else appears: the actual nature of the person.

It is now a complex, multifaceted, contradictory human being.

There is another tool essential for my work: my own innate reality – my body.

Ideally its in good shape and always available to me so that I can become what I imagine. My body transforms the imaginary into reality. It gives the mental work a form. And during the performance, my presence hovers between the reality of my body – that is what I actually do - and my imagination. And its because of that, that I can credibly convey other worlds.

This is especially striking while working on a film.

Normally, right before a take, there is a lot of preparation, a great flourish of activity: lights are adjusted, final touches are made. And then suddenly there is silence, camera begins to roll, the clapperboard snaps shut, “action” is called and a moment later, I push off and jump right into the picture, right into the other reality.

From one second to the next, I have a different life. The room I`m standing in is still the same, but simultaneously I am in a bourgois apartment in East Berlin. The time is Now, but simultaneously it is a summerday in 1981. I am myself and at the same time I am Christa Maria, a completely different person.

Reality and imagination have merged. And perhaps this is one of humanity’s oldest dreams, that we can step out of what is given and into what is possible. Maybe that is why it makes us happy, when it comes true.

The boundary between imagination and reality is where artists live. We balance there. We play around it. And if all goes well, we dance on it.

Possibly this childhood image of crossing borders also impressed me so much, because it mirrored the reality of my own life at the time.

We had moved from Bavaria to West Berlin, which was, as you all probably know, surrounded by the wall. And to get there, we had to cross the border from Bavaria to East Germany, and then after a 4-hour drive, again, in order to enter West Berlin.

And here for the first time I crossed a real border.

To me it was life-threatening, even though everything about it was quite banal.

There was a low wall, very few people, mostly serious young men in grey uniforms who scrutinized us. Our passports were taken away and placed on a jankily constructed conveyor belt and we watched them disappear and didn`t know if we would ever see them again and if we would ever be allowed to continue driving at all. All at once, our identity was questioned and we realized that it was not guaranteed, that the place we lived in was our place and that we were free and had the right to be there. The whole thing was quite a fragile matter and maybe I had done something wrong – in any case I had a bad consciousness without actually knowing why. Then, usually we were allowed to travel on, a bit relieved, but still in a state of tension, intensified by the monotonous landscape, on a bumpy highway that we were absolutely prohibited from exiting, since we were not allowed to enter eastgerman roads.

From then on, this experience was part of our DNA and every time we left West Berlin or returned to it, this abyss opened again: that our reality might not be the real reality, things were possibly very different and we didn`t know the truth.

Later, we sometimes stood on wooden platforms built for that purpose along the wall, using a large telescope to look across into the other world that looked exactly like ours. And just as in the earlier fairy tales, my horizon opened up.

I saw buildings, floating in unreality – which mirrored our own, and yet were otherworldly. The street we stood on continued on the far side, like a reflection made nebulous by our bewilderment. Through the telescope I saw the wall, which was actually two walls and between them the Todesstreifen, the deathstrip, hundreds of yards wide, no-mans-land made out of raked sand, so that every footprint would betray itself, mines and tank barriers placed throughout. And just like in our fairytales: The silence and the banality of what we saw revealed a destructiveness impervious to the human mind – and it could not be reasoned with.

In astonishment we stood still. But looking through the telescope did not bring the incomprehensible any closer.

Cause this was not a fairy tale. This was our reality, it was part of my life.

This was my country – divided by a border, that could not be surmounted.

It was true, in West Berlin during the 1970s and 80s, the border was the bitter condition of our daily life, the wall encircled our city, we were guarded, we didn’t know our East German compatriots, we were locked in – and, as island existences tend to be - locked out at the same time.

But on the other hand, and maybe for the same reasons, we were free.

The city was enigmatic, it was changing constantly. There was no compulsory military service in contrast to the rest of Germany, there was no curfew, and West Berlin became a city that never sleeps. there was enough space; time was irrelevant. there was no pressure; if anything, there was self-realization and seeking and finding love. We lived in our own world. A world we created for ourselves with every imaginative faculty we had. Our life in this part of the city was marked by a kind of floating freedom – it was sensual, carefree, perhaps even irresponsibly light.

So there was the harsh reality against which we closed our eyes - and at the same time we led an insular existence, where so much was possible, cause no one looked too closely, and which had changed into a place where daydreams happily settled down. It was as if we wanted to defeat the existing border with an unbounded life.

And bitter fights erupted against federal rules and moral restrictions.

Borders, that much was clear, had to be breached.

I grew older in this divided city, in the divided country, and here I also grew into my profession. On East German maps, West Berlin was a blank white field, a blind spot. In turn, we in the West were blind to the communist part of the country – blind, because we didn’t know how people lived there, how people would think, what kind of country it was. Living in immediate proximity, side by side, speaking the same language, we knew nothing of each other, whatshowever, less than we knew of any other country. Two different worlds shared the same time and space without ever touching. And we didn`t realize the enormity – and also the sadness – of this condition, because we had lived with the wall from childhood onward. We did not realize, that it had become part of our lives to close our eyes to an elementary reality, and to close our eyes specifically, to the reality of the wall, to block it out.

The boundary between imagination and reality – we balance on it. We play around it. And if things go really well, we dance on it.

And yes – in the end, we danced on it, in real life, we danced on our border. It was an exquisite, extraordinary moment when the wall came down. And the image of people dancing on the Berlin Wall was for us far beyond imagination. It will forever stay in our minds, a magnificent sign of confidence.

For many people in the East, the West they couldn`t enter, had become the land of dreams: a country full of promise, a place they longed for. They hoped it would offer them relief, happiness and that it would transform them.

We in the west however became only fully aware of the wall, when it was gone. and we were far from understanding, what it had meant; that we started to realize, when we first saw people from the other side. When we met for the first time. When we recognized how different we were – and that, even though we were supposed to belong to eachother we might not fit together at all.

So unfortunately there was little understanding for the other side. And there was no understanding at all for the pain and sadness the Easterners experienced – as for them, the collapse of the wall meant a comprehensive loss: the disappearance of their everyday world. A system that was destined to last forever, for better or worse, was erased within weeks and months. Today, more than thirty years later, that past – and the memory of it – seems to have vanished completely. Apart from the little blinking man in the pedestrian signal in the eastern part of the city, there is not much left of former GDR. And the old shining West Berlin, too, only flickers here and there. To this day we try to come to terms with this. To this day this rift affects our lifes.

And even today the question remains: Who are we? How do we connect? Who can we become? The break in identity – the scar that now fills the place where the wall once stood – still exists. And this time we should accept it, and not again pretend it`s not there. Our eyes should be open now.

Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit Sire! “Give freedom of thought, Sire!

This line from Friedrich Schiller’s drama Don Carlos, was written in 1783, and it became a symbol in the struggle against repression and censorship.

Mental walls must be dismantled. That is our responsibility in political times.

And we are always living in political times.

Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit, Sire! Freedom of thought is the freedom people fought for over centuries. And this freedom includes the right to express ones thoughts and the right to stand up for it in person without being harmed.

Here in Germany, this right has been part of our existence since the end of the Second World War. And it’s our most precious possession. In that matter we learned a lot from America. The American spirit has always enlightened and enriched our lives.

A major rupture is happening in the United States and the eyes of the world are watching. America – land of the free – that’s how the world has looked upon this country until now.

Now that this freedom is being threatened, you may see your country with different eyes. With the stark division among the populace, you might also see your home as something incomprehensible, beyond reason, otherworldly.

It may not be possible to close our eyes and leap into a fantasy world – but it’s not too late to preserve the American spirit of freedom.

May we succeed in keeping our borders permeable, in remaining open to one. another, in creating a world that is not governed by the law of the strongest and that we can shape together freely.