KATHARINA THALBACH
KATHARINA THALBACH
(*1954, Berlin) is an actress and theatre director and an icon of German theatre. For her the world is a stage. Her father is the director Benno Besson, her mother the actress Sabine Thalbach. At the age of 13 she became a master student of Helene Weigel. She has played primarily in the Berliner Ensemble and the Volksbühne, often working with Matthias Langhoff, and has appeared in films, with star status. In 1976, the year the GDR authorities withdrew songwriter Wolf Biermann’s citizenship, the cultural sector in East Germany became highly politicised. That year Katharina Thalbach left the GDR. It did not hurt her career. She played at the Berlin Schiller Theatre and in Hamburg, Cologne and Zurich, and appeared in cinema and television films. At the end of the 1980s she began directing theatre. She performed and directed.
In 2020 the brakes were pulled on her for the first time in her long career. Waiting for the theatres to open again, she read for the podcast of OLLARICKCHEN – DIE WILDE VON DER WEINREIHE, short episodes about the clever, freedom-loving little scamp Ulrike, written by Sarah McGrane. But this was certainly no replacement for the stage. For a year she has been waiting – and her audience as well – for the premiere of MORD IM ORIENTEXPRESS, the German version of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, in the Berlin Schiller Theater. Katharina Thalbach directs and plays the main part of Detective Hercule Poirot. It is also a tribute to the most successful whodunit novelist of all time, for Agatha Christie wrote her first detective novel a hundred years ago, in 1920.
In his photo for MISS YOU, Maurice Weiss shows Katharina Thalbach on the high seas, as it were. It is symbolic for the entire cultural sector.
MAURICE WEISS
(*1964, Perpignan/France) studied photography, film and design from 1989–1993 with Ulrich Mack and Arno Fischer at the film academy in Dortmund. Member of OSTKREUZ since 1995. In 2004 TABORI ZIEHT UM. WIE SOLL MAN EINE WOHNUNG FINDEN, WENN ES REGNET? was published by Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz, Weitra. 2005 Hansel Mieth Prize. From 2008–2013 steady freelance photographer for Der Spiegel, concentrating on politics. He has done commissioned work for German and international publications, including Le Monde on political and social topics, mostly in the Mediterranean region about the political upheavals there. Since 2011 he is a guest professor at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in Lebanon on the importance of photography as a mechanism of memory and on the responsibility of photographers for their pictures. His series SI JAMAIS ILS REVIENNENT on the legacies of the Second World War in Europe was shown in 2020 at the Akademie der Künste Berlin.