Vera Oelschlegel

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Vera Oelschlegel 1970 in Berlin

Vera Oelschlegel (born July 5, 1938 in Leipzig ) is a German singer , actress , director , professor and theater manager who worked in the GDR until the fall of the Berlin Wall . She then headed the touring theater Theater des Ostens Berlin until 2013 , performing in German-speaking countries.

Life

Vera Oelschlegel in Goya , Wels, October 2007

Vera Franziska Oelschlegel was born in Leipzig in 1938 as the daughter of the merchant Gottfried Oelschlegel (1910–1945). Her mother, Ruth Oelschlegel (born Lauterbach, 1914–2014) was a trained journalist and u. a. Head of the district commission for entertainment arts in Leipzig. She first worked for the women's radio at Radio Leipzig and later headed the concert and guest performance department in Leipzig. Her maternal grandfather Carl Lauterbach was Max Reger's publisher and sponsor . Her brother Axel Oelschlegel (1942–1989) was a journalist and writer ( Das Pseudonym , 1988). Oelschlegel attended the Helmholtz School from 1946 to 1950 and graduated from the Thomas School in Leipzig in 1956 . She then studied from 1956 to 1959 at the Drama Faculty of the Potsdam-Babelsberg Film Academy and completed her studies with a diploma.

From 1959 to 1961 she worked at the Putbus Theater before she became a member of the ensemble of the German TV broadcaster of the GDR from 1961 to 1974 . In 1966 she was a founding member in the creation of Ensemble 66 . Almost 10 years later, Vera Oelschlegel was involved in founding the experimental theater in the palace (TiP), which was not uncontroversial in the GDR , and of which she was director until 1990. Corinna Harfouch was a master student at TiP with her in the 1980s. Oelschlegel also worked as a director. She drew u. a. responsible for the staging of Dürrenmatt's Der Meteor , Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and King Johann , Peter Hacks' Ohne Zorn und Zorn und Ulrich Plenzdorf's Deprivation of Liberty . From 1981 she was a lecturer at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Art , Berlin, and taught a master class for drama. In 1984 she became an honorary professor for acting at this university.

As an actress and singer, she became known - also internationally - primarily for her Brecht interpretations and performed with her Ensemble 66 in 37 countries. At the TiP she also organized art exhibitions and poetry readings as well as composer portraits with u. a. Günter Grass , Christoph Hein , Daniil Granin , Stefan Heym , Luigi Nono , Alfred Schnittke , Paul-Heinz Dittrich and Witold Lutosławski .

In 1991 the touring theater Theaters des Ostens Berlin was founded. Vera Oelschlegel was on tour with this theater as a principal , director and actress. The theater worked without subsidies, without sponsorship and played on tours in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Luxembourg and Holland. The ensemble was on the road for several months a year and traveled by bus and truck for decoration and technology from place to place, well over 10,000 km per year.

The repertoire included a. Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor , Strindberg's Dance of Death , Ibsen's Ghosts , Goethe's Iphigenia on Tauris . Vera Oelschlegel's literary adaptations such as Umberto Eco's Der Name der Rose (200 performances) and Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter (more than 100 performances) as well as Hermann Melville's Moby Dick were particularly successful . From 1991 to 2013 the theater played more than 1,500 performances. In January 2013, after 22 years, the last tour took place and the theater was closed.

In 1991 Vera Oelschlegel published her autobiography under the title If my mother knew .

Private

Vera Oelschlegel was married to the writer and director Günther Rücker for her first marriage (1961–1967) ; this marriage had a daughter. In his second marriage (1971–1976) with the writer and ex-president of the GDR writers' association Hermann Kant and in the third marriage (1977–1987) with SED political bureau member Konrad Naumann , who was the 1st secretary of the SED in Berlin. From 1988 to 2006 she lived with the screenwriter Gregor Edelmann . Since 2008 her partner has been the Zurich architect and urban planner Fritz Stuber .

Awards

Discography

  • 1960: song by the German Armin Röhrig
  • approx. 1960: Knüpflied for a troublemaker
  • 1975: Like clouds, like fire, like salt
  • 1978: My songs have wings, have roots (live recording of a concert in the Theater im Palast on February 4th, 1977)
  • 1979: Liedertheater
  • 1979: Chansons, songs, lieder: by interpreters from the GDR

Filmography (selection)

Although Vera Oelschlegel was mainly at home on the stage , she also played in a few film and TV productions:

Radio plays

Fonts

  • If my mother only knew. Self-Portrait. Ullstein, Frankfurt / Main, Berlin 1991. ISBN 3-550-07509-X .

literature

Web links

Commons : Vera Oelschlegel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Musik und Gesellschaft 24 (1974), p. 717.