Wilfried Minks

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Wilfried Minks (born February 21, 1930 in Binai , Czechoslovakia ; † February 13, 2018 in Berlin ) was a German set designer and theater director.

Life

Minks grew up in Bohemia and, at the age of fifteen, left what was then Czechoslovakia with his parents after the Second World War . The family came to Wurzen in Saxony . The talented painter later trained at the arts and crafts school in Leipzig . After one and a half semesters, he switched to the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts , where he studied from 1955 to 1957.

Before the Wall was built in 1961, it was still possible for him to accept an engagement in 1959 at the Stadttheater Ulm , where Kurt Hübner was artistic director and Peter Zadek and Peter Palitzsch directed. The encounter with Zadek was the decisive one in his career. From then on he was the closest collaborator to the enfant terrible of German theater directors.

Wilfried Minks (center) at a demonstration on Bremen's market square in 1968

In 1962, artistic director Hübner moved to Theater Bremen , and Minks followed him, as did Peter Zadek. And here, too, his sets shaped the productions so that, according to the critics, they themselves represented part of the direction. People spoke of the " Bremen style " and meant the most innovative era of German post-war theater.

For Minks, “the set included a large part of dramaturgical thinking”, so that “the set designer is almost also a director”. In the early 1970s, Minks began a career as a director . In 1972 he staged yet in Bremen Maria Stuart by Friedrich Schiller and from 1973 at all major venues in Germany. In 1979/80 he made the historical film Birth of the Witch with his then wife Ulla Berkéwicz (in the film as Ulla Berkévicz ) in the lead role. In 1980/81 Minks was, together with the director Johannes Schaaf, for a short time the director of the board of directors of the co-determination model at the Schauspiel Frankfurt and then worked as a freelance director.

In the course of his career, Minks worked with all the great directors of his time, including Luc Bondy , Dieter Dorn and Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Klaus Michael Grüber and Claus Peymann , as well as Johannes Schaaf and Peter Stein . His activity also took him to the Salzburg Festival (1975 Leonce and Lena von Georg Büchner , directed by Schaaf; with Klaus Maria Brandauer and others) and to the Vienna Burgtheater (stage design debut in 1988 with The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare , directed by Zadek, later also Director at the Akademietheater , including the world premiere by Fernando Krapp wrote me a letter from Tankred Dorst , 1992).

Wilfried Minks had been a member of the Free Academy of the Arts Hamburg since 1973 and of the Berlin Academy of the Arts since 1994 . From 1967 to 1995 he taught as a professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts .

Important stage sets in the Bremen style

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jeanine Meerapfel: Akademie der Künste mourns Wilfried Minks. Akademie der Künste Berlin, February 13, 2018, accessed on February 13, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Eberhard Schoener. Retrieved September 3, 2019 (German).
personal data
SURNAME Minks, Wilfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German stage designer and theater director
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Binai , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH February 13, 2018
Place of death Berlin