“Dear Mr. Richter,” the letter began. “I have been working on the idea for a feature film, about which I would like to talk to you, if you can make that possible. Could you give me an hour of your time?” The author, the German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, had been trying to get in touch with Gerhard Richter for quite some time. Mutual acquaintances had refused to make an introduction; no one wanted to jeopardize a relationship with the man widely considered to be the greatest painter alive.
So Donnersmarck, who is full of what Ulrich Mühe, the lead actor in Donnersmarck’s first film, “The Lives of Others,” called “implacable friendliness,” resorted to mailing a handwritten letter to an address listed on Richter’s official Web site. A few days later, Richter responded, with an invitation to visit him in Cologne.
It had been almost a decade since “The Lives of Others,” which explores the Stasi surveillance of artists in the waning days of the German Democratic Republic, was awarded the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film. Like many European auteurs before him, Donnersmarck, who was thirty-three when he won, found himself drawn centripetally toward Hollywood. He and his wife, Christiane, a lawyer who oversaw the international operations of Creative Commons and now facilitates Donnersmarck’s career, moved to Los Angeles with their three children.
The family rented a nineteen-thirties estate in the Pacific Palisades, near the house where Thomas Mann once lived.
In 2009, Donnersmarck, an unabashed admirer of Hollywood maximalism—he heaps praise on “The Terminator”—co-wrote and directed a hundred-million-dollar studio movie, “The Tourist,” in which a spy and her lover, played by Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, evade both the Mafia and Scotland Yard in the canals of Venice. Critics had applauded the previous film; now many were dismayed. In the Times , Manohla Dargis was gently damning. “It takes an exceptional director to prevent an entertainment as flimsy as this from collapsing under its own weightlessness,” she wrote.
“The Tourist” went on to earn two hundred and seventy-eight million dollars worldwide, but Donnersmarck wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
“It was a bit like you had stayed at a super-luxurious spa,” he told me. “It’s beautiful and objectively great, but it feels hollow.
I didn’t have that feeling of: Only I can do this.” His friends began to worry. “I told him he should be careful not to lose too much time,” Jan Mojto, who financed “The Lives of Others,” told me. “He said, ‘Between Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” and “Royal Highness” there are nearly ten years.’ I thought, He’s losing his mind, so better bring him back. Then Florian tells me, ‘I have an idea.
’ ”
Donnersmarck had been looking for a way to illustrate, in film, the healing power of art.
Over breakfast in Los Angeles, he explained how Richter had turned a life of profound trauma and loss into creative grist. “This man has lived through everything imaginable,” he told me. “He’s lived through his mother being raped by the Russians, his father committing suicide, his aunt being euthanized, both of his uncles being killed on the Eastern Front, his childhood classmates being killed in the bombing of Dresden, the experience of incredible impoverishment. Yet he manages to take all these things and charge them, in his paintings, with this mystical energy that comes from the suffering.” In this way, Donnersmarck said, art becomes an emblem of resilience, even productivity: “It gives us that wonderful feeling that our suffering can be of use.”
At eighty-six, Richter, known for an astonishingly diverse practice that includes photo-realistic portraits, Romantic landscapes, and conceptual abstractions, hovers numinously over German art, at once omnipresent and nowhere to be found. Born in Dresden in 1932, he lived through Nazism, the Second World War, and the Communist occupation, before defecting to the West in the nineteen-sixties.
But, when faced with curiosity about his person and his work, he has often deployed John Cage’s witty dodge: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.” His life story is a meticulously concocted living text, mediated by his paintings, which tell a story of their own.
In the sixties, Richter started making his photo paintings, recognizable by a characteristic blur.
The paintings purportedly represented random snapshots of strangers, and their generic titles—“Family at the Seaside,” “Mother and Child”—encouraged this reading. As Richter grew more prominent, he began to refer to “cuckoos’ eggs,” biographical truths hidden in his work. Still, when an interviewer asked about the seeming banality of his source material, he replied, “It’s all evasive action.” Sometimes he explained himself by saying, “My paintings know more than I do.”
“I believe that great art is deeply biographical,” Donnersmarck told me.
Anthony Minghella, the director of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” one of Donnersmarck’s favorite films, had no direct experience of American expats on the Italian Riviera, but he drew upon the oppressive class consciousness of his English childhood to lend authenticity to Tom Ripley’s striving. Studying Richter’s work, Donnersmarck learned that he had taken unusual pains to control its reception. Since the sixties, Richter has been compiling his own catalogue raisonné, an official list of works usually assembled by scholars and curators. Furthermore, he started the clock on his œuvre in 1962, after his arrival in the West, erasing a period as a prominent socialist-realist artist in the East, where he had been commissioned to paint murals extolling the ideals of the republic.
“He was someone who was quite guarded about his personal things,” Donnersmarck told me. “Although, on the other hand, it’s also partly that he just tells us he’s guarded about his personal things.” Taken together, he felt, Richter’s feints amounted to a pixelated portrait.
“Here was someone who never really told the full story, and was steering people in a certain way,” he said. Donnersmarck had set out to research a master of visual representation; now he was beginning to view Richter as what he calls “a master of narrative.”
One painting in particular troubled Donnersmarck. “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” depicts a luminous nude, Richter’s first wife, Ema Eufinger, who, as Richter later noted, bore a resemblance to Brigitte Bardot.
Art historians contended that the image was part of Richter’s dialogue with Marcel Duchamp, who had ostentatiously quit painting after completing his own “Nude Descending a Staircase,” in 1912. But Donnersmarck suspected that there was something more than the anxiety of influence at work.
Richter typically dates his canvases with only the year; this one is marked “May, 1966,” as if the month held special significance. Where the previous photo paintings relied mostly on a gray-scale palette, Ema glows with nacreous pink skin and golden hair—her body “seems to shine from within,” as one critic put it.
In fact, she was pregnant, with Richter’s first child, Betty, who was born later that year and would become the subject of some of his most arresting portraits. It was the convergence of two details—Ema’s pregnancy and the date—that stuck in Donnersmarck’s mind, suggesting a mystery that he was determined to solve. “I thought, O.K.
, I’ve now read the major texts on him. I’ve researched this thoroughly. I’m very familiar with his work. I have to at least throw my theory at him and see how he reacts,” he said.
“I was thinking that I’d maybe be thrown out after half an hour.
”
“I wouldn’t have spent so much time fixing this place up if I’d known we’d be leaving so soon.” In January of 2015, Donnersmarck showed up at Richter’s home. “The most extraordinary thing happened,” he said. “I outlined to him what I planned to do, really just thinking I’d glean from his reaction—Was I on a completely crazy path, or was there something true about it?” Surprisingly, Richter didn’t turn him out. “That first day, I ended up staying seven hours or so.” After several more sessions, Donnersmarck said, “I asked him, ‘I have a good memory, but I don’t remember everything. Do you mind if I record this?’ ”
Donnersmarck grew up stringently Catholic, a choirboy, and he still attends Mass; as an artist, he frames his goals transgressively.
His intention, he says, is “to write like I’m wiretapping a confession booth.” He told me that Richter accepted his presence, though he suspected that Sabine Moritz, Richter’s third wife and former student, opposed it. Richter went so far as to allow him to accompany the couple on an anniversary trip to Dresden. “He told me everything—truly everything—about his life, and was amazingly open,” Donnersmarck said. “I ended up staying for one month and recording this stuff, which really I think makes any biography of his completely obsolete.”
During the next three years, Donnersmarck wrote and directed “Never Look Away,” an epic spanning three decades of German history.
(The German title, “Werk Ohne Autor,” or “Work Without Author,” is a tag that critics in the seventies applied to Richter’s art, because of its seeming lack of subjectivity.) The film hews closely to Richter’s youthful experiences, particularly his first marriage, but leaves room for conflation and outright invention.
Donnersmarck’s protagonist, Kurt Barnert, is a sensitive and talented painter from the East who marries into a family that, while outwardly conforming to the new postwar politics, privately adheres to the most repulsive aspects of Nazi ideology. “I didn’t want it to be a bio-pic per se,” Donnersmarck told me. “Sticking exactly to every fact and chronology tends to weaken something. ‘Citizen Kane’ would be a lesser film if it were called ‘Citizen Hearst.’ ”
“Never Look Away” is on the shortlist for a best foreign-language Oscar and opens in New York and Los Angeles on February 8th.
When I met up with Donnersmarck this past fall, in L.A., shortly after the film’s German theatrical run, he was perturbed. A rift had opened between him and his subject. “Suddenly, there was this statement from him,” Donnersmarck said. Richter had not seen the film, but, hounded for comment by the German press, he had let slip that he found the trailer too “ reißerisch ,” or thriller-like.
The insult stung, a rebuke of the intimate understanding that Donnersmarck had felt existed between them.
Not long ago, I wrote to Richter, asking if he could tell me about his interactions with Donnersmarck. To my surprise, he wrote back within a few days:
I thank you for your kind letter about the film of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. To recall all the events, I had a look into the quite hefty folder regarding the case von Donnersmarck. Unfortunately, this visualization of all the facts caused such bad feelings, and my dislike of both the movie and the person grew so much again, that I find it impossible to give you an answer.
I hope for your understanding, but I can’t help it.
With best regards,
Gerhard Richter
Donnersmarck is six feet nine, with a baby face and an accumulation of gray-blond curls that look ready to dump rain—a cherub and his cloud. He has storybook grandeur, and an expansive sense of time. He lets weeks pass between e-mails, then sends novellas. Our first breakfast lasted four and a half hours, and earned me two parking tickets. He was unusually interested in being a subject. “Free analysis,” he called it.
Courtly manners, a social necessity for a giant living among humans, are also the inheritance of a family that traces its nobility back six hundred years; he says that “Donnersmarck,” which he translates as “Thunder Marrow,” is the name that his Saxon ancestor Henckel was given by Kaiser Matthias in gratitude for funding a war against the Turks.
Donnersmarck, a count, has a booming laugh. He speaks five languages, including Russian, and has a whippet named Tsarevich. It is hard to find a car that can accommodate his size, but he makes the best of it. For a while, he drove around Los Angeles in a vintage white Rolls-Royce, until the brakes gave out in the hills above Sunset Boulevard.
“You can’t buy a car like that in Germany,” Thomas Demand, a German artist who lives in Los Angeles and is close to Donnersmarck, says. “You would look like a pimp.”
During the Second World War, the bankable part of Donnersmarck’s inheritance vanished behind the Iron Curtain, with family castles reduced to ruins. The family—which Donnersmarck describes as too cultured to have been Nazis—was uprooted. His grandfather, a doctor of philosophy specializing in Thomas Aquinas, was drafted at the end of the war, and immediately found an American to surrender to. His father, Leo Ferdinand, had spent his childhood preparing to take over the Donnersmarck mining and agricultural operations in Silesia, an area that was once easternmost Germany and is now largely in Poland.
In 1945, notices went up in Silesia: all Germans had to vacate immediately, leaving the keys in their locks, on pain of death. Leo Ferdinand became, at the age of nine, a refugee.
“Because of all the terrible suffering Germany caused in World War Two, there wasn’t a lot of focus on what the German people suffered, understandably,” Donnersmarck told me. “But many people were apolitical, and suffered the way Richter’s family suffered, and the way mine did.” Donnersmarck’s mother, Anna-Maria, remembers being four, fleeing to relatives in the West.
“Our mother made it an adventure,” she said.
“Women in that time, they were all heroes. They had the children, their husbands were dead or captive and the women were in Berlin. They cleaned up the whole city with their hands. They made a mountain where people go skiing now, formed from the dirt and stones from the war.”
Donnersmarck’s father was among the first in the family to need a job.
He became an executive at Lufthansa, and when Florian was one and his brother, Sebastian, was three the family moved to Roosevelt Island, as part of a social experiment to establish an economically diverse colony on “Welfare Island.” Florian was so blond that women in the city would annoy him by touching his hair, and so tall that his mother brought along his passport when they ran errands, in order to prove that he was young enough to ride the bus for free.
Leo Ferdinand was deeply religious, traditional, and intellectual. Walking through a European capital with him was a master class in declinism. Donnersmarck said, “He found it hard to remember the names of those who weren’t from Catholic noble families.
” Anna-Maria, on the other hand, had been active in the leftist student movement in West Berlin, and collected sophisticated people. Her best friend in New York was John White, an Austrian Jewish émigré who directed the City Opera and was a mentor to Florian. “I grew up in a world in which the objective quantification of intelligence and eloquence and erudition was valued above all else,” Donnersmarck told me.
Sometimes he performed too well for his audience’s taste. “He was pretentious,” Anna-Maria said.
“When he was thirteen, I took him to the opera in Frankfurt. ‘How did you like it?’ I asked. He said, ‘I liked it, but I could do it better.’ ”
Anna-Maria had high standards for art, which extended to her sons’ output. She told me, “When they made pictures, I did not put them on the fridge unless they were good, and they were very rarely good.
There were not many pictures on my fridge. Florian thought I was too critical, too strict. I said, ‘Florian, do you want me to lie to you?’ This is my influence—that he wants to prove that he is the best in the world to his critical mother. He got the gift from Leo Ferdinand, and from me the drive to prove me wrong.
”
Last winter, I went to see Donnersmarck in Berlin, where he was finishing postproduction on “Never Look Away.” It had been eight months since I’d last seen him in Los Angeles—when he had read me the entire three-and-a-half-hour screenplay, in the course of two days—and he had been working twenty hours a day on the film. (He is a sleepwalker, imperfectly cured. Only the first floor of a hotel is safe for him, and he sleeps with the lights on.
) His hair had turned whiter and wilder, and I got the impression that he’d been sustaining himself with editing-room chocolates.
In a comfortable sound studio, overlooking the River Spree, Donnersmarck was doing dialogue replacement, rerecording some two hundred lines that hadn’t come out well during filming.
It is tedious work for most people, but Donnersmarck relishes the chance to tune and polish flaws. “Suddenly, you can heal all those little wounds,” he says. “It’s very, very joyful.” For a scene in which one character subversively advises another to mutter “ Drei liter ” instead of “ Heil Hitler,” Donnersmarck instructed the actor on the precise quality of the stifled laugh he was after.
“We have to bring up some of your tonality a notch,” he said. “It needs to be more nasal. It wants it to be more coming from the throat, so it’s rattling more. Try to do it as if you’re just about to clear your throat, a bit more pressure.”
“You’ve come to a fork in the road—age-defying or age-appropriate?” Later that afternoon, the actor Sebastian Koch came to the studio. Koch, who played a writer under surveillance in “The Lives of Others,” returns in “Never Look Away” as Barnert’s sinister father-in-law.
In the scene that they were working on, he orders Barnert to paint his portrait. To prepare Koch for the line that needed to be replaced, Donnersmarck said, “ Du hast ein neues sujet ,” emphasizing certain words in the way of a choral conductor tweaking the phrasing of a song.
“Feel in yourself how superior you are compared to Kurt,” he said. “Be really aloof, almost arrogant: ‘I descend to your pitiful way of life by even talking to you.’ ” Koch told me later, “He’s fully formed as a perfectionist. As in, ‘We’ll do it again. No, we’ll do it again.’ He believes strongly that, if an actor thinks something wrong, he can read those thoughts.
”
As Koch got ready for another line, Donnersmarck told him, “You’re worried, and it should come through in your whole demeanor, but you’re still controlled and that means your breathing is steady, yet there is a certain nervousness about it.” Koch, visible through a glass wall in an adjacent sound booth, jumped up and down and fluttered his lips. Fifteen or twenty takes later, Donnersmarck quickly said, “ Sehr schön ,” and moved on.
In the evening, as the city turned pale, Donnersmarck and I got into a taxi. “You’re best behind the driver,” he said, as he claimed the front passenger side for himself, pushing the seat all the way back and reclining it as far as it could go. “It’s a very ungallant way to ride, but the only way it works,” he said.
We were going to meet his mother. I asked if I should call her “Mrs.
Donnersmarck.” He said, “ ‘Mrs.’ is wrong. The correct formal address would be Countess Henckel. But she’ll want you to call her Anna-Maria. My mother is a big all-women-are-sisters kind of woman.”
Leo Ferdinand died nearly a decade ago, and Anna-Maria, who has shoulder-length blond hair and vivid blue eyes, lives in a cozy apartment in Charlottenburg, the Upper East Side of West Berlin. Above the coatrack hangs a portrait of an ancestor Anna-Maria calls “the family prince,” a rake who married a French courtesan and built her a castle in Silesia, which was bombed by the Russians.
“It’s like ‘Gone with the Wind,’ ” Anna-Maria told me.
“Nobody has any money anymore. They all work.”
Anna-Maria showed us to the living room, where Donnersmarck’s brother, Sebastian, a physics teacher at a high school in Berlin, was sitting. On a coffee table was a silver tray filled with dishes of macadamia nuts, malt balls, mini-Snickers, and sugary wafers.
When Donnersmarck reached for a Snickers, his mother shot him a reproving look. “ Nicht gut für dich ,” she said. He ignored her, and took a wafer, too.
She brought a board with rye bread and sliced ham. “My big child should eat something,” she exhorted him.
After leaving Roosevelt Island in 1981, the family moved to Berlin, a jarring experience for the two boys. “My brother and I felt like we’d been thrown into a harsher, colder, and poorer place,” Donnersmarck said. “All the American products we’d grown up with were sold in stores here that you couldn’t access as a German citizen. The American military areas were cordoned off.
Those people could buy marshmallows and peanut butter.”
American movies offered a reprieve and a way back, even if they were shown a year after release.
The brothers, both tall, with long hair, would dress as girls so that they looked old enough to sneak into Clint Eastwood movies. Sebastian said, “We grew up on ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones.’ ” Anna-Maria turned to Florian. “I pushed you into exhibitions, opera, theatre,” she said. “You hated exhibitions.” Florian shrugged, and changed the subject. Seeing art with his parents, he later explained, was complicated. For a Catholic boy, the bald eroticism of German art in the eighties was both liberating and confusing.
Small wonder if he squirmed in front of a self-portrait of an artist fellating himself. I asked Anna-Maria if he had evinced any inclination toward art.
“Not a bit,” she said. “He was always interested in psychoanalysis.”
Donnersmarck attended Oxford, and, egged on by his brother, entered an essay-writing contest whose first prize was an apprenticeship with Richard Attenborough. He won. As he walked from the studio to the train station each day, Attenborough would pass in a beautiful Rolls-Royce. “I always thought that one day he would pick me up,” Donnersmarck says. “He never did.
I remember thinking, If I ever make enough money, I’ll get exactly that car.”
After university, Donnersmarck went to film school in Munich. In a book about “The Lives of Others,” he wrote that, while struggling to come up with movie premises for an assignment, he put on a recording of the Russian pianist Emil Gilels playing the “Moonlight” Sonata.
While listening, he remembered reading that Lenin once said that, until his revolution was complete, he would not permit himself to listen to Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” because it inspired him to “stroke the heads of people” rather than to “strike, strike pitilessly.” Donnersmarck began to wonder how history might have been different if Lenin had been compelled to hear that music. “An image forced itself into my mind,” he wrote. “A medium shot of a man in a desolate room; he has headphones over his ears through which comes the sound of wonderful music.
” This image—a listener overhearing something that might make him abandon his deepest beliefs—gave rise to “The Lives of Others,” which became Donnersmarck’s thesis project and, eight years later, his first feature.
“The Lives of Others” centers on Gerd Wiesler, a Stasi surveillance specialist, assigned to eavesdrop on a celebrated playwright and his actress girlfriend, who is the romantic obsession of a powerful Central Committee minister. Wiesler wires the couple’s apartment and installs himself in the attic of the building. The playwright believes in the basic righteousness of the German Democratic Republic, while his closest friends are punished for their doubts.
When one of them commits suicide, he becomes disillusioned, and, convinced that his apartment is the last unbugged place in East Berlin, starts writing a treatise against the government, to be published in the West. Listening in, Wiesler finds his own loyalties shifting, and alters his reports to protect his subject. But, in a skillfully turned plot, the actress, having spurned the rapacious minister, is threatened by the Stasi and begins informing on the playwright, betraying what Wiesler has withheld.
The life story of the poet and songwriter Wolf Biermann echoes through “The Lives of Others.” Biermann, a Bob Dylan of the G.D.
R., was placed under house arrest and banned from publishing. According to Donnersmarck, Biermann was among the first Germans to seek out his Stasi files after reunification. Biermann, who published parts of the files, has written that they contained a plan for how to ruin him, including “destruction of all love relationships and friendships” and “faulty medical treatment.
” Donnersmarck read the published files, and managed to find and interview at length the agent who oversaw the investigation of Biermann. Like Wiesler in the film, the agent was a model of ideological correctness.
Donnersmarck says that even twelve years after the Wall came down the agent was unsure what he was allowed to say about Biermann. “He was, like, ‘By what laws am I bound right now? Can I tell you details about this guy’s sex life? I was sworn to secrecy by a government that no longer exists,’ ” Donnersmarck told me. “It was total confusion of information loyalties, but he ended up telling me everything.”
Biermann was far less forthcoming. Donnersmarck thought that he might gain entrée through Anna-Maria, who, in her student-movement days, had visited Biermann when he was under house arrest. But Biermann ignored his entreaties. So Donnersmarck, relentless, approached him in the book-signing line after a reading. “I know exactly who you are,” Donnersmarck recalled his saying.
“And I’ll tell you one thing: If I’m going to say something about the Stasi, I’m going to say it myself.”
“The Lives of Others” created controversy in Germany. Ulrich Mühe, who played Wiesler, had been a theatre actor in the East. When the film was released, he disclosed that he had read his own Stasi file, and found evidence that his former wife had served as an informant.
(The documents, Donnersmarck says, showed that she had even asked the state’s permission before marrying him.) To critics, the revelation seemed to be part of a cynical marketing campaign. Mühe’s ex-wife sued him for libel and won, despite the documentation. Mühe, who had developed ulcers as a young man when conscripted as a border guard, died of stomach cancer soon afterward.
Easterners who had been oppressed by the Stasi found the character of the agent too sympathetic; those who hadn’t been oppressed said the whole thing was sensationalized. Donnersmarck’s experience of the East was limited to teen-age excursions through the checkpoint with his parents, to visit his mother’s childhood friends. It embarrasses him now to remember how he and his brother, alert to the injustices suffered by fellow-Germans, would roll down the car windows and call out the lyrics of a popular song, “Thoughts are free! No one can ever know them, no one can hunt them down!” He was sixteen when the Wall fell, detractors often noted: What could Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck from West Berlin know about the G.D.
R.?
“I still meet people from the East who say, ‘This is not a good film,’ ” Sebastian Koch told me. “But point for point they can’t explain why not.” “The Lives of Others” was denied a competition spot at the Berlin Film Festival, at Cannes, and at Venice. It made its première at Telluride, and, after winning the Oscar, became, with “Das Boot,” the most successful German-language film in history. “It was loved everywhere except here,” Koch said.
Biermann, however, praised the film. “The political tone is authentic, I was moved by the plot,” he wrote. “But why? Perhaps I was just won over sentimentally, because of the seductive mass of details that look like they were lifted from my own past.” Or maybe Biermann had already made his peace with up-close observation.
In the seventies, not long before he was exiled while on tour in the West, he wrote “The Stasi Ballad.” Its refrain, “Stasi is my Eckermann,” refers to Goethe’s compulsive assistant, who documented his every utterance. “It’s an amazing ballad, where he said how incredibly grateful he is to the Stasi for recording everything he ever said for posterity,” Donnersmarck told me. “They’re trying to destroy his life, but at least they’re paying attention, in the way that every artist wants people to pay attention.”
Richter’s cuckoos’ eggs serve as a test of attentiveness: Did you catch that? One of his earliest photo paintings, a tender black-and-white portrait of a teen-age girl holding a baby, was first exhibited with the unremarkable title “Mother and Child.” “It could be any mother and child,” Dietmar Elger, the director of Richter’s archive and the writer of his authorized biography, told me.
“In the beginning, in the sixties, he was hesitating about making his art too personal.” Later, Richter renamed the painting “Aunt Marianne,” and over time it emerged that the woman it depicted was his mother’s younger sister. The baby was the artist himself, at three months old.
Richter, at eighty-six, hovers numinously over German art, omnipresent but resistant to inquiries about his life or his work.
When pressed, he has often deployed John Cage’s witty dodge: “I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.”
Photograph by Sean Gallup / Getty Marianne Schönfelder, Richter’s aunt, was a delicate, attractive girl, who, by the time she was twenty, had been institutionalized with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Mental illness was a dangerous label to wear in Nazi Germany. Mentally ill and physically and intellectually disabled women were subjected to forced sterilization, and in 1940 the government established a medical-murder program, with six execution centers, equipped with “showers,” to destroy them.
By 1941, when Hitler shut the gassing program down, some thirty-five thousand women had been killed at these sites, in what Donnersmarck described to me as “a dress rehearsal for the greatest crime in history.” By the end of the war, at least a hundred thousand women deemed unfit for procreation had been exterminated.
In 1938, Schönfelder was committed to a psychiatric nursing home in the eastern state of Saxony, not far from the town where Richter’s family had moved.
While a patient there, she was involuntarily sterilized; later, she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where she was deliberately starved to death in 1945, and buried in a mass grave.
In a childhood riven by catastrophe, the tragedy of Aunt Marianne held a special place. According to Jürgen Schreiber, an investigative journalist who wrote a biography of Richter in 2005, she loomed over the household. “If Gerd was unruly,” Schreiber wrote, “his mother would threaten him, ‘You’ll end up like Aunt Marianne.’ ” On Richter’s Web site, where his works are categorized according to subject—Clouds, Candles, Families, Aeroplanes, Snowscapes, Nudes—the “Aunt Marianne” painting falls under the heading Death.
While at art school, in Dresden, Richter met another Marianne, a fashion student nicknamed Ema, whose father was a prominent ob-gyn. The couple, who married in 1957, lived at her father’s house in Dresden.
In the course of researching his book, Schreiber visited the house, and made a significant discovery. “A woman came to me and said, ‘Here lived a super-Nazi!’ ” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “I was highly alarmed. And then I started a new investigation.”
In the federal archives, Schreiber discovered that Ema’s father, Heinrich Eufinger, had served as a lieutenant colonel in the S.S., Hitler’s “racial élite,” a leadership squad entrusted with executing his Final Solution.
Eufinger’s files referred to him as an “irreproachable SS-man,” who was meticulous about proving his Aryan ancestry. Later, when Eufinger was promoted and assigned to care for future S.S.
wives in Saxony, he evaluated them for their “suitability for marriage among members of the S.S.”; to his superiors, he recommended a more exacting process, including a gynecological exam and, for the prospective groom, a mandatory sperm count. Otherwise, Eufinger wrote, “no certainty can ever be obtained as to the effective functioning of the procreative organs.”
For nearly a decade, until he was arrested by the Russians in 1945, Eufinger served as the director of Friedrichstadt Hospital, in Saxony, where nearly a thousand women were forcibly sterilized, most of them by him. The youngest victim was eleven years old. Eufinger did not perform Schönfelder’s sterilization—that task was carried out by the doctor who had delivered Richter.
As Eufinger would surely have known, sterilization was a station on the road to death.
Many of the women sterilized at Friedrichstadt Hospital were subsequently murdered by the state. After the war, other physicians from the region—including the doctor who oversaw Schönfelder’s case—were tried in Dresden for crimes against humanity, and some were sentenced to death. Eufinger, however, went on to have a distinguished career in the G.D.R. and then, after emigrating, in West Germany. Until Schreiber’s reporting, his portrait still hung on the wall of Friedrichstadt Hospital.
The natural question to ask is: What did Richter know? (Richter told Schreiber that Ema had seen her father preening before the mirror in his S.
S. uniform and been appalled.
) In Richter’s case, the more relevant question may be: What did his paintings know? Richter and Ema defected to the West in 1961, shortly before the Wall went up. Among the few possessions Richter took with him was an album filled with family pictures, which he soon started to use as source material.
Within two years of painting “Aunt Marianne,” Richter painted his father-in-law, as well as an architect of the euthanasia program, who killed himself rather than face a war-crimes tribunal. The father-in-law painting is “Family at the Seaside.” Grotesquely, it depicts Eufinger at the beach with Ema, her sister, and one of his patients, all grinning in their bathing suits, around the time that Schönfelder was sterilized. Elger, Richter’s archivist, told me that the association among the three subjects—father-in-law, aunt, euthanasia mastermind—was unconscious.
“They fit together now very perfectly, but I’m not sure if they were painted as a group,” he said.
Donnersmarck takes literally the idea that Richter’s paintings know something, and are trying to tell us, in spite of their author’s confounding trail of crumbs. “The things that are the most obvious and the most clear should never be forgotten,” he said. “If you look at Richter’s catalogue raisonné, you will see all the photo paintings. Suddenly, at the end, comes the largest painting”—the one of Ema descending the staircase nude. “He says himself that it’s his wife, pregnant. Then you say, wait a minute, they’re thirty-four, which is very late for that generation, and they’d been married forever. So what does that mean? And why is this the largest painting? Why does he paint it the moment she announced that she’s pregnant, as if it’s a triumph over something?” With “Ema (Nude on a Staircase),” Richter broke into color, but afterward veered toward abstraction, producing a series of paintings based on color charts.
“This must mean something,” Donnersmarck said. “He’s laying his life out. That’s what triggered my story, that sudden change.”
According to Donnersmarck, in order to elicit the most candor from Richter, he offered a strategy for presentation.
When the time came, Donnersmarck wouldn’t say what in the film was true and Richter wouldn’t say what wasn’t. While filming was under way, Donnersmarck wrote to Richter about his plans: “Whenever the conversation turns to you, I will say that it is specifically not a bio-pic of Gerhard Richter but the story of the fictional painter Kurt Barnert. I will call the film something like a spiritual biography of our country, which was enriched by the biographies of other artists as well. I will say that the elements of your biography were merely the starting point for a free, fictionalized, story.
” He went on, “As for things that are shown in the movie because you told me about them and that are not commonly known anyway and matters of public record, I will of course continue to be silent about them. May the journalists speculate over what is truth and what is fiction!”
To me, Donnersmarck said, “Unless he decides to reveal something that’s true, which under the arrangement is permissible, he can always hide behind the fact that I invented things, and I can always hide behind the fact that something invented could be true.” The understanding was precarious—“a touchy matter,” Donnersmarck said—but it had implicit safeguards. Richter could disown the film, and Donnersmarck could validate his sourcing.
“All this information is from Richter,” he explained. “He knows that I have all this incredibly sensitive stuff on tape. A lot of it involves his first wife, who’s still alive, and has a right to privacy.” (The former Ema Eufinger now runs a secondhand-clothing store in Düsseldorf and never discusses “Herr Richter.”) “It’s changed enough that one can say, ‘Yes, this is the “Citizen Kane” version,’ but there are these very close proximities,” he said.
Donnersmarck’s hero, Kurt Barnert, has been profoundly affected by the death of his aunt, a psychiatric patient first sterilized and then murdered by the Nazis.
At art school in Dresden, he falls in love with and marries a fellow-student, only to learn that her father, a former member of the S.
S., is the doctor who presided over the aunt’s treatment, condemning her to death with a flick of his red pencil. Terrifyingly, the father-in-law, who sees Barnert as genetically undesirable, performs an abortion on his own daughter in an attempt to drive the couple apart. Barnert assimilates these horrors, some of which he only partly grasps, into his paintings. In the film, Donnersmarck traps the painter and his wife in an excruciating family dynamic for which art is the salve, the solution, and the way out.
As a young artist, Richter was interested in the lottery: an everyday example of random elements acquiring unassailable significance. When Schreiber was researching the biography, Richter found his discoveries fascinating. He marvelled at the details of his father-in-law’s S.S.
past and, in particular, his participation in the sterilization program. Elger, the archivist, told me that Richter had coöperated closely with Schreiber, sharing unseen pictures and private family stories. “But after the book came out Richter was not so happy,” Elger said. “Schreiber made it a crime story, made too much out of it.
He made a lot of connections, put everything together. ‘He lived on this street and—surprise, surprise—this other person lived only five streets away! At the same house number!’ ” Schreiber, apparently, had failed to discern the meaning of the lottery, and was mistaking every number for a winner.
Richter’s provisional acceptance of interlopers, Donnersmarck believes, is rooted in his practice as an artist and in his psychology. “He was both thrilled and shocked by Schreiber’s book,” Donnersmarck said. “Though he gave him quite a lot of access, he now considers him an enemy.” Richter does not generally insist on propriety: he has painted, from magazine and newspaper images, murder victims, suicides, and Jackie Kennedy weeping at J.F.
K.’s funeral. “He himself is so phenomenally indiscreet in his art—overstepping boundaries, overreaching,” Donnersmarck said.
“There’s a German word, übergriffig , which means reaching into a space that isn’t really yours. You know how some people just do not respect your space? It’s usually people whose space was violated in a meaningful way.
They don’t recognize the difference between me and you, and just go right into your soul.” He paused. “I think he felt that Jürgen Schreiber had gone a little too far.”
Donnersmarck knew that he had to tread carefully when he began interviewing Richter.
“All the factual information I was using was from Schreiber, and he knew that,” he told me. “But he expressed such incredible anger at Schreiber that I had to pretend that it came to me from the Holy Spirit. I was the Virgin Mary, impregnated by these facts out of nowhere.”
For an artist like Richter, whose sources are deeply biographical, inviting others to collaborate on the story of his life may be both irresistible and highly dangerous.
Donnersmarck read the screenplay to Richter, as he did to me; in his view, Richter, frailer than when he had sat for the interviews, was profoundly moved. But he refused to go to a theatre to see the finished film.
“He said, ‘Can you send me the DVD?’ ” Donnersmarck recalled. “I said, ‘No, I’ll rent you a theatre. It’s like me saying I want to see a painting of yours on a stamp.’ ”
The relationship, which started off with such unexpected warmth, chilled as Donnersmarck’s project came to fruition. Schreiber, for one, was unsurprised.
“Richter’s reactions to my book and to the film are equal,” he wrote to me.
“First, he was happy and told me on the phone that a friend had told him, ‘Now you have a biography like Picasso.’ Later, he was complaining.”
After receiving Richter’s letter about “the case von Donnersmarck,” I wrote to him again, hoping to understand what had happened. He replied:
What to say—very soon after his first or second visit I told him clearly that I would not approve of a movie about Gerhard Richter.
I also suggested that the protagonist might have another profession, like a writer or a musician for example, as the family history that he wanted to tell did not necessarily need a painter as such. He left all his options open and I gave him something in writing stating that he was explicitly not allowed to use or publish either my name or any of my paintings. He reassured me to respect my wishes.
But in reality, he has done everything to link my name to his movie, and the press was helping him to the best of its ability. Fortunately, the most important newspapers here reviewed his concoction very skeptically and critically. Nevertheless, he managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography! I don’t want to say more about this.
Elger told me, “I would say, after the Schreiber book, he makes the same mistake twice.” He went on, “He’s interested in things like this, maybe.
Donnersmarck, he knows how to approach people. He’s very smart, he’s very gentle, like these film people are. They know how to get people to give them money. ‘Donnersmarck, the Oscar winner, wants to talk to you.
’ He wrote this letter by himself. Gerhard called him. They met. I don’t really know why he let that in.
He was so charming, Donnersmarck, so Gerhard felt he was betrayed by his charm.” Elger, with a note of finality, told me that he would purchase a copy of the DVD for the archive. Case closed.
Sometimes Donnersmarck’s children play “What superpower would you most want to have?” The children wish that they could fly, or walk through walls, or turn invisible.
No, he tells them, the only superpower you really need is the ability to read minds.
Interviewing Richter, Donnersmarck felt that he was coming close to a profound truth, and also that Moritz, Richter’s wife, might at any moment cut him off. He wished he could overhear their evening debriefing, in order to understand his prospects for continuing. One night, after leaving Richter, Donnersmarck turned on his phone and found a voice mail from him: a pocket dial.
He listened to the sound of Richter walking down the corridor, calling his dog, Leica, and then sitting down with his wife and telling her about the day’s interview.
It was as close to wiretapping the confession booth as Donnersmarck could hope to get, and, he says, it confirmed for him that his insight into Richter’s story was sound.
When I met up with Donnersmarck for lunch in Los Angeles, in December, and asked what he had heard Richter say, he told me, “That is truly fruit of the poisonous tree.
” He was preparing for the film’s American release and hunting for a new house. The family had been based in Munich, with the kids accompanying Donnersmarck on location, while he made the film. He looked rested—trim, with his hair now darker and tamed. “Even though it was wonderful and very useful fruit, even though it made it possible for me to continue interviews with him for a very long time, because I had a ten times better counterargument against anything his wife was objecting to.” Now that he feels Richter turning against him, the recording is a comfort to his conscience.
When I told him what Richter had written, that he had explicitly objected to the film’s being about a painter, Donnersmarck was taken aback. Richter had listened to the screenplay, and even raised the possibility of making the paintings for the film himself—a notion that Donnersmarck, imagining long delays and the nightmare of insuring millions of dollars’ worth of original art, had declined. (Richter denies making this suggestion.) Instead, Donnersmarck hired one of Richter’s former assistants to re-create key works. It was a pity, he said, that I had not been able to get Richter to open up to me more, show the real self he had revealed during their interviews. What he was doing now was obfuscating, an octopus in a cloud of ink.
“I thought he would simply stay quiet publicly, based on our agreement about the facts,” Donnersmarck told me. “And, you’ll note, he stayed very quiet on all of that.
But then he found the loophole of talking about the trailer, which is almost a little funny. The regrets and the remorse are—mostly—part of that game, I think.”
At a public event not long ago, Donnersmarck told the audience, “Any work that resonates in some way can only be autobiographical. It just comes in different crypto-forms.” Only once the film came out was the hazard of the arrangement between Donnersmarck and Richter laid bare.
Just as photographs replace and alter memories—a transubstantiation that Richter complicates in his photo paintings—so, too, do films tend to replace facts. The details that Richter had shared with Donnersmarck, and those he had gleaned from Schreiber’s biography, made the inventions seem real. “So many details were taken from his history, and on the other side there were so many things that were alternative facts, as you say in the States,” Elger said.
“If you have fifty per cent historical details from Richter’s life, you think the others are true. You can’t differentiate between what is true and what is not true.”
In a Richter-like gesture, Donnersmarck had freighted the film with hidden meaning. “I put in a lot of what computer-game programmers call Easter eggs, things only he would be able to decipher, little love letters to him,” he told me. “It’s too bad he didn’t see it, but I can understand it a little bit. If I imagine someone taking my life story and putting a spin on it, either it would be super-painful, because it would be so close to these painful chapters in my life, or it would be painful because it was not close enough.” Richter’s story was complex and difficult; Donnersmarck could not truly fault him for wanting to maintain control of it. He said, “Maybe the film is for everybody except him.
”
Donnersmarck and I exchanged many letters in the next few weeks. He wanted to make sure that I had his motivations straight—that his goal was to exalt Richter, not to diminish him. “If my film did not portray him as the hero, I would feel on morally problematic territory,” he told me. “It does portray him as a hero. Wouldn’t you say?”
Charting the underpinnings of one’s own creative impulses is a murky, perhaps counterproductive, business. That’s what interpreters—journalists, biographers, filmmakers, shrinks—are for.
“It’s impossible to do it for your own work,” Donnersmarck told me at lunch. “Even Richter can’t do it for his own work.
That’s why he wants Schreiber and me. In a certain way, I’m being his analyst. And he’s the kind of patient who can get super pissed-off at his analysts. In a way, the fact that he gets so super pissed-off at us shows that we’re pointing toward something correct. I think he’s kind of, in a weird way, addicted to this type of analysis.”
In the course of verifying details of his life for this piece, Richter declined to entertain Donnersmarck’s ideas about the significance of the Ema painting. “I’ll leave that to the art historians to figure out,” he said. He did allow that Ema’s father had been her gynecologist, and that there were mysteries and rumors around the treatment that he provided her.
But that, he said, was not his story to tell. As for his time with Donnersmarck, Richter had not enjoyed hearing the screenplay read aloud. The only part of the encounters he took pleasure in was the tactful, penetrating questioning of the interviews. That had touched him deeply.
Richter said, “He was like a psychoanalyst.” ♦.
