For how long do you already have this house on Madeira, Mr Gründgens?
Four years.
So, why did you move to Madeira?
Coincidence.
I produced an opera in the Scala in Milan when I decided to go on holidays.
I was fanciless which is why I though about Teneriffa.
All Teneriffa was sold out but the owner offered to provide me his own chamber.
I had already experienced something like that in another hotel, a hypermodern one.
However, the owner had lived in Plüsch which gave reason to me not to risk it this time again.
That´s how I came to Madeira instead of Teneriffa.
And since then, five or six years ago, I never went to another place.
What I love about this place is that no one knows me here.
I can walk around without anyone caring about me.
I have my house here... my neighbours.
I speak some Portugese
but I assume that speaking with my Portugese in Lisbon
must be like a Upper Bavarian speaks in Hamburg.
It is an Island Portugese..
It must be a demon´s dialect.
You are clearly aware of your unique position in the German theatre that you have
as an actor, a director, a theatre manager for more than thirty years now?
A self-assessment?
My main impressions are astonishment and wonderment
because personally I can´t understand why all of this has happened to me.
This is no coquetry?
No, God knows it´s not.
Sometimes I just sit there and ask myself: Why?
It´s exactly the opposite of coquetry.
It is simply the feeling..
I have to say now that my private life
has always been the springboard of my artistic work.
And since I am a quite unpretentious person
I am sometimes surprised of the peacock's fans I show from time to time.
And whenever I reminisce I think something like: Strange, astonishing that this has happened to me.
Astonished or not astonished, Mr. Gründgens.
There must have been a moment where you have realized: Now I am at the very top.
When did that moment come?
I have to make a pause here..
When did it happen? Very late.
If you think that the time of my greatest successes took place between 1933 and 1945...
Although that time (1933-1945) has been one of numerous daily tasks and responsibilities
there was barely reality in it.
I remember how I sat with my wife in our garden telling her:
Marianne, imagine we would really sit here and I would really be the artistic director of the Staatstheater
and I would really play Hamlet. Wouldn´t that be wonderful?
I couldn´t take it more seriously than that.
I wasn´t born for living against something.
I still remeber the famous actor Hans Brausewetter who was killed by a Russian grenade.
He and me sat together the day before he died. And we reflected about what would happen to us.
Berlin was already besieged and grenades were shelling in the streets.
And Brausewetter then said: My God! We were so talented in being in favor of something
and spent our whole lives with being against something.
Therefore I can´t give you the exact date when I realized the success
because I can´t really count the successes of that time.
Mr. Gründgens, you have mentioned the time of your directorship in Berlin during the Nazi era quite early in this interview.
Do you have a kind of an unconfident conscience about that?
Nothing is further from my intentions.
You must have misunderstood me completely.
What I meant to say was that the stage seemed to us the only certain factor in a time of uncertainty.
I call a stage a grid square.
And I knew exactly that if I had said that specific sentence onstage, a door in the back would be opened by a lady in a green dress
instead of a SS man.
That´s all I meant.
What then became decisive for my way of looking at theater: the order, the exactness, the elimination of the accidental.
You never thought of leaving Germany?
Oh yes, I did.
I made several attempts to get rid of the theatre.
We shouldn´t forget that Jessner and Reinhardt still staged when I took over the Staatstheater.
And no one of use believed that the regime could hold it´s ground.
I think I shared the opinion of the majority of the Germans who were not politically engaged.
Have you ever been interested in  political questions at all in your lifetime?
No.
It belongs to my generation - I was 18 years after the First World War - to be interested in Expressionism.
