"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.”
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 “HeilHitler,” 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.”
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 RichardAttenborough. 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.
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