Interviewer: Martina Pfeiffer

It is an honour for us having Michael Lederer as an interviewee in our project "Literal Encounters". The cultural worker, actor and author has lived in Berlin since 1998. Michael was born in 1956 in Princeton, New Jersey. His maternal grandparents were German, both born in Stettin. His relatives on his father's side were Jews from Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in what is now Croatia. His father Ivo Lederer made a career as a university professor of diplomatic history at Princeton, Yale and Stanford in the United States. Michael studied theatre sciences at Binghamton University, New York. In 2009 he founded the Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival (DSF) being its artistic director for the following years. A very warm welcome to our interview, dear Michael Lederer! I am looking forward indeed to our conversation!

After your family had moved to Palo Alto, California, in 1965, your parents divorced. You were 12 at the time. "The Michael train got off the track", that's what you said in an interview with Deutsche Welle. In 1975-77 you lived in the tipi tent of a hippie community. It was called "The Land" in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Joan Baez had founded this community for the purpose of studying non-violence. When thinking of "non-violence", immediately Mahatma Gandhi and his peaceful resistance comes to my mind. Was Gandhi's personality a source of inspiration to you in those years?
M.L.: Gandhi, yes, though more recent was the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been assassinated for his own non-violent protests only seven years earlier. Joan Baez and her husband David Harris were both leaders of a non-violent resistance movement that stood against the brutalities of the Vietnam war, and of racial segregation in the American south. As a white American male growing up in the north, I was insulated from both those struggles physically, but not in spirit. As a child growing in the sixties, I saw the violence on television every night which brought it home. The music we listened to was a collective cry for peace. Violence was something around the corner, but no further than that.

Did you also take part in protest marches against war in your youth?
M.L.: When I was 13, in Palo Alto, California, I marched with others in the October moratorium against the war. That was 1969, the year of Woodstock. My own schools were integrated, which felt so natural and we were better for it. I couldn’t understand anyone not welcoming that. We felt we were part of those struggles. One of my strongest early memories was of the day in November 1963 when my mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, told me the president had been murdered. I remember the day Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down. I was aware of my own good luck, and knew so many were never handed the kind of opportunities I was given. As young as I was, the resistance movement offered a way to be involved.

On the other hand, didn't you have the feeling at that time in the hippie community of living a life in limbo and that you might lose touch with the outside world – that the "real" life might be slipping away from you?
M.L.: What “reality” do you mean? In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” an older character offers advice to the young Dustin Hoffman about his future: “Just one word – plastics.” So much in the so-called modern world felt like it was being constructed from plastic. Disposable pens, disposable lighters, disposable marriages... Thoreau’s “Walden,” E. F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful,” Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome, native American cultures, all those presented a life just as real as any mechanized petro-chemicalized military-industrialized keep-up-with-the-neighborized life being peddled 24/7 in mass media down the hill. There are trees and grasslands, starry nights and a moon both east and west, north and south, so I’d argue we were not stepping outside the world as much as into it. Three years living with no electricity, the first two in a geodesic dome then the third year in a canvas tipi, built a resilience and appreciation for natural beauty that have served me every day and night since. Building a fire for warmth instead of just pushing a button for it. Not only looking out the window at the seasons but smelling them. Entertained by one’s own thoughts, undistracted by the white noise of an overloaded world. Community on a scale where that word again meant something. Those experiences felt as real as it gets. I still spend summers in a stone house with no electricity in an olive grove in Spain. I don’t choose to live there always. But I don’t choose to live without that, either.

Was it, that you experienced a kind of reality that has been lost today in many ways?
M.L.: We were picking the reality we wanted and needed at the time. Setting back the clock to rediscover the child within, mixing the serious and the playful. Anyone reading this has chosen their reality to some degree. This career instead of that, living in one place instead of another. Every day brings forks in the road. As Robert Frost said, we were taking a fork less traveled. It was interesting, and it was fun. Bumping into Neil Young in the little market at the corners on Skyline. Jerry Garcia driving past in a little red MG – he looked like an M&M stuffed into that tiny thing. Alan Ginsberg walking his little white dog. I yelled, “I love you, Alan.” He yelled back, “I love you too, man.” Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters from La Honda, Pancho eating butter like it was cheese. While back to the non-violence, we were following Martin Luther King’s edict to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. Peace and love not bad paths to follow. It was groovy.

In 1984/85 you wrote your first novel "Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore", which is set in the small fishing village of La Herradura in Southern Spain. The text is about a family stuck between tradition and modernity.  The family is faced with the decision to either stay, or to sell their farm to a real estate company. In 1999 the novel was published in Cadaqués, and in 2013 it came out in German, in Berlin. How do you feel about your text after such a long period of 40 years have gone by?
M.L.: The year I spent writing that, living in that same village, felt like a natural extension of the life I had lived up on The Land. Again, back to nature. A goatherd would bring his goats past the house every morning and evening. From my balcony, I’d watch the fishermen sitting on the beach mending their nets. I was a runner then, and every day I’d run along the old goat trail the Moors had carved into the cliffs above the sea. There were the ruins of an old stone building on one cliff, and I wondered why anyone would ever leave such a beautiful place. It is where I set my story. Because from there, looking out you could see cranes and bulldozers in the distance putting in condos and hotels that were sweeping away the old ways of life that would not endure much longer. I was sad about that, and so I decided to try to capture those changes. That tsunami of change has always been there, of course. Cars replacing horses, electric lights replacing firelight. Now our phones replacing human contact as machines become our friends. I think that story becomes more relevant every day.

There´s another important year, as I found in your C.V. In 1998, you co-founded the "Safe Haven Museum" in Oswego, New York. The museum's mission is to trace the flight history of a group of 982 Jewish people who searched refuge in America during World War II, including your aunt Mira, your grandparents Otto and Ruza, and your father, Ivo Lederer. In 2023, your play "Casual Baggage" was performed at the English Theatre Berlin. The American Embassy in Berlin has included it in its literature program. The theme ties in with your family's history of fleeing. Could you tell us something about this flight?
M.L.: My father, his parents and sister and the other refugees aboard that one ship were the only Jewish refugees brought to the U.S. during the war. They were then interned behind barbed wire on an old military camp in upstate New York until after the war ended, because the truth was the country did not want Jewish refugees coming in. That was a token gesture for publicity’s sake, and my family was just incredibly lucky to be included in it. They were not admitted as immigrants, but literally wearing labels around their necks identifying them as “U.S. Military Casual Baggage.” After the war, President Truman allowed the 982 to stay. Fast forward, I was born in 1956 with an American passport tucked into my little diaper.

When did you actually start writing your play?
M.L.: The play began in 2019 when I was commissioned by a Tony award-winning Broadway producer, Latitude Link, to write it. But then Covid struck, theatres were shuttered closed and that producer backed away from the project. Writing it was such a personal thing. I couldn’t get past the fact that because of my own good luck, it was almost impossible to grasp the despair and later relief my own family had experienced, let alone the grief of so many who had not been as lucky.  I visited Auschwitz trying to get my head around it. But even there, every step through that hellscape, I knew I was there by choice. A hot meal and a fast trip back to the hotel were just waiting for me. So, my play evolved to be about how hard it is for a next generation to understand the fear and hate we have heard about from parents and grandparents but not experienced ourselves. The same thing reading of other people’s struggles in the news, because the family of Man-Woman, right? “Wankind,” as I call us. My hope is that being aware of that chasm helps to narrow it. The museum in Oswego, which stands on the site of the old army camp where the refugees were held, is an excellent place to seek that understanding. Only 982. Incredible.

To come to another topic now: Your heart has always beaten for William Shakespeare, I guess. In 2009 you founded the Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival (DSF). Shakespeare in Dubrovnik sounds like an adventure to me. In the following years, you were also the artistic director of the Festival. Shakespeare’s 460th birthday is on 23 April 2024. He is still fascinating us. How come he is still a permanent fixture?
M.L.: If you imagine a safecracker’s fingers sensing each click of the dial to open it, that’s how I think of Will Shakespeare. He had his fingers, mind and heart on the human condition, also of course the natural and supernatural worlds that surround us. I would do anything to travel for a day and night with Shakespeare, though I can’t imagine we’d get very far. I picture him pausing to notice every little this and that along the way, plus its opposite. The yin and yang of it all. He was the keenest observer I know of, and we have the great luck that he was able to express what he saw.

How big is the organizational effort to prepare and carry out such a festival? Are there also things happening in the course of the festival that you didn't have on your mind beforehand – that came as a surprise?
M.L.: This answer can’t be short. The beginning of a thing is the easiest part. You begin with the blank page and just pin all your hopes on it. Then of course, turning a dream into a plan and plan into reality is the hard part. My father took me to Dubrovnik during some very special summers when I was a boy. Croatia, then-Yugoslavia, was the country of his birth. He wrote one of the great books about the country’s origins, “Yugoslavia at the Paris Peace Conference” (Yale University Press, 1963). Later, when he was Director of East European Programs for the Ford Foundation, he was instrumental in establishing the Inter-University Centre for Advanced Studies in Dubrovnik. After my dad died, I also wanted to give something back to that town and that country that had meant so much to him. I bought a home there, then quickly learned that aside from the wonderful Summer Festival which runs for six weeks in July and August, and the Julian Rachlin Chamber Music Festival in September, there was very little cultural activity beyond local fare. The springtime, when the weather is glorious and there are fewer tourists crowding the Old Town, seemed a perfect opportunity to establish a theatre festival. With help from Croatia’s President Ivo Josipovic, who I had met in New York, and my old friend Irina Brook, the theatre director from Paris (and daughter of director Peter Brook), we started Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival in 2009. We were lucky to have strong support from the Ministry of Culture, the city of Dubrovnik itself, and corporate sponsors like Croatia Airlines, Valamar Hotels and others. At the same time, we faced three enormous obstacles. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 hung like a weight around our ankles, then necks, as budgets everywhere were tightening. They say timing is everything. Oops. Secondly, there was corruption on a scale I did not anticipate. Example: While at President Josipovic’s urging the city provided us with “free” space to perform, the manager of one venue asked me: “Now, are you going to want electricity for your lights? I have to charge you for that, of course. Will the audience want chairs to sit on? These will cost you, naturally. There is an ice machine at the bar.” He mentioned how much it would be to rent that nightly. Finally, he said “Someone on my staff will have to unlock the doors, then stay through the evenings to lock them when the audience has left.” By the time he tallied it all up, our “free” space was going to cost about 60 percent of what we anticipated in ticket sales. Something lost in translation of the word “free.” Finally, the real deal-breaker and ball-breaker was that while building up the festival, I became more and more—pick your adjective, disgruntled, disgusted, with what happens to that beautiful Old Town in the summer. In 2009, only 800 Croatian citizens remained living within the old walls, most homes sold off to foreigners. While as many as five cruise ships a day, each disgorging as many as 3,000 short term visitors swell the town with invading hordes. The Disneyfication of one of the most beautiful manmade corners of the globe. That is, if you can spot it through all the bobbing heads of picture-taking tour groups. They spend 5 or 6 hours there, then back onto their ships and off to Venice or Istanbul.

I suppose that was probably not your real target group?
M.L.: I wanted to attract a different kind of visitor, one who would stay days, nights, take in the once city-state that had stood as a sentinel between empires, that had pioneered diplomacy as an alternative to war, survived wars itself, with its peacock island of Lokrum, its hidden treasures tucked into the white stone alleyways, etc. My frustration began to really express itself in some of the performances we planned in 2012. One café agreed to post a sign on its terrace, “Take photos of the tourists. 1USD$.” Some actors would play the parts of locals—children kicking a ball, couples arguing, a pair of lovers etc., since there were so few locals left to depict local life. I organized a fake tour group looking like the real thing that would tell people things like “The house on the left is where Mozart spent much of his childhood, while the house on the right is where Coca Cola was invented…” Because true or not, some of the people shuffling along in those groups just seem to believe whatever they are told, and I wanted to test those limits. Information as fast food. Such a superficial way of seeing a place to spend only a few hours, then for the rest of your life tell people you were there? What “there”? To quote Gertrude Stein, “no there there” the way they do it.

What other theatre events were planned for that year’s festival?
M.L.: We planned a gallery of twenty living statues lining the Stradun, the main pedestrian throughway, with statues coupled in mini-performances: a slow-motion kiss, slow-motion punch, slow-motion act of pickpocketing, etc. Each of those would take an hour or even hours to unfold, forcing a spectator to return from time to time to see the denouement, not just rush past on their way back to the ship. The great Russian/German painter Genia Chef was going to paint an enormous portrait of Shakespeare outside the Rector’s Palace. That would take days, again asking an audience to keep returning to see it develop. We had a Pink Floyd tribute band from London ready to perform “The Wall” within the city wall itself, with its theme of isolation to shed light on how the remaining local population was growing more and more isolated from its own city. Then the fan hit the you-know-what.

Oh dear! Everybody take cover!
M.L.: The final straw seemed to be an interview I gave on Croatian National Radio. The host asked me what I had planned for the festival for 2012, and I jumped like a Jack-in-the-box from its lid. It just spilled out of me. I started talking about what mass tourism was doing to the town, and how we hoped to combat that. After only a few minutes, the host cut me off. The next day the mayor summoned me to his office. “Michael, do not try to change the city, just make theatre.” As if theatre is…what? Nothing more than selling tickets and filling seats? A few days after that, Dubrovnik Airport phoned to say that instead of the 50,000 euros they had pledged to support our Festival, they would be giving only 3,000. At the 11th hour, we were forced to scale down big time. Irina Brook was just about to bring her company of actors from Paris to stage “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That was going to be interesting. In Shakespeare’s day, men played all the parts including women’s. In Irina’s staging, two men acting as man and woman kissed. Croatia was not exactly at the forefront of Woke then, but that’s another story. A wonderful company from Zagreb, Exit Theatre headed by Matko Raguž, was bringing one of their shows. Both those had to be cancelled.

And so, with the reduced budget that year … How did it go on?
M.L.: We did some smaller plays. The company Performance Exchange from London, led by Daniel Foley, came. We had commissioned an English translation of the Marin Držić play “The Miser” and managed to do staged readings of that in Dubrovnik and also in London. It was the first time the words of Držić were heard in the city of Shakespeare. But now the air was out of the tires. I wanted to get back to my writing. And keeping the festival going in those headwinds felt like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. Still, DSF was beautiful while it lasted. And it spawned a couple of newer festivals that people are attempting now, fashioned after ours. Some of my old production crews are behind those. I wish them well.

There is a personal story about your conflict with the mayor of Dubrovnik, about the performance of "Romeo and Juliet", as you told me. The mayor said that tourists want a play about romantic, eternal love. In contrast, you were convinced that "Romeo and Juliet" is basically about hate. Could you elaborate on that and on your idea of the performance of the play?
M.L.: In that same conversation I mentioned, the day after that radio interview, I told the mayor of my plan to stage “Romeo and Juliet” as follows: there would be two boxes of football jerseys on the stage, one containing Croatian jerseys, the other Serbian jerseys. Serbia and Croatia had fought a brutal war in the 1990s. In 1991, Dubrovnik itself had come under attack by Serbia and Montenegro during the Croatian War of Independence. I would come on stage before the show on opening night to flip a coin, then ask someone in the audience to call it, heads or tails. Depending on the toss, either Romeo’s family or Juliet’s would wear the Croatian jerseys, while the other family would wear the Serbian. The next night we would swap costumes, then back and forth from night to night. Totally arbitrary. I knew our predominantly Croatian audiences would feel instinctive empathy for whichever family wore the Croatian jerseys, and hatred toward the other family.

That sounds like a powerful way to present that story.
M.L.: The point was to show how easy it would be to manipulate allegiances and emotions. Every politician knows it. As I said, R & J is often mistaken as a play about love, but its real power is as a story about hate between two “others”—in this case, Romeo’s Montagues vs. Juliet’s Capulets. It could, and at its heart is, as easily about black/white, Israeli/Palestinian, religious rivalries of Shakespeare’s day and our own, etc. Us vs. them, group-think. If I staged the play in the U.S. today, I'd do the same thing with red MAGA hats. One night one family would wear them, the next night the other family. That's the closest antipathy and group-think come to the surface in my native country just now. Back to Dubrovnik, the mayor was exasperated. “Michael, can’t you leave politics out of this and just give pleasure to the audience?” Wrong Artistic Director for that. Wrong festival for that.

You also wrote a stage play for the festival, which was performed there. In how far would "Mundo Overloadus" thematically fit in the festival?
M.L.: DSF took that play on the road. In 2010 we did it in London at the little Poetry Café in Covent Garden, then later that same year we did it at PS122 in New York’s East Village. It’s about a group of characters we think are waiting in an airport lounge, only later we learn they are in an insane asylum. Sanity is a fragile thing. The play worked for DSF because with those stampeding hordes of tourists phone-in-hand in Dubrovnik, the Old Town felt so overloaded. Instead of really seeing the place, being in that moment, many are so busy taking photos so that later they can see what they didn’t quite see when they were there. They can linger on an image, zoom in on it and think: Oh, so that's what that was, that's where I was!

Yes, we all know those people who are unable to cherish the moment when things are actually happening.
M.L.: The play is about more than that. In his book “Beating the Global Odds,” the writer Paul Laudicina cites it, writing, “Imagine having at last the entire knowledge of human civilization at your fingertips and finding that it basically gives you a migraine. That’s the theme of 'Mundo Overloadus'.” As we withdraw further and still further into our devices, we’re adding new layers between us and the world humans have inhabited for millennia. To really experience Dubrovnik, Venice, some parts of Paris, etc., one now has to roam the streets between say one to seven in the morning, otherwise the crowd is the same crowd you saw at the last stop, one of them just happens to be you. A sameness is obliterating the very differences we came to see. How do we retain our own identity as we’re swallowed by the crowd? That is the question here.

You wrote your play to be staged at the Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival. Shakespeare was also a master of the sonnet, with its typical form and strict metre. The classic themes of the sonnet are mainly love, beauty, time and transience.  As a composer of sonnets yourself, would you say that the spirit of Shakespeare lives on in your sonnets?
M.L.: A 3-line haiku already gives enough room for a story arc. A classic 14-line sonnet, by contrast, offers almost luxurious space while still imposing its constraint. Fitting the furniture into a room only so big. Though some of my sonnets like “How Fast is Love” stretch it to 15-lines. A novel is the opposite, you can go full-in-Tolstoy if you want. I do like the discipline of the sonnet and its’ formalism. It’s like hoisting a flag to mark great occasions. Like a great love, or a great sadness. I wrote sonnets when my first son was born, and when my father died. There’s a dignity to a sonnet. As a theatre major in 1980, I wrote my first sonnet during a semester abroad in London after I read some critic claim he knew exactly what Shakespeare meant in some moment of some play. I was venting, because much of the magic of Shakespeare is the ambiguity. As Pink Floyd told us, sometimes words have two meanings. Will goes still further, showing us life in a fun house mirror, reflections of reflections. This was the 23-year-old-me's homage to him:

The kaleidoscope of meanings is never ending
That seen forthrightly for what they are
The words of Shakespeare are elusive and undying
Like the universe itself, outliving stars
And like some flaming constellation of hallowed lights
So many beacons illumining mankind
Without them we would proceed with partial sight
Stumbling forward in strange kinship with the blind
But with them, the blind as well may see
Such richly varied colors, tones and hues
That they, like he, as he wove his tapestry
Command innumerable shades from which to choose
And so his words like eyes give vision to us all
To gaze upon a world that has no walls

How uplifting to hear such an elaborate sonnet! I enjoyed it very much. But now let's move over to another writer. In the story "Spain II" you mention Hemingway. His clear, precise and in many ways ascetic prose was already regarded by the German writer Siegfried Lenz as an orientation for his own writing. Has Hemingway been important for your writing, too?
M.L.: I said a good deal about his influence on me in an essay I wrote in 2021 for the American Studies Journal blog. So, at the risk of repeating myself I’ll say that I felt less alone after reading Hemingway. He was an ex-patriot. My tribe if I have one. He was an alcoholic, a writer, and loved places with people and also without people. Ditto all those. His style of writing influenced not only me, but so many writers who came after him. Boiling down the chicken soup to thicken the broth. Before Hem, writing was more florid. He made you pay for each word. Say it, be done with it, and move on. On a personal note, only Shakespeare has felt as close. And maybe John Fante. I’d cut off a toe or two to spend a few hours with any one of those three.

While reading "Spain II", I noticed that you write with a certain melancholy about a type of Spain that perhaps seems to be disappearing. As you point out in this story about Hemingway: "He captured those places in their virginity, or something close to it […] There were no budget airlines or package tours […] And describing the soul of a place was easier, because the soul was still there." Besides Berlin and Dubrovnik, you've lived in Spain. A passion for Spain?
M.L.: I read “The Sun Also Rises” – in Europe it is called “Fiesta” – about a year before my first trip to Spain. In that book, Hemingway describes the white dirt roads just across the frontier from France, and the behavior of people still tethered to our animal side. Technology and sheer numbers have moved us away from our own roots. It’s been exactly a century since the last Twenties when Hemingway wrote that book. In Spain, I found one didn’t need to get away from people to stay connected to our nature. It feels there like we are still part of nature, which is why I fell in love with it. People are animals, and there they don’t hide it. As if each moment has something of raw sex about it. Again, exceptions to each rule, but many in that culture let you see what they are feeling. Less veneer than say here in Berlin, where I now live.

So, it is this raw honesty in Spain that appeals to you?
M.L.: I’ve always had a hyper-active imagination and a romantic view, so it might just be me, but many there also strike me as more grateful for life, less disappointed by it than in some of the other places where I’ve spent time. I know the moment I step across that border I am happier. I spent a year on crutches there after breaking my leg near Granada, and I even smile thinking back to that hospital. Some kind of magic in that. If you get away from the towering look-like-anywhere apartment blocks of Benidorm, and the thickening summer crowds on Las Ramblas, they are still there, our roots.

In 2014, the novel "Cadaqués" was published. This place on the Spanish-French border became famous because of the writers and painters who were drawn there. Artists such as Dali, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picasso, Buñuel, Garcia Lorca, John Cage felt attracted to this place.  And in addition to the zest for life, they seem to have somehow managed to work in a disciplined manner – unlike your protagonist called Cal – rather hard-drinking than hard-working. You succinctly name the feeling of life in Cadaqués: "Cha-cha-cha-mood". Has this mood filled you as well with creative joy?
M.L.: If I had to point a finger toward my favorite spot on earth, it would be Cadaqués. There are places as beautiful, but none more beautiful. Those rocks, that wind, that sea. Still more olive trees than people. I like that. One can be with people or away from them, one as easy as the other. I first came to the village in 1998. From the ages of twelve to forty-seven I basically had a drink in one hand and a joint in the other. I found a group of artists there who could drink as much as I could, had dreams as big as mine, and like me were trying to reconcile those two. Trying to put the square peg into the round hole. The spirit of those great artists you mentioned tower over that place, a reminder of what art can achieve. There’s a responsibility that comes with that awareness. Don’t waste it, whatever talent you have, whatever time you have. As I’m answering this, I can report my last drink was on May 10, 2004. I wrote that novel to chart a line between being too wild but still wild enough. One can also be too careful in life. That’s never been a problem in Cadaqués.

2016 your book "In the Widdle Wat of Time" came out. There are two photos on the cover: one of you as a three-year-old and the other presenting you in your end-fifties  – in keeping with the theme of "time". The book harbors sonnets, very short stories and haikus. Would you see yourself in the tradition of Ezra Pound’s haiku poetry, those short three-liners that capture fleeting impressions?
M.L.: I already spoke about a haiku offering enough space for a story arc. Life is a fleeting impression. As I get older, I see that a century isn’t what it used to be. For the child, a hundred years is approximately forever. For someone north of sixty, it seems hardly enough time in which to get where one is going. Ezra Pound’s edict to “Make it new” was the clarion call of a younger man. Fast forward, and what happens is a certain fondness for tradition shoulders its way in to share the head space. I don’t embrace change in the same way I used to. I accept it, which is different. That book takes its title from my sonnet “In the Widdle Wat of Time,” which is me wrestling with trying to understand that.

As I noticed, you had already been on stage as a 12-year-old. In your career you played various theatre and cinema roles: at the age of 15, Gandalf in a Hobbit production. You also played Prince Serpuhovsky in Tolstoy's "Strider" and Sigmund Freud in "Fräulein Dora" (by Carol Lashof) , as well as Lucullus in Brecht's "The Trial of Lucullus". As Claudius in "Hamlet" you were on a theatre tour in London and Hong Kong in 1989. You had been on stage at an early age. Any stories that spring to your mind when looking back?
M.L.: As a boy living on Roger Road in New Haven, Connecticut, our next-door neighbor was a professional actress named Bunny Cohn. Bunny’s daughter Karen was the first girl I ever kissed. Theatre of life. In 1964, Bunny was in a production of Brecht’s “Caucasian Chalk Circle” at what was about to become Yale Repertory Theatre. The production used Karen as the child. I remember watching my little friend up on that stage, then running home and writing a play called “The Good Guy and the Bad Guy.” I made little tickets that I sold to my parents and friends for a dime each, made a set from an old box, and used some of my toys and puppets as the actors. I still have some of them. At the same time, my father’s parents lived in Manhattan and would take my brother and me to Broadway shows. “Fiddler on the Roof” with Zero Mostel, “Kismet” with Anne Jeffreys, Radio City Music Hall. So, by age eight I already wanted to be an actor more than anything.

That was about the same time when you moved to Palo Alto together with your family, right?
M.L.: We moved to Palo Alto, California, when I was nine. A friend of my dad’s got me an audition to play children’s roles in a series of educational tapes for radio being produced in San Francisco. I joined the actor’s union AFTRA, and at age twelve I was making fifteen bucks an hour, which was a lot in 1968. I was active in Palo Alto Children’s Theatre, which is still such a great resource for P.A. kids. In 1970 I began to act at what would become TheatreWorks, now among the more important regional theatre companies in the country. A sidenote, you mention playing Claudius in a touring production of “Hamlet” in London, 1989. The most exciting thing on that tour was that one day I was wandering around Southwark, across the river where Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and the others performed their plays. I stumbled on an archaeological dig that turned out to be the ruins of the Rose Theatre, where Shakespeare began his career. It was the first Elizabethan theatre ever unearthed, and they were only a few days away from destroying it to put up an office tower. I alerted the “Evening Standard” newspaper which wrote about it, and the resulting protests meant they redesigned the office building so that the ruins of the Rose are still preserved and open to the public. I’m proud of my little part in that. The owners of that building are probably still cursing me.

On the stage, you also played the part of Cyrano de Bergerac. You have been working again on the subject of Cyrano in another stage play recently. Could you name the reason why you feel artistically drawn to the character of Edmond Rostand's famous hero?
M.L.: I played Cyrano at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto in 1983. That was a turning point for me where my love of acting morphed into a greater love for writing. One can control the universe taking shape on the blank page in a way that excites me. In the case of Cyrano, while researching the part I learned the playwright Edmond Rostand had based his 1897 play on the real character of Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, who lived in France in the early 17th century. The real Cyrano was a free-thinking libertine who believed in science. Here in the 21st century, some still don’t. Italo Calvino described Cyrano as “the first writer in the modern world who professed an atomistic concept of the universe in its fantastic transfiguration.” And he was one of the first to write science fiction as social commentary, saying things about the church and state which if he had said them directly, off with his head nose and all. In his books “Voyages to the Empires of the Moon and Sun,” he imagined different ways of traveling to space. He described a hot air balloon, the parachute, rocket travel, an electric light bulb, phonograph, MP3 player and more, centuries before others made those real. And it pissed me off that outside of France, where many do know about him, most of the world thinks of Cyrano as a big-nosed fiction created by Rostand. So, after that run I went to Bergerac in France, though it turned out he never lived there, picked grapes for a while, then wrote a play entirely in verse called “The Practically True History of the Final Days of the Real Cyrano de Bergerac.” I also learned the real Cyrano, who was an atheist, took a whole year to die from a head wound while the real Roxanne, who was Roman Catholic, cared for him. Rostand had him die only a few days after receiving his wound, and so I thought it would be interesting to explore that year. I had luck that a friend of mine was the playwright John Guare. John read the script and told me that while he loved the poetry, the play was too sweet, too long, and far from ready.

But in the meantime there has been another revision, is that correct?
M.L.: It took me forty years before I finally cultivated a more cynical side to counter the romantic part of me that comes more easily. Only a few months ago I finally finished that play, which is now called “How Fast is Love.” Four characters, one set, running time about 90 minutes. It’s about two older men who are spending their final days sharing a room in a hospice. One has been a romantic actor/poet, no money but has lived from his heart. The other is a cynical Trump-like businessman from Queens, NY, who would sell anything and anyone for a profit. They are cared for by a young nurse named Roxanne. The fourth character is the old poet’s grandson. I’ve just started sending the script to theatres. Fingers crossed.

Yes, knocking on wood. Let’s move over to your screenplay "Saving America". In 2017 the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg invited you to read from the manuscript which is your contemporary version of Don Quixote. Your screenplay about the old, chronically optimistic Don Hotey won the Bronze Prize for comedy in the PAGE International Screenwriting Contest 2019. Might we label this screenplay as a depiction of America's salvation?
M.L.: As children, we all have fantasies. A stick becomes a sword, a bush becomes a fort, a tree becomes the mast of a pirate ship. At least, that was my childhood. Quixote is a character who has kept the child within him alive, while with his help his friend Sancho discovers his own inner child during their adventures. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Some see things as they are and ask why, others dream things that never were and ask why not?” That is the essence of Quixote. The real enchantment. My country the United States is in danger now. Some stoking the fires, it hasn’t felt this divided since the 1860s. The ice is melting. We’re pulling away from each other via the very devices that were promoted as bringing us together. You’re in your bubble, I’m in mine. Someone, or something’s got to save us. Why not a story? I wrote once that every step we take begins with a story. We tell ourselves what we hope to find around the corner, and only then do we head there. I love storytelling because you can solve any problem, on paper at least.

Looking on “Saving America”, can you give an example of how you have solved a problem on paper?
M.L.: In this story, I imagine that engineers have created a new kind of silicon-based asphalt that can convert sunshine to electricity. I’ve spent much of my life living in places like California, Spain, Croatia, where the roads get so hot you can’t step on them with bare feet. I always thought, what a pity no one is using that available sunshine to address our climate issues. In the United States alone there are over 4 million miles of existing roadways. Those could not only collect but also distribute electricity to homes, factories, vehicles. At the same time, racism and xenophobia are tearing us apart. Donald Trump, fool’s gold if there ever was any, wants to “drill, drill, drill.” Next generations be damned, the floodwaters won’t touch him. He inspired Storm Tyler, my villain in the story, who tries to kill the new technology because of his own investments in fossil fuels. Germans offered perfect movie villains for a long time. See “Casablanca” to confirm that. Now Trump has stepped out of the shadows to offer his own services there. Perfect bad guy material, with just enough buffoonery thrown in for fun. He’s like a Commedia dell’arte character, slapping others for fun. In one scene in a Nevada brothel, a fight breaks out between Blacks and Whites, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans and others. My hero Don Hotey gets up on a table and gets them to stop fighting for a moment by shouting out, “You know what tribe I belong to? Put your hand on a table, now hit it with a rock. If that hurts you know something, that means you and I, we belong to the same tribe. The Hit-my-hand-with-a-rock-and-it-hurts tribe. Or, as we are also called, the Stroke-my-hand-gently-and-it-feels-good tribe. It’s about that easy, folks. We are in this thing together.” Of course, that’s naïve. The fighting resumes the moment he steps away, just like in Cervantes when the master resumes beating the servant boy Andres as soon as Quixote rides off. But at the same time, there’s a child’s uncomplicated truth in Don’s plea—Can’t we somehow get along? To quote Hemingway, isn’t it pretty to think so? Out of the mouths of babes. There’s a charm in the original story I also try to bring to mine. Charm is like a magic potion, it can make anything easier. When the bad guy realizes that, it can even be dangerous.

In your short story collection "The Great Game" (2012) you explore the myth of the American West being wild and in Europe it would be the other way round. A few words perhaps on this interesting counter-position?
M.L.: That’s just a coincidence of the compass. I was talking about post-war Europe after the Iron Curtain rose. The old West of the United States was rugged and lawless until order was imposed. Fast forward, Eastern Europe was rugged, rough edges everywhere, and just as lawless in that the law was what someone behind a closed door said it was. At the same time, with exceptions there was order in the West. Due process in law, in business, art operated with an open door, hardly anything secret anymore. More often than not people were who they said they were.  Whereas in the East of Europe, you couldn’t be sure. State police had informants everywhere. Your own friend or family might be spying on you. That’s pretty wild. Again today, some Russian friends won’t say what they think because they know Putin is looking over their shoulder. We thought history moves forward? Not always.

One of the stories in that book is titled “Berlin-Warsaw Express.” Can you say something about it?
M.L.: Absolutely. I describe how even after the Wall fell “re-branded Communists who not long ago had been Stasi informants still watched their neighbors through lace curtains out of habit.” Another story I keep telling is how in 1980 I was traveling with an Austrian girlfriend on a train from Vienna to Budapest. At the frontier, armed guards who looked straight out of Central Casting for “Mission Impossible” demanded to see my passport. They wanted to know why I was coming to Budapest. In English I told my girlfriend, “Tell them it’s because I want to see their military installations.” Poor Heidi turned white as a ghost. “You can’t joke with these people like that, Michael.” Thank God they hadn’t understood a word of English, or probably I’d still be scratching out the years on a cold stone wall, at least until the Wall came down some twenty years later.

On the "American Studies Journal Blog" I read one of your recent essays: "German Distance, American Naivety". In your observation of the Germans and the Americans you end with the sentence: "The truth is that we have much to teach – and much to learn". What exactly is there to teach and to learn on both sides?
M.L.: In that essay, I tell the story of waiting to cross the street in Manhattan. There was a stranger next to me, and while we were both waiting for the traffic to clear he and I got into a spontaneous conversation about our fathers dying. I noted that not in a hundred years do I believe I would ever have such a deep and easy exchange with a stranger here in Germany. But then I also note how as an American I have not always been as sensitive to some of the historical nuances here in Europe as someone who grew here. I take too much for granted. A good example would be my joking with that Hungarian border guard in 1980 about wanting to see their military installations. Because of its size and the two oceans bordering it, the U.S. can be so insular. I think Europe can continue to gain from our openness, and our readiness to innovate. And we Americans can learn a lot from Europeans’ experience living so close together. Europeans understand that the alternative to coexistence can too easily be war.

Another remarkable essay on the "American Studies Journal Blog" is: "Erich Mühsam and the Berlin Idea Factory". You have had your writing office and research library in the same building where Erich Mühsam worked and lived with his wife Zenzl. Alt-Lietzow 12. Could you explain why you feel so close to Mühsam, as your essay reveals?
M.L.: I first came to Europe when I was two years old in the summer of 1958. In 1961-62, we came again to spend a year in Vienna where my dad Ivo was researching and writing a book on European diplomacy. While we were there, the Berlin wall was going up. I remember a picnic we took one day within sight of a machine gun turret on the Hungarian border. So, I already knew Europe was a more dangerous place than my home back in New Haven, Connecticut. Later I learned how my father, his sister and parents had just barely escaped the Nazis in Yugoslavia, and that my grandfather had first escaped from the concentration camp Kerestinec outside Zagreb. He had been arrested for violating the edict against Jews practicing law. Erich Mühsam was a Jewish poet, playwright and essayist, arrested by the Nazis on the night of the Reichstag fire in 1933, then murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. There is a stenciled picture of Mühsam’s portrait on the wall at the front of the Kunstlerhof, just below the library where I work. A few weeks ago, someone spraypainted it with yellow paint. Especially since the October 7 Hamas attack against Israel, the discovery of over 600 kilometers of military tunnels under Gaza—longer than the London underground—and the tragic loss of life on both sides, tensions are again spilling into the furthest reaches of life in Europe. At the same time, Ukraine is little more than a bike ride away. Drums beating, bullets flying. In the U.S., a major political party is about to again nominate a candidate who vows retribution against his political enemies, calls those enemies “vermin,” and claims immigrants are spoiling the blood of the country, though he himself is the son of an immigrant mother, and his father was the son of immigrants. Red hats now instead of brown shirts. Breaking glass at the U.S. capitol January 6 was a far cry from Kristallnacht, but even a baby step in the direction of political violence is a warning sign. History rhyming. Erich Müsham used satire to address the cruelties and dangers of his day. Laughter is a powerful weapon. Nothing gets under Trump’s orange skin more than people laughing at him. Putin, Kim Jong Un won’t allow it because it strips away power, the would-be emperor seen without clothes. Alexei Navalny has just paid the ultimate price for the power of serious humor—at its best, and his was, sharper than any knife. In Weimar Germany, Mühsam used satire—until the boots came for him.

You have been living in Berlin since 1998. Here you are a member of the "Kunstlerhof Group of Artists". In the interview with Deutsche Welle, you explain what makes Berlin so special for you: Instead of "getting lost in so many blue skies" – you prefer Berlin as a place full of its own dynamics. "a place that stimulates and not just to relax". In how far are you moved by the city of Berlin – emotionally, artistically, culturally or whatever?
M.L.: I’ve never liked being in the too-comfortable center of things. It’s anesthetizing. I’ve always enjoyed life on the fringe. For so long, Berlin was a hot breath away from the edge. When I moved here seven years after the wall came down, it still retained that feeling. Parties at night in abandoned factories, late smoke-filled nights at Paris Bar, license to be whatever and whoever you wanted to be. The nice thing about being sixty-seven is there have been big chunks of life spent here and there. I have moved every so often to try something new. Big city, small town, country. Mountain, sea. East and West in the U.S. and in Europe.

Are there other places besides Berlin that you would call "home" as well?
M.L.: If you spend enough time in a place, it never leaves you and you never really leave it. You have invested life itself there, and that is an investment that continues to grow. I spent a couple of big chunks in Manhattan, which was perfect at the time. In the West Village in the early 70s, a little brick walk-up next to the old Waverly Theater by Bleeker Street. Later, four years atop the rectory of "The Little Church Around the Corner" on East 29th Street. Home is in the heart, right, and those two are still there. But the crowds and noise and competition for every table or taxi started to wear on me. I’ve also lived in London twice, the first time as a theatre student and I can’t not-smile to remember that. Later, too much of my life there centered on money. Money should be a tool, not a main motive. Palo Alto was home for so long, but unless you’re in high tech it’s not at the center of the world, and after a break now and then I do like to be where things are happening. My life there became too comfortable, too predictable. The village of Cadaqués is in a way like a tiny city, in that just sit in one of the cafés and sooner or later it feels as if the world comes to you, artists especially, from every corner of the globe. But it is in the end a village, and eventually I need a little more caffeine in the stride.

And Berlin, does the place have enough of this caffeine for you?
M.L.: Berlin offers the perfect pace for me. Not too fast, not too slow. It’s a major world capital, but the buildings don’t tower over you and you can still see the sky. I take advantage of the network of embassies here, always something and someone interesting to push you forward. My work with English Theatre Berlin has been rewarding. Also, my wife Katarina and I have three children: Lukas, 14; Alex, 13; and Katarina, 11. Katarina goes to the Staatliche Ballettschule here, the state ballet school. This is a great city in which to raise kids. The fact that it’s so multi-culti means they and we feel like part of something bigger. And as I told Deutsche Welle, as a writer the city fascinates me. In the span of just one lifetime, it has gone from liberal Weimar to National Socialism to a city divided by a wall, to that wall collapsing and integration into a European Union still in flux. As the son of a historian, I love being in the eye of history. Eye of a hurricane is another story. Either way, the view from here is a fine one. Always on the front line of something.

Potsdamer Platz, the former "Waste Land", devastated by the war and then full of cranes for a long time, is now "a symbol of Berlin re-born" for you, as you have said. "Berlin was a city re-inventing itself by the minute" – that is what you observe in the story "Berlin-Warsaw-Express". Would you agree that Berlin metaphorically might resemble a person starting life anew?
M.L.: When I came here, I was still drinking—a lot. I couldn’t sleep through the night without waking up to suck on my bottle, refill the tank before passing out again. I knew I had two choices, stop drinking or die. English-speaking AA in Berlin saved me, helped me reinvent myself at the age of forty-seven. To do that in a city that has reinvented itself was a great comfort. Because I knew that if a city and a country can change so much, a person can as well.

Can you imagine that, apart from Berlin, you might move to another place on this globe in the future?
M.L.: I can’t see around the next corner. But this is my home now. Base camp. Three of my four children were born here. So many of my friends are here, others just a quick train ride away. On my mother Johanna’s side both grandparents were born in Germany, descendants of French Huguenots who came to Prussia in the 17th century. I have been in the apartment where I now live for 21 years. I’ve never lived in any one place this long in my life. I love my neighborhood. So, if there’s any reason to move, I can’t think of it.

Michael, would you kindly tell us what you are up to in the near future?
M.L.: Later this year, PalmArtPress in Berlin will publish a collection of my non-fiction titled “Blood Oranges and Other Sticky Things.” The book will include essays, interviews from Europe and the States, and articles including one I wrote for Politico, “Berlin is No Longer an Island,” about the Christmas market attack in Berlin in 2016. One of my favorite interviews was about night trains in Europe, still my favorite way of getting around. There are seventeen essays I wrote for the American Studies Journal blog, and another dozen or so that will be published now for the first time. I’ve also kept a personal journal since I was a student. Some of those entries will be included as well.

Dear Michael Lederer, thank you very much for the time you have been with us. It has been a great pleasure for us having you.  You have given us deep insight into your way of thinking and work. And into a life that makes an important contribution to culture and society. Wishing you and your family all the best and of course for anything that is in the pipeline. Thank you very much again for this lively "Literal Encounter"!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lederer
www.michaellederer.com
blog.asjournal.org/contributor/
sfgate.com