Actor Finzi’s bitter criticism of socialism | STERN.de

Mr. Finzi, you wrote the autobiographical novel “Samuel’s Book” about your childhood in socialist Bulgaria. Although it was only a few decades ago, that time seems infinitely far away…

Like from another millennium, whatever it is! It was easy for me to shake up those memories. Anyone who grew up in a dictatorship will never completely shake off this experience. Long after this system collapsed, every time I crossed the border, I felt uneasy. The reflexes stayed.

Mr. Finzi, in “Samuel’s book” you describe a scene in which, as a small child, you made a joke about Head of State Zhivkov on the train to Sofia and all the adults looked down in fear. As a child, do you notice that something is rotten in the country?

The child wonders, but does not question. There are too many reactions to any form of the adult world that doesn’t understand it for that. Even though I grew up in a state like that, I don’t get how you ever went to jail for a joke. Socialism was terribly stuffy and unsexy. At the World Youth Festival in Sofia in 1968, the police went around forbidding boys to have long hair and girls to wear short skirts.

When did you become aware of the maliciousness of the system?

A child strives for light-heartedness, no matter where. Even in the miserable refugee camps that exist on the fringes of the EU, you see laughing children. I remember asking at the time why we couldn’t travel unrestricted.

Her parents were musicians and actors, they were allowed to perform abroad…

… but never together. Children, spouses or close relatives had to stay behind – as collateral. In addition, there were visits from relatives from abroad, who had nice clothes, brought gifts from another world, and looked better. I was six when the first visitor came from Israel.

How present was the Jewish element in the family?

Barely. You have to consider that only a few Jews were left. The Bulgarian population is to be credited for not cheering for the deportation of Bulgarian Jews during the Nazi regime, as they did everywhere else. My theory is that Bulgaria has traditionally been reluctant to take a stance, maneuvering between the great powers. Sometimes that was unfortunate, sometimes this lack of character also helped in being human. Although many Jews had to leave the capital, they survived in the Bulgarian hinterland. When Israel was founded in 1947, most of them emigrated, around 45,000. Bulgarian socialism was not anti-Semitic per se, but the Jews were considered bourgeois, and that was something they wanted to smash all the more vehemently.

Have you experienced antisemitism?

Only after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when there were right-wing tendencies, anti-Semitic slogans, and suddenly my family’s name found itself on such a list.

The Germans are very focused on their GDR past. What are the biggest differences between socialism in the GDR, CSSR or Bulgaria?

Romania was more extreme due to the dictator Ceauşescu and his truly vicious Securitate, while Bulgaria has always been in the slipstream of history. It mostly belonged to foreign empires and was always on the side of the losers.

How well has today’s EU country Bulgaria dealt with this story?

Almost not at all, which is a terrible mistake. To this day, the files have not been released, and the perpetrators have never been prosecuted.

The director Dimiter Gotscheff said that what was left for him was the subtle talk of the dictatorship. Always having to think about what to say. Do you know that?

I knew Mitko, as we called him, well, having acted in more than 20 of his productions. I heard his voice in my parents’ house in Sofia, later he gave me a stage in Berlin, an artistic space. I have never been an artist under socialism. I know what he meant, but I have never experienced this imprint myself.

Great literature has often emerged under the spell of censorship, with Schiller, with Heiner Müller…

Metaphorical thinking flourishes in dictatorships. Bulgakov’s “Molière” was performed, and everyone knew that the Sun King meant dictator Zhivkov. But please don’t sugarcoat the censorship. Brilliance has, of course, arisen from this opposition of art, but the circumstances remain damnable. Today I have to smile and shake my head when I hear how easily young people romanticize socialism and even wish it back.

So you don’t think true socialism deserves another chance?

There is nothing wrong with utopia, but I prefer to see the left in a position to criticize the prevailing circumstances than to transfer power to them. Many Stasi or Securitate henchmen were forced or ridden in, I’m always careful with my judgement. But there must no longer be a system in which everything that was possible is possible.

Do you think there is a danger?

It always exists. If you have physically experienced what a socialist system means in which one person decides over the other what works and what doesn’t, you remain skeptical. It was inhuman, inhuman, inhuman.

Would you be a different actor without the experience of an authoritarian regime?

Certainly. Because in every piece I question what is actually meant. Theater people who grew up in the West tend to think that – let’s say – “Don Carlos” is about a prince in Habsburg Spain. Anyone who grew up under censorship asks themselves: who does the author really mean, what is the parable?

Why do you mainly tell about this time from the point of view of the child in your novel “Samuels Buch”? Anyone who expects a Bulgarian “breath swing” will not be served.

I really never had this claim, I wanted to tell a story from this small, beautiful country and from the confines in which I grew up. I felt it should be told. It was an adventure, you have a plan where you want to go, while writing the flow of the unconscious comes and pulls you to places and to people who are long forgotten and dead and who only exist in your own memory.

After leaving the country in 1989, what sobered you about the real West?

Nothing for now. Then, a little later, something came that was more of a realization than a disappointment. Like when I saw Miloš Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

Because?

… I understood that oppression and paternalism is part of the system in socialism, but all of this is possible at any time in the West, even if it’s in a psychiatric ward.

One of your most impressive film roles is that of the downtrodden and ultimately vengeful man in Oscar Roehler’s Glorious Times. How strong is that…

… the experience of socialism? Very strong in my personal approach to such a character. Roehler doesn’t even know how present the socialist homunculus is in his film.

I can’t tell you what’s Jewish about me. What unites all Jewish people is the idea of ​​a survival strategy.”

One of your most recent roles was in the series “House of Dreams” – as a traditional Berlin Jew. Did you encounter a cultural identity there that you never had?

Difficult question. But you stand there in your costume and you think: aha, well, yes.

When you shoot in a synagogue, do you think: What does that have to do with me?

Oddly enough. I can’t tell you what’s Jewish about me. Sometimes I think to myself, maybe it’s this particularly ironic look at the supposedly serious things in life, but I actually resist this classification. What unites all Jewish people is the thought of a survival strategy.

Have you ever been homesick for Bulgaria?

Actually never. I felt a faint twinge of betrayal as I left. In 1989 there was not only this new freedom to go, but also the freedom to return. That will be forgotten. Luckily, my parents are still alive, and I often gave guest performances there. There is something forgiving about the fact that I am a well-known actor in Germany, but that people also know me in Bulgaria.

How do you feel today when someone in uniform asks for your passport on a Berlin-Sofia flight?

Serenity. As if nothing had ever happened.

Samuel Finzi: “Samuel’s book – an autobiographical novel”, Ullstein Verlag, €22.99.