Ursula Ehler was easy to recognize at premieres, as petite and small as she was. With her red curly hair she stood out neatly from the crowd. Or you first saw the hard-to-miss Tancred Dorst in his godfatherly appearance, then it was clear: Ursula Ehler, his wife, was at his side. The two were symbiotic as a couple, inseparable. He: quiet, mild, shy. She: a resolute Franconian, lively and direct. Until his death in 2017 – he died at the age of 91 – they were only ever seen together. They also wrote the numerous plays that made Dorst one of Germany’s most important and most performed playwrights together since 1971. It was always called “Collaboration: Ursula Ehler”. The time was not yet ripe for equal participation in car racing. When someone called her Dorst’s “muse,” Ehler became wild.
They met at the end of the 1960s in the Munich marionette theater Kleines Spiel, where Dorst wrote his first plays and Ehler directed the puppets. The Bamberg native, born on November 10, 1939, studied sculpture in Munich and worked as a librarian in the state library from 1961 to 1965. She was also an assistant director and screenwriter. In co-authorship with Dorst, pieces such as “Ice Age”, “On the Chimborazo”, “Merlin or the Waste Land”, “I, Feuerbach”, “Karlos”, “Herr Paul”, to name just a few of the around 40 titles, were created to name. In 2005 they received the city’s cultural honorary award. In 2012 she received the “Faust” theater prize for her life’s work. The latter also includes the 2006 “Ring” production in Bayreuth.
“Our life is a conversation,” they said. And the pieces and dialogues were created in a shared conversation at the tea table, written with ballpoint pens in narrow notebooks and later typed out on a typewriter. Thoughts and notes for future texts were stored in the legendary apothecary cabinet in her Schwabing, later Berlin, apartment – an inexhaustible reservoir of ideas. Open and curious as they were, they traveled a lot, jetting all over Europe for the Bonn Biennale in search of pieces by young authors. Ursula Ehler died on Monday in Berlin at the age of 84. She will be buried in Munich-Bogenhausen. Then she is back with her husband.