The sixth chapter has the beautiful title “What do a sheep and an assassination have in common?”. It features a sheep and an assassination attempt, the connection between the two is not superficially given, but ultimately it is compelling. Now, it may seem a little strange to approach an actor like Samuel Finzi through what he is doing in secret, which is writing a novel, and not on the stage or screen where he is actually at home and where many people are watching. But that is correct.
The conversation with Samuel Finzi, 56, takes place the day after the cinema premiere of risks and side effects instead of. In Michael Kreihsl’s film, Finzi plays an architect who is very interested in his own success, but a kidney gets in his way. His wife needs it, he would be the ideal donor, but he doesn’t want to give the organ away without further ado. As a result, a relationship muddle develops, in which a couple of friends are also involved, a few ventures outside of the respective relationships come to light, while the kidney wanders around and is ultimately not needed. Yes, it’s funny. Mainly because you enjoy watching everyone involved. The film was shot at the end of 2019, before Corona.
So now Finzi is sitting across from you on the laptop, not as tousled as you might expect on a morning after a cinema premiere. There is a magic inherent in this encounter right from the start that makes you forget that you are supposed to be conducting an interview here. Rather, one comes up with the idea of immediately arranging a longer night out with Finzi at the pub. Samuel Finzi is someone you want to be around.
From a utilitarian point of view, the conversation is wonderfully useless at first. There would be a lot to talk about. Not just what has often been told, growing up in Bulgaria, fleeing the confines of home first to Paris, then to Berlin, working in the theater above all with director Dimiter Gotscheff and fellow actor Wolfram Koch, the formative evenings at the Berlin Volksbühne or at the Deutsches Theater. The tour de force evening “Comes a horse into the bar” based on the novel by David Grossman, which was published at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, is still running there. And then there’s the shooting, of course, Finzi in Til Schweiger films, Finzi as the criminal psychologist Flemming, as Allmen’s all-round butler in the films of the Martin Suter stories, just a small selection.
Risks and side effects: Arnold (Finzi) does not want to donate a kidney to his wife Kathrin – friend Diana (Pia Hierzegger) is surprised that her own husband would be immediately willing to help Kathrin.
(Photo: Petro Domenigg)
Finzi, however, asks himself much more what one actually wants to tell something about these days. “I don’t know what kind of time we live in.” Corona, the forced break at work, the speed of social development. No, he didn’t suffer like many other colleagues. But since he pulls everything that concerns him “through the prism of his job”, that for him, as a “homo ludens”, life and job are one, the outside world constantly penetrates his professional activities. And now the war. “I grew up in a system that had a special relationship with the aggressor.” Finzi’s children will soon be eleven and 15, “I worry more about them than they do about themselves.” But there is also hope in that.
Jewish issues? It’s more of a coincidence, he’s interested in the stories
In addition to theater and the film mentioned above, Finzi is currently offering: the series The house of dreams about a Jewish department store in Berlin in the 1920s, which premieres on June 27 at the Munich Film Festival; the novel he is writing, which has yet to be titled and is due out early next year; the podcast “Biography”: In 24 days in the studio, Finzi read the novel by his friend Maxim Biller, to be heard on SWR 2a shimmering, global panopticon of people.
Biller, Grossman, the series in which Finzi plays a businessman who wants to climb the social ladder by investing in his colleague’s department store, at some point the question of being Jewish has to come up. Samuel Finzi understands that. But: He is interested in the people in the stories. He doesn’t like the distinction that these can be characters with a Jewish background. Yes, well, maybe there is something like Jewish humor, always paired with irony, towards oneself and also towards the rest of the world. And it is actually the case that the characters in Biller or the failed comedian in “Horse in the Bar” do one thing above all: live. Finzi: “You can’t calculate life, you live it.”
Or just write it down. But please note that he is not an intellectual. He is an actor and actors are players. Well yes, players also with words. Maxim Biller is to blame for the book, which still hasn’t been named – “Samuel’s book” would be very pretty. Samuel Finzi wrote a birthday text to Dimiter Gotscheff three years after Finzi’s death. A kind of letter published in the time, a piece of literature (sorry, Herr Finzi!). Biller read that, called, persuaded Finzi to write.
The name of the novel is still unclear
After the one chapter with the sheep that Finzi sent to read, you can be sure that he will write down a lot of what is on his mind here. The quarrel with the political developments in his home country – “every people deserves the government that it has”: there is no civil society, everyone thinks of their own well-being, he knows no country that is as proud of its slavery as Bulgaria is. First part of the Ottoman Empire, then the Russians came in 1944 and behaved like they did in Berlin in 1945. No sooner had there been a progressive head of government than he was killed. Finzi still has an apartment in Sofia, the floorboards come from his father’s theater, a famous actor; almost ten years ago he went there to demonstrate against corruption. Since 2008 he has been performing his Nikolai Gogol solo “Diary of a Madman” at the Deutsches Theater. The madness of a minor official – suddenly he sees Putin in it.
So now the sheep. The chapter is a memory conceived from afar. When Samuel was five or six years old, the family traveled to the Black Sea, as they often did. But there were no more flights, Samuel’s father met a former lighting technician from the theater at the airport, who now worked for Balkan Airlines. Sergei made the flight possible. While on vacation, Samuel discovered a sheep behind the house and wanted to ride it, but the sheep didn’t want it and ran away. Many years later, Samuel Finzi saw Sergei on TV. He had been arrested as a black sheep who had been at the service of the wolf Mehmet Ali Ağca in his assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Sergej, the nice man from the airport, was involved in secret service and terrorist organizations. That’s why a sheep and an assassination have a lot in common. And it’s all true.