It could have turned out differently. Then he would have looked grumpy and scolded: “Yes, what are you doing there? Sneak!” But Josef “Sepp” Bierbichler laughed from the bottom of his face, spread his arms and shouted through the entire dining room of the old Seeblick tavern: “Yes, look here! That we two idiot idiots are still walking across paths!” And so the visit to the set at the old “Seeblick” inn on the SchafWasher Bay on the western shore of Lake Chiemsee was an extremely enjoyable venture.
The actor in “Death in Venice/Kindertotenlieder”, 2013 at the Schaubühne in Berlin.
(Photo: Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance/dpa)
And an exciting one at that, as the great Bavarian actor Bierbichler had to transport his monumental roman à clef “Mittelreich” to film, which is a special adventure when the author of the three-generation work also wrote the screenplay and took over the direction . The fact that the film is then called “Two Gentlemen in a Suit” is a bit irritating, but Bierbichler has never been interested in simplicity. Today, this Wednesday, April 26th, Sepp Bierbichler will be 75 years old. It could be that he does not pay special attention to this date.
So it could be that on this day, as so often, he is sitting in the anteroom of the Gasthaus Fischmeister in Ambach on Lake Starnberg, with a newspaper and a cup of coffee in front of him, and hardly lifting his eyes when a guest comes into the house, and this one gives the impression that there is just a grumpy elderly gentleman who doesn’t give a damn about life around him. It’s probably just that Sepp Bierbichler quietly enjoys the home sweet home, which this beautiful inn has been for him since birth, and recovers from the dangers out there in the world. A world that knows him as such a powerful, subtle, coarse, powerfully eloquent, tender, fear-mongering, embracing actor.
Bierbichler is an autodidact, which is a blessing, because none of the well-known drama schools took away this fine dialect, which often infiltrates High German. So whether as Kasimir despairing of his Karoline under Marthaler or as the simple-minded merchant Lopachin under Zadek in “Kirschgarten”, you always have this fine Bavarian singsong in Bierbichler’s voice in your ear, just like Klaus Maria Brandauer’s gentle Austrian even with Petruchio in “Der The Taming of the Shrewd” did not fail to have an effect on Käthchen.
Josef Bierbichler in his solo “Wood Slaughtering. A Piece of Work”, which premiered in 2006.
(Photo: Raimund Müller/imago)
Sepp Bierbichler, who has been fascinated by acting since childhood, is hired after ten formative years in a Catholic boarding school and after going through a hotel management school, moving from the amateur theater in Holzhausen to the Residenztheater. There was a powerful rebellion against the establishment there at the time, with Sepp Bierbichler at the forefront. After tremendous success with “Brandner Kaspar” he got to know and appreciate the filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch, an artistic liaison that years later would end in a total rift. After Werner Herzog hired him for “Herz aus Glas” and “Woyzeck”, there was no stopping him. The greats of the directing trade take turns in the Ambacher Wirtshaus. Doris Dörrie (“Right in the Heart”), Tom Twyker (“The Deadly Maria”), Hans Steinbichler (“Hierankl”), Wolfgang Mumberger (“The Bone Man”, a really nasty role), Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon” ), a truly broad spectrum of German film events; and an equally wide range of unforgettable characters. In addition, there is the role in Ferdinand von Schirach’s “Crime” series, or that of the Jewish FC Bayern President Kurt Landauer, who was in office in the 1930s; and last but not least the double role in his opus magnum “Mittelreich”, where he plays the old innkeeper and the aging boy.
Bierbichler as Bertolt Brecht, with Birgit Minichmayr in “Abschied”, broadcast on WDR in 2001.
(Photo: WDR/OBS)
But if you want to deal with the Bierbichler phenomenon for the first time, which is likely to be rare, we recommend “Im Winter ein Jahres”. Director Caroline Link is gently leading Sepp Bierbichler by the hand, who as an artist is supposed to bring a boy who took his own life back to life with a picture, so to speak. One experiences a Josef Bierbichler of such sadness and tenderness in and with the mighty body that one takes one’s breath away. The man who has already chopped wood for a whole evening on the Berlin Schaubühne fails here in accepting the fact that painting cannot replace life. At that time one could congratulate. Today we do it too.