On page 13, the author asks Hollywood actress Sharon Stone what it was like to shoot the film “Total Recall” with the ego bombshell Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Arnold,” Stone enthuses in her response, “gave me two vital tips for dealing with journalists. First, answer the questions the journalist should have asked, rather than the questions he’s asking you. Second, when a If a journalist corners you on a subject, ask him something about his life. It flatters his vanity so much that he forgets his subject.” The journalist Sven Michaelsen has experience with strategies of this kind – he has been conducting interviews for the since 2011 SZ Magazine – and had to find ways to circumvent them. In his book “If only I had never said that!” 20 cultural giants tell him about their psychopathologies and how, through compensation, they became the key to their ascent. Whether David Hockney or Joachim Meyerhoff, whether Anselm Kiefer or Edgar Selge, whether Alexander Kluge or Helene Hegemann – they all have one sentence from Jean Cocteau in common: “If my house were on fire, what would I save? First the fire.”
Sven Michaelsen: If only I had never said that! The new best interviews. nonfiction. Piper, Munich 2023. 352 pages, 22 euros.