Behind the Words

With unparalleled radicalism, the actress Gisela Stein (1934-2009) dedicated her life to the theatre. After her beginnings in Koblenz, Krefeld-Mönchengladbach, and Essen, she performed at the State Theatres in Berlin from 1960 to 1979. Here, the exceptionally talented actress, who also appeared as a guest on stages in Hamburg, Zurich, and Stuttgart, quickly became one of the outstanding theatre actresses of her time.

In 1980, she moved to the Munich Kammerspiele, where she formed an incomparable working symbiosis with the director and later artistic director Dieter Dorn and members of his legendary ensemble—such as Helmut Griem, Rolf Boysen, Peter Lühr, Thomas Holtzmann, and Cornelia Froboess. In 2001, she followed Dieter Dorn for another six years to the Bavarian State Theatre.

With immense will to survive, utmost discipline, and her undiminished love for the theatre, the fifty-year-old accomplished the unimaginable: after a severe car accident in August 1983 that nearly destroyed her body and against whose effects she fought for the rest of her life, she returned to the stage a year later.

Whether as Iphigenia, Hecuba, Penelope, or in modern plays: with words as the "initiator" of images, feelings, and associations, the actress brought forth new hidden layers of meaning for a role and a play based on the most intense engagement with the texts.

The exhibition pays tribute to this great actress with a multitude of photos, costumes, and film excerpts from her performances. Memories from her artistic companions, as well as Gisela Stein's own statements in correspondence, diaries, and interviews, document in words and writing the life's work of a personality who became the epitome of the acting profession.