Mr. Liefers, theatres have been completely sold out for your programme “Soundtrack meiner Kindheit” (Soundtrack of my Childhood). What gave you the idea to take this show on tour?
We’d originally planned a single concert in Bochum focusing mainly on the music that had shaped my life. It took me back to the bands of my childhood, and I was really surprised to discover how deeply some of these songs were rooted in my memory. Then, to help our audience in western Germany to understand things a bit better, I started to fill in a bit of the background, create a bit of context by telling a few amusing anecdotes that really happened – and it all went down incredibly well. We got some amazing feedback, as if people had been waiting for an evening like this without really knowing it. The band got together, we looked at each other, and we all thought the same thing. Then I sat down, looked for a few more songs, took snippets from some of my father’s old 8mm films and went in search of original soundtracks from those days.
What’s so interesting about old GDR rock now in 2009?
In contrast to English songs, everyone can understand the texts and get the feeling of them. Our show is a very personal evening. It adds a kind of face to history. I don’t tell stories about heroes and victims. Almost everyone everywhere could have experienced most of the situations or something similar. There are a few exceptions, and they just happen to be political. It becomes clear that politics determine our everyday lives, even if we’re not interested in such matters. We play pieces which, all in their own particular way, resist imposed levelling and toeing the party line. They deviate from the culture prescribed by the GDR dictatorship, sometimes quite subtly.
In the GDR you often came into conflict with the authorities. You weren’t allowed to carry on at school and qualify for university, and you were at the microphone during the demonstrations in 1989. What disturbed you most about the GDR state?
Where on earth should I begin? Above all, the regime’s hypocrisy and ignorance. The discrepancy between their hollow rhetoric and our reality. And then later, the fact that we were caged in. But look, I’m not a victim of the GDR regime. I was a rebel, but nothing really terrible happened to me. My family gave me the ability to make my own way through life despite everything. I had a lot of luck, too. Sometimes you just follow your own common sense without realizing that you’re already acting politically. You sign a citizens’ action appeal put out by the Neues Forum, simply because you feel the text is right and that it’s time for things to change. Then suddenly you’re standing in front of half a million people, almost scared out of your mind, but you still manage to give a speech. Maybe I went a bit far, but a wise man once said to me: if you don’t speak out when you can’t really afford to, then you won’t speak out later when you can afford to.
After you left drama school you went on location to South America, West Germany, France and Spain to shoot your first film. Didn’t you think about escaping at that time?
South America bowled me over completely. The time in Ecuador changed me, taught me something about the magnitude of the world. On top of this, the GDR National People’s Army became increasingly insistent about my doing military service and then threatened that my conscientious objection would have consequences – so I planned my escape. But that was in the spring and summer of 1989. The rest is history.
Jan Josef Liefers
He is one of Germany’s most versatile artists: Jan Josef Liefers, born in Dresden in 1964, is an actor, singer, screenwriter, director and dubbing actor. In this respect he is continuing a family tradition, since his parents were actors and directors. Liefers, who refused to do military service in the GDR National People’s Army, completed an apprenticeship in carpentry before studying at drama school. He has four children and lives in Berlin.
