Dramaturg Carl Hegemann died in Berlin at the age of 76

When bad news hit the Berlin theater and you didn't know what to do, when you wanted to get a feel for the mood in the scene or when you wanted to know what really happened with Helmut Kohl at Lake Wolfgangsee or the bite of a racist police dog during the arrest of Christoph Schlingensief at the Documenta, then you called Carl Hegemann.

It was important to take the time, because the conversations always lasted a bit longer and usually led to much more interesting topics, topics you hadn't called about in the first place. What you could always count on was that you'd be in a much better mood after the conversation than before. This even worked recently, when we discussed the Senate's austerity measures, and Carl Hegemann spontaneously developed a socially revolutionary theater model in which politicians and the unemployed would perform together on the city's stages, while art would have been relegated to City Hall. He was gleefully pleased about the impending catastrophe.

He was the best first audience a theatre maker could have

These calls will no longer be possible. As the Berliner Zeitung learned from close circles of the Berlin theater maker, author, and university professor, Carl Hegemann died in recent days after a brief illness. With him, Berlin's theater loses one of its best minds and its true heart. More than any artistic director could have, he offered himself and his ideas with complete generosity, always trying to elevate conflicts, difficulties, and artistic experiences to an intellectual level and somehow connect all the ideas and participants he encountered.

Carl Hegemann had the rare talent of discovering interesting aspects and connections in everything he encountered and of becoming passionate about them. This enabled him not only to keenly and astutely sort through the political situation, the feature pages, and the debates, but also to gently guide the energies of the artists with whom he collaborated without constraining them.

He was the best first audience member a theatermaker could have. One can assume that Hegemann was often able to read more into the artist's work than the artist himself could have written, constructed, or staged in their wildest dreams. Some mistook his comments on their works or texts for praise, believing that vanity was at play when he was so keen to praise his own ideas, when in fact he was simply galloping off with his associations and cross-references, full of enthusiasm.

His actual place of work was the Volksbühne

Guarantees of success horrified him; Schlingensief's motto of failure as an opportunity was certainly Hegemann's brainchild. It was Hegemann who gave Schlingensief the key words and polished the nuggets that emerged from his not always brilliant, but sometimes protracted and tedious actions.

Hegemann was born in Paderborn in 1949. He studied philosophy, social sciences, and literature in Frankfurt am Main, receiving his doctorate in 1979 with a thesis on Fichte and Marx. Hegemann probably thought too fast, too wildly, and too impatiently for a purely academic career; theater needs such people. He was a dramaturge at the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen (1988–89), in Freiburg (1989–92), and in Bochum (1995–96), and, after the death of Heiner Müller, served for two seasons as co-artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble (1996–98).

His true place of work, however, was the Volksbühne, where he inspired the dramaturgy throughout Castorf's tenure (1992-2017), albeit with two interruptions of several years, and in the latter, furious years as chief dramaturge. His collaboration with Schlingensief began in 1997 and lasted until his death in 2010. Both Schlingensief and Castorf had Hegemann's intellectual tools at hand as they plunged into their Bayreuth adventures and the accompanying darkness. Without Hegemann, they would certainly have dared to do so, but they would certainly have had less fun.

Carl Hegemann last lived in Berlin's Bötzowviertel

From what has been described, it should be clear that he was also gifted as a teacher: From 2006 to 2014, he was a professor of dramaturgy at the Leipzig University of Music and Theatre. He taught at colleges and universities in Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich.

Hegemann was married to the graphic artist and stage painter Brigitte Isemeyer; their daughter is the author Helene Hegemann. Carl Hegemann most recently lived in Berlin's Bötzowviertel district and was enthusiastic about his upcoming work with the total theater duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller, to whom he would have been only too happy to hand over the Volksbühne as a plaything, which would certainly have backfired in a grandiose and hopeful way. No one could dance the mental tango with him as happily as with him. And if you stepped on each other's feet or tripped over each other and fell over, it was definitely part of the fun—and naturally promoted mutual insight.

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