Boundless success

Jan Josef Liefers & Anna Loos

AT HOME ON MANY STAGES

As a conscientious objector in the GDR, Jan Josef Liefers was not allowed to take the university entrance examination. That’s why he began an apprenticeship as a joiner and went to drama school in Berlin. 
In 1987, he became a permanent ensemble member at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Three years later – it was the year of German reuni­fication – the actor, who was born in Dresden in 1964, moved to the Thalia Theater Hamburg and soon became known to audiences throughout Germany. His breakthrough on the big screen came in 1997 when he landed a role in Helmut Dietl‘s film Rossini. But Liefers’ debut on the international political stage came earlier, on 4 November 1989, when he grabbed the microphone at Berlin‘s Alexanderplatz and told demonstrators the end of the GDR was at hand.

The general feeling in the final years of the GDR was something Liefers likes to describe as the “passion of dreariness”, a mood expressed by Tamara Danz, lead singer of the pop band Silly. Following Danz’s death from breast cancer in 1996, actor and singer Anna Loos, who has been married to Liefers since 2004, took her place – and helped Silly stage a comeback. Loos, who was born in Brandenburg in 1970, began her 
career in 1993 at Hamburg’s Schmidt Theater. Liefers and Loos have appeared together in front of the camera 
on numerous occasions – for example, in the 2013 TV film “Nacht über Berlin – Der Reichstagsbrand” (Night Over Berlin – The Reichstag Fire).

Maybrit Illner

SECOND WITH CHARM

Why did Maybrit Illner spend part of her youth, during the turbulent 1980s, at Leipzig’s “Red Monastery”? The talk show host, who was born in East Berlin in 1965, answers such questions kindly and patiently, aware that 
a quarter of a century after the end of the German Democratic Republic such monikers have all but disappeared from public memory. The name refers to the Department of Journalism at Leipzig‘s Karl Marx University – at the time the only place journalists could receive academic training in the GDR.

That’s where Maybrit Illner, who like nearly all East German children of her generation had previously been a member of the Communist youth organisation Free German Youth (FDJ), studied journalism after completing an internship with GDR television’s sports desk – 
although her parents would have preferred to see their daughter study law or medicine. But the self-assured young woman stayed in television, moving in the watershed year 1989 first to the foreign news desk of East German state television broadcaster Deutscher Fernseh­funk (DFF), then in 1992 to the political affairs desk at the newly formed broadcaster Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg (ORB), and finally, six months later, to West German broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) – initially as a presenter with , then as head of, the ZDF breakfast TV programme Morgenmagazin and host of the political talk show Maybrit Illner. “Purse-lipped” and “tomboy charm” are attributes given to “the longest-serving woman in her profession” by the print media after she had acted as one of the seconds in all four of the past “Chancellor duels” held in the run-up to German Bundestag elections.

Neo Rauch

THE PAINTER WHO CAME IN 
FROM THE COLD

Those who can’t think of anything better to say about Neo Rauch generously extol him as “one of the most important painters of his generation”. The best-informed among the German columnists call his pictures “naturalistic”, if not “almost photorealististic”, finding in them “a penchant for the informal” or even a “predilection for cartoons and Surrealism“. By contrast, art experts with nostalgic leanings like to see in the artist, who was born in Leipzig in 1960, a reviver of the “old East German state-sanctioned agitprop style of art“. And there is obviously an oblique reference to Rauch’s origins in the bon mot coined by his discoverer Roberta Smith, who in a 1999 article in the New York Times made him internationally famous as the “painter who came in from the cold”.

Thomas Brussig

UPSIDE-DOWN WORLDS

The GDR makes a good story, writer Thomas Brussig, who was born in East Berlin in 1964, once said. Counterfactually, that is – against what really was, contrary to the actual course of events. He turns actually existing socialism – where it may be said to have existed – and his own real existence upside-down, simply reinventing himself and world around him. He’s a satirist who pretends to know better – not everything but a great deal; a writer who strikes sparks of wit from historical truth. Before you take that too seriously, let the title of his latest book serve as a warning: “Das gibt’s in keinem Russenfilm” (That Would Never Happen in a Russian Film).

Kathrin Menges

A CHAMPION OF GREATER DIVERSITY

The Düsseldorf-based adhesive and detergent manufacturer Henkel has been around since 1876 and occupies a unique position in Germany’s corporate landscape. The company employs nearly 50,000 people and nearly a third of the 9,000 workers earning above-standard salaries are women – a rare exception in German company boardrooms. At the top of the corporate hierarchy, i.e. in the three most senior levels of management, the goal is to increase the proportion of women 
to around 20 per cent in the near term, says Kathrin Menges. She has been a board member at Henkel since 1 October 2011 – the first woman to make it to the top in the company’s 139-year history.

Kathrin Menges was born in 1964 in the Brandenburg town of Pritzwalk. She studied educational science at the University of Potsdam and has worked at Henkel since 1999, initially for its hair cosmetics brand Schwarzkopf in Hamburg. In 2005 she moved to the firm’s headquarters in Düsseldorf and was promoted to Corporate Senior Vice President Human Resources in 2009.

Karamba Diaby

THE GRASSROOTS POLITICIAN

Born in Senegal in 1961, Karamba Diaby was elected to the German Bundestag in 2013, the first member of the German parliament to come from sub-Saharan Africa. Diaby had initially gone to university in Dakar before arriving in the GDR on a scholarship in the mid-1980s to study chemistry at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

He has been a German citizen for the past 14 years, a member of the 
Social Democratic Party since 2008, and a member of Halle/Saale City Council since 2009. It’s at the university there that Diaby also completed his PhD – incidentally, on the subject of pollutant loads in allotments. 
It’s no wonder, then, that his own 2013 election campaign saw him working the local allotment community he knows so well, 
accompanied by several fellow party members and a number of aides, and talking to dozens of people – from one neighbour to another over the garden fence, so to speak. With the result that a catchy new buzzword soon found its way into the vocabulary of German politicians: the term “garden-to-garden campaign”.

Toni Kroos

THE WORLD AT HIS FEET

“The best up-and-coming football talent I’ve seen in years” – that’s how former team mate Oliver Kahn described Toni Kroos in 2007. The Greifswald-born Kroos, who transferred from FC Hansa Rostock’s youth team to FC Bayern Munich in 2006, was, at 16, the youngest player in the record champion club’s history to make his debut in the Bundesliga. The sports papers soon elevated the football prodigy to “key player” status, voting him Player of the Month twice in a row.

His career has been a remarkable one by any standards: now under contract to Real Madrid, he played in the German national team that won the 2014 World Cup – the first and only German player to have been born in East Germany (on 4 January 1990). Kroos was not an outstanding student at high school – certainly not a model student. But he did show a sense of fairness and sportsmanship by going 
out on to the football pitch barefoot so as to give the other players a chance, at least in theory.

Leander Haußmann

RESTLESS STORY-TELLER

Leander Haußmann is a descendant of German poet ¬Friedrich Hölderlin, some sources believe. Most of them simply state that he is the son of an actor and a costume designer; that his paternal grandmother was, in her first marriage, the wife of Hermann Hesse; and that one of his great-grandfathers made a name for himself at the beginning of the 20th century as manufacturer of the legendary Swiss Army knife. What we do know for certain is that Haußmann was born in Quedlinburg in the Harz Mountains in 1959, that after taking the university entrance examination he completed an apprenticeship as a printer and then studied at the Ernst Busch drama school in East Berlin from 1982 to 1986.

The crowning achievement of his work as an actor and director – which included stints at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and Berlin‘s Schillertheater – was his appointment as artistic director of the Schauspielhaus Bochum from 1995 to 2000, despite the fact that his contract there was not extended because of declining audience figures and following a serious brawl in the theatre canteen. Then, in 1999, Haußmann achieved major success with his film debut Sonnenallee, a comedy about East German youth in the 1970s.