I’m tired of people who brag about how well they sleep
Celia Walden
Ute Lemper has spent more of her 54 years outside her native Germany than inside, for the past two decades preferring New York as the family home she shares with her four children, because it is a city where “no one cares less where you are from”.
The award-winning singer, actress, dancer and musical adapter – words that inadequately convey a range that stretches from reinterpreting the songs of Kurt Weill and Edith Piaf, to starring in Chicago, Cabaret and a string of celebrated art-house films, as well as voicing Disney’s The
Little Mermaid – has a complicated relationship with the land of her birth. “Don’t call me German,” she once rebuked an interviewer.
But today, sipping her coffee with perfect poise, her black leather jacket draped diva-like over her sinewy, tanned shoulders, Lemper confesses that something has been shifting of late in her attitude. “I’m maybe happy to be German a little bit more than I was unhappy to be German before.” The explanation lies in part, she explains, in two figures: Angela Merkel and Donald Trump.
It’s 10 o’clock on a bright London morning, and for one whose natural habitat is the night-time world of theatres, stages and outdoor spectaculars under lights, Lemper is surprisingly sparky. Her eyes have a mischievous twinkle and her eyebrows are forever arching. Only when the photographer appears does she protest: “You need to find me some dark.”
We are meeting in a deserted bar to talk about her two forthcoming shows, touring back-to-back in the UK – The 9 Secrets, a song cycle she has created from the words of the celebrated Brazilian spiritual writer, Paulo Coehlo (“a little Bible without the religion”), and Last Tango in Berlin, a selection of her best-known numbers.
But it is on being German that she gets most animated. “When I started, in 1987, to re-record the catalogue of “degenerate” music banned by the Nazis, I was thrown as a young German hundreds and hundreds of interviews worldwide, and asked to discuss the German heritage. It was very complicated for me as a post-war German to figure out what had the Germans done, what was the collective guilt, how could people see and watch the Holocaust, be aware of it and not face it more profoundly in the context of grief? These were questions I couldn’t fathom at the time. I had grown up with no national pride but, rather, national shame.”
And so she put some distance between herself and home: living first in Paris, where she won a Molière Award for her Sally Bowles in Cabaret and starred as Marie Antoinette, in 1990’s L’autrichienne; then in London, where she won an Olivier award in 1997 as the original Velma Kelly in Chicago – “throwing my legs up in the sky”, as she puts it.
Her memory is that it was a tough time to “come out” as a German. “On one of my first trips to America in the Eighties, a guy was flirting with me. We had some drinks and some fun. He thought I was Swedish. When I declared I was German, he stopped talking to me. He was of Jewish heritage.” That must have been a shock? “It was OK. I probably would have done the same thing.”
Lemper has a reputation for telling it like she sees it. So when we drift on to the state of the world today, she holds back not one iota on the subject of the current US president.
“Us New Yorkers hate Trump.
It is horrible to drive all the West Side Highway and see the 15 Trump Towers he placed at the Hudson river, hindering the beautiful view into the older city. We are outraged.”
She lives in an apartment on the Upper West Side with her two older children, Max and Stella, 23 and 20, by her first, seven-year marriage to writer, comedian and actor, David Tabatsky, and her two younger ones, Julian, 11, and six-year-old Jonas with second husband, musician Todd Turkisher. That’s one big age gap. “We had made one child in my second marriage, so we wanted a little sibling. And it took a bit of time to make him.” She was 48 when Jonas was born.
But back to Trump. She speaks, she says, with a casual laugh, as one who suffered under his chaotic travel ban. “They held me back at the border once
‘I had to sit in the immigration room for three hours’
because my Green Card [which allows her to live and work in the States as a foreign national] was on extension. So they didn’t accept the stamp in my passport. There was a new rule to check every stamp in passports. I had to sit in the immigration room for three hours, surrounded by Arab men.” Up go the eyebrows, and I am wondering what those men must have made of her, because she certainly wouldn’t have been waiting patiently and meekly. Lemper, though, isn’t to be sidetracked. She is on a roll about the man in the White House.
“He certainly doesn’t have the credentials to be a president. He’s a sexist. He doesn’t respect women. He is a primitive man. He got his redneck votes with racism and primitive talking.” For someone for whom English is a second language, she certainly knows how to deploy words as weapons. But if Donald Trump is making her a little less comfortable in America, then Germany is travelling in the opposite direction in her affections.
“A lot of things have happened there,” she reflects. “We had the fall of the [Berlin] Wall in 1989 and the new guilty people were discovered – the East German traitors, the Stasi, those who had betrayed their brothers and sisters, fathers and sons… Then came the millennium and a new generation, living in a post-cold War world, with a new definition of the world, with civil wars and new religious wars. Germany now has a great reputation in the world.”
And its leader, Angela Merkel, has, Lemper says, finally empowered many Germans to feel pride, not shame, on the world stage. “She was really outraged about the refugee crisis, so she stood for a policy that had some humanity. She has built villages out of nowhere to host the refugees, to give them education immediately, to find ways to assimilate them into the society. She did really good stuff – a clever, intellectual woman with her heart in the right place. And she’s not even a liberal. She’s a conservative.”
Might that example tempt her one day go “home”? “Well, I do a lot of concerts in Germany and I see how things change. My family still lives there. I am the only emigrant. So I feel connected. It is my root.” Her next
two projects return her to those questions of German identity that have for so long shaped her view of the world and herself. The first, already performed in the States and most recently in Milan, is a programme of “songs for eternity”, based on material written in Yiddish by those held in the Nazi concentration camps and in Jewish ghettos. “I want to show the other side of the story, not the music that was banned by the Nazis, but the music of those who didn’t make it out.”
The other – still just a possibility – would reunite Lemper with Marlene Dietrich. In 1992, she recreated Lola, Dietrich’s celebrated role in the 1930 film The Blue Angel. “I’ve been compared to her for so many years. I’m running away from her for my whole life.” But not this project – perhaps for theatre, perhaps for film – about the relationship between Edith Piaf and Dietrich. “I’ve just got the offer and I’m thinking I might just do it.
“My first reaction was no, but if we can explore her [Dietrich’s] political relationship to Germany, and the resistance she faced after singing for the American soldiers in the Second World War, then it needs to be explored and discussed.” “Needs” is a weighted word. She may live an ocean away from Germany, but the ties that bind Ute to her homeland, however uncomfortable, remain strong.