Sebastian Koch: 'It's a gift to experience history'

DW: You've done an amazing number of historical dramas, and you've played almost every figure from German history: Nazis, terrorist, political dissidents… What's the hardest thing about entering the past in that way, particularly when you have to recreate a real character from history?

Sebastian Koch: Actually it's a gift as an actor to cover such different parts of history, it's like time travelling, being inside a history book, in the actual locations.

Like when I shot "The Tunnel" [Eds. A German mini-series], about the building of the Berlin Wall and a man who escaped by tunneling beneath it. The beginning of the Wall was just two soldiers putting a wire together - and I was next to it, experiencing it in "real life."

It is a gift to feel history so vividly and naturally. I love doing this. Although I'm not searching for these parts, they're the best scripts. I'm very picky about what I'm doing and if a script is good, and the people around are good, I'm with them... and funnily enough, it's often historical themes. I'm not digging for it but it just comes naturally to me.

I have always had a longing to talk about this Nazi period, because my parents' generation wouldn't talk about it after the war at all. From an actor's point of view, it's amazing to play in one year the Nazi Albert Speer and Claus von Stauffenberg [Eds. would-be Hitler assassin].

As an actor, is it particularly difficult to play a real person, like Speer, Stauffenberg or Andreas Baader, where people already have an idea of who they are, in their heads?

It might be that the responsibility is different. People have an idea about the character, which makes it quite exciting. I love the fact of being fully prepared and then deciding what I put into the character.

Take Albert Speer. There are people who say he was conscious about every thing he did. I'm not sure about that at all. He was always convinced that he was a good gentleman and he felt innocent himself, which is why he could be so honest and true. He was the master of repression.

And repression served as an alibi for Germans for decades actually.  They said: if he, Speer, was so close to Hitler and he didn't know anything, how could we?

I think that this character was almost schizophrenic. It's almost as if Hitler's architect mastered the art of building spaces and closing them after a period of time. And for me, the root of the character was that he is just closing doors and never opening them again. This is a very strange talent but he was a master at that.

In your new film, "Fog in August," you play Doctor Werner Veithausen, one of the key figures in the Nazis' euthanasia program. Describe Dr. Veithausen, who was this guy?

He was like Speer, a believer. He believed in doing good things. At the time, at the end of the 19th century, it was absolutely normal for society to discuss race hygiene, and how to make the human being better. It was based on Darwin, on Social Darwinism.

Hitler took this and made with horrible laws between 1933 and 1938 his own thing of it - which was just an instrument murdering people.

How do you play a character like that and not make him into a two-dimensional Nazi villain?

Those people themselves doesn't think they are monsters. He was quite convinced of what he was doing. To "redeem” people they have no chance to survive there disease,to vacate a bed for someone who still have the chance to recover from his disease.

For me, the challenge as an actor is to find the logic, the inner space of thoughts and logical consequences. And the better I do that, the better I prepare that, the better I can move in this strange reality - strange for us, not for him.

What do you think is the relevance of the film and its themes for today?

This idea of race hygiene is still present, if you look for example at pre-natal diagnostics. 

We are moving towards dangerous directions by wanting to control things, we even can't. Those children with Down Syndrome, for example: killed under Nazi rules. But today these children would not be born nor even live, because nobody wants to give birth to them now. This is one of the reasons why I did the film, to make people think about the decision of giving and taking life in our modern system.

I can't let you go without talking about your big breakthrough film, "The Lives of Others" in 2006. Looking back to that time, what impact did the film have on you personally, and on German cinema as a whole?

First of all, I loved the work. For me it was the best three months I ever had, artistically. During the shoot, we already knew we had something special going on. And then it was such a huge success. Every actor's dream is to make a film that remains…

And I remember the Oscars. I think it was the foreign language Oscars' 60th birthday and they had an eight-minute trailer about European cinema, with all the Oscar winners - Fellini, Da Sica, Truffaut, Schlöndorff, and so on... and after that came, "the Oscar goes to... 'The Lives of Others' from Germany." I'll never forget that.

I felt like in a bubble it was overwhelming. All of a sudden, our film was in the row of so important films that made me become an actor. I was educated with them in a way. It was a wonderful moment.

After "The Lives of Others," you appeared in a lot of big international films, "Black Book" and recently, in "Bridge of Spies" from Stephen Spielberg. What do you get, as an actor, out of playing smaller roles in these big productions, compared to the lead roles you are used to in German films?

Every actor will say: there are no small roles. And that is true. For me it is important that the film has to exist. And for "Bridge of Spies," for example, the script, by the Coen Brothers, and the team, Tom Hanks and Spielberg, this was a match.

So I was very convinced that this would be a special film: And it is, by the way. I love the film. The work was impressive because Spielberg is one of the few directors who is able to create a very private, creative atmosphere on set even though there's expensive Hollywood production outside. We were free to make mistakes, to make suggestions, and we worked together in a very intimate way.  It was a very good experience.

When you get a chance to act with Spielberg or in big international series like "Homeland," what keeps you coming back to Germany and German films?

I'm German! Actually I love my country, I love the language. The German language is very special because it is so precise. There is a word for everything. There are so many wonderful words that other languages don't have. It is impressive to have such a rich language and I love to work in that language.

Find out more about Sebastian Koch and his new film, "Fog In August," in the next KINO show on DW.