Jürgen Flimm: He loved the game and the people

His humor, based on a humanistic education and a good feeling for people, was legendary. The theater and opera director and actor Jürgen Flimm was also particularly interested in the inside of the literary material he brought to the stage. From 2001 to 2005 he was theater director and from 2006 artistic director of the Salzburg Festival, parallel to this from 2005 to 2008 artistic director of the Ruhrtriennale. Jürgen Flimm died on Saturday in Berlin at the age of 81 after a long, serious illness.

He was born in Giessen in 1941 and grew up in Cologne, where he studied sociology, theater and literature. Even as a student, he fancied the theater and gained his first experiences on a Cologne basement stage. A small acting school was attached, where he passed his acting exam, “the only profession I can prove to this day,” he said in an interview about his 80s.

Poetic and imaginative

In 1968 he became assistant director at the Munich Kammerspiele, later he directed from Mannheim to New York. He never brought politically one-dimensional works to the stage, but always artistically dramaturgical as well as poetically imaginative productions. In 1978 he ventured to the opera for the first time with Luigi Nono’s “Al gran sole carico d’amore” in Frankfurt. He later worked closely with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Daniel Barenboim. From 2010 to 2018 he was director of the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden. For fun, he appeared several times in “Tatort” and played a commissioner in Thomas Brasch’s film “Engel aus Eisen”.

Flimm taught at the universities of Harvard, New York and Hamburg. From 1990 he was married to the film producer Susanne Ottersbach-Flimm in his second marriage.