Nina Hoss Doesn’t Need Answers

Nina Hoss: I don’t want it to be misunderstood – as if my idea of art were that one simply has to draw from history and continue from there, you know? What I mean is simply that if you want to change something, it’s good to know what it is you are changing, or what tradition you are standing in.

The problem is that nowadays everything becomes flattened. It has no depth. It doesn’t ask questions. People are constantly searching for answers, and that is something very alien to me. Whether I am acting, or reading a text, or entering into a work process or project with other people, I am much less interested in answers than in putting something up for discussion, so that a conversation can begin, so that through observation, one might arrive at reflection.

What I am really always looking for – and this is something that has become so foreign to us now – is a pause. A still point.

That would be incredibly desirable. But I don’t think I will ever know fully and completely who I am, because one is always so many things.

That is also what is wonderful about my profession: I get to encounter so many lives. I never play myself when I act, but try to draw something out of the other life I am portraying. That shows me that I can understand so much that I may not live, but that I still carry within me.

In the end, the world changes, you yourself change – always.

For example, the security of knowing that you don’t have to run after everything.

Even as a child, I remember – or rather, my mother always told me this – that when I entered a group, I would first watch from the sidelines for about two weeks. I’d arrive at kindergarten and just observe. The kindergarten teacher would say, “What is wrong? Your daughter doesn’t play at all.” And my mother would say, “No, no, just leave her. She’s a watcher. She’ll come around.”

I was that child who watched. I sorted everything out first – who is who, who does what, what are they like – and then I would suddenly burst in and become the leader. And I think that has stayed with me a little: this sense that one should pause for a moment, not immediately charge ahead.

I never really have the feeling that I need to prove myself. I only want to try things out, to give myself, to explore.

I don’t yet feel entirely at the point where I look back on my career in that way. But I have the feeling that I have been quite lucky – which may also, in the end, have something to do with me.

I started out with The Girl Rosemarie, which at the time was seen by eight million people. I was catapulted from zero to a hundred into a level of fame. But suddenly, I was always offered the vamp, the sexy troublemaker, the kind of girl who twists men around her finger.

But what interested me in Rosemarie was not really that she was a prostitute. I thought she was an incredibly exciting person: a girl wants to escape the narrowness of the suburbs and sees, in the 1950s, only this one path. She takes it – but then she becomes famous and dangerous to the men who exploit her. That is why they have to kill her.

That path, that strength of such a girl, such a woman – that is what spoke to me. All those other roles that were then offered to me felt flat by comparison.

No. Life cannot be only good; otherwise, you would not even recognize the good.

In fact, whenever I hear something like that, I become suspicious, because I always think it reveals a fear of sentiment, or of pain. And I don’t have that. It would probably be strange if I did – otherwise I shouldn’t be doing this profession. Most of the figures one plays go through some dramatic turning point or rupture.

There was one moment in Yella, for example, where this woman – who is in a sense already dead, but does not yet want to let go of life – goes too far and becomes truly brutal toward someone. I understood it completely, because there was something almost childlike in it. In the sense of a child pulling the legs off a fly to see what it will do, forgetting that it is a living being. If you get close to that, it is frightening.

Yes – and that is also a liberation. I never have the feeling that I have to carry it all inside me without knowing where to put it. I often think: I don’t even know how people do it if they don’t have something like this.

It is difficult to describe. I think we are in an in-between time, where we first have to find ourselves again. The last twenty years we imagined we knew how the world worked. We thought we knew quite exactly what we were for and against. And all of that has dissolved a little. And yet I always still hope that in art, especially in difficult times, we find voices again – voices that on the one hand take us by the hand, and on the other hand challenge us, voices that do not let us duck away, but pull us forward.

Yes, because more and more everything revolves around business. Not that it was never like that before. But there used to be more niches. And those niches could become mainstream, and when they did, they were welcomed and actually supported.

When I feel – on a film set, in the theater, on stage, or sometimes simply in rehearsals – that suddenly there is something that has presence and makes the whole thing larger – if only for a moment. It cannot be repeated. And yet the camera captured it.

In solitude, you prepare yourself. You read, you research, you do all these things and fill yourself up, so to speak. I do all that in order to be inspired, and, as I said before, not to draw only from myself. And then, filled with all of that, I go into a scene or into a work process, and then I am absolutely curious about what comes from the others – that mutual discovering is the most thrilling thing.

Why do we make the world the way it is? Why do we treat one another the way we do now? Why do human beings think they are worth more than other human beings? How can we think that other people are worth nothing? Ultimately, my question is the nature of the human being. Why are we the way we are?

No, I do think we are capable of it. We just keep being told that in our hearts we are bad, and I do not believe that. There are thousands of studies showing that when another person is suffering, the first impulse is always to help. The first impulse is to reach out one’s hand.

Children discover so much because they are learning all the time. They move
through the world with open mouths and open eyes. The world is also changing so quickly. In my lifetime alone, so much has changed. The computer arrived; all of this is rushing over us. But it is also incredibly interesting, what is happening. Despite everything about it that can frighten one, it is still an extraordinary time to be alive. Life keeps going. It doesn’t work any other way. One cannot stand still. Even if sometimes one would like to.

I love that line.

But those moments do exist. We must honor them. And if we are lucky, we recognize them while we are living them.