The Insatiable

Clemens Schick on Monasteries, Kreuzberg, Hitler and What Keeps Him Awake.

When Clemens Schick sits down, he hasn’t quite arrived yet. The day before, he returned from Rio de Janeiro, from a Brazilian winter of 26 degrees and the final day of filming for a US Netflix production involving half of Hollywood. Tomorrow morning, he’s off again, this time to Prague for his next project. In between: this one afternoon, this one conversation, this one photo shoot.

Anyone who speaks to Schick quickly realises that standing still is not a state he allows himself to remain in. And yet his career began with a period of retreat. At the age of twenty-two, he spent eight months in a monastery run by the Taizé Community in France, in search of what he describes as: “a longing for concentration, for a sense of devotion in my life”. Looking back, he sees it not as a detour but as an important part of his life story, one that continues to shape him to this day. Even there, in what might seem the purest of all places of retreat, concentration was a daily challenge, he says: “When you try to have one thought, ten thousand follow.” It is a sentence that suits him so well you want to remember it for later.

From Taizé, his path led to a private drama school in Berlin, funded by jobs as a waiter, in a city shortly after the fall of the Wall that he remembers as overwhelming, almost suffocating. For the next ten years, theatre was his world: stages in Dresden, Frankfurt, Vienna, Zurich and Hanover. The fact that he eventually brought this period to such a decisive end, perhaps too decisive, in order to turn his attention to film still weighs on his mind. He openly admits that it is a pattern in his life: “I bring things to a very clear end. In that case, I was perhaps too brutal.” He misses the stage, but not the ensemble system behind it.

Berlin has been a constant since 1993. More precisely: Kreuzberg, where he has lived in the same communal household for twenty-five years, alongside fifteen families he is friends with, their children growing up together. A village in the middle of the city, he says, and it’s not hard to hear that this is precisely what ‘home’ means to him. His mother comes from an old jewish Berlin family, so the city is not only part of his biography but also of his family history. He finds it hard to say what has changed over more than three decades, thoughtfully remarking: “I miss the sense amongst Berliners that the city is theirs and that they are the ones who must nurture and look after it. Whether that’s down to my growing conservatism or because the city is changing, I can’t say for sure.”

With the fifth and final series of Babylon Berlin, he is now bringing a completely different era of the city to the screen. It is the 1930s. Schick plays Adolf Hitler during the early years of his rise to Reich Chancellor, ushering into a dark era. He approaches such a character consistently from the outside, he explains: “I approached this character primarily through his physicality and his voice.

Hitler had a very distinctive way of projecting his voice; he had already started taking elocution lessons in the 1920s, long before a political career was even on the cards.” Working with his own speech coach, Schick spent months perfecting this sound. On top of that, he spent up to three and a half hours a day in make-up, a transformation that made working on the character possible in the first place.

He deliberately stays clear of the parallels with the present day that inevitably arise in a series about the disintegration of a society. He very much hopes, he says succinctly: “that Babylon Berlin remains fiction”. In recent years, Schick has repeatedly tackled extreme roles and the darker chapters of German history. A year and a half ago, he played a public prosecutor in Die Ermittlung, the film adaptation of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. In Krux, the feature film debut of young director Ulrike Tony Vahl, now screening in Toronto and in competition at San Sebastián, he plays a teacher who initially teaches the ideology of National Socialism himself, only to be crushed by his later realisation. The film tells the story of the final weeks of the war in a German village, of a country that, faced with its own downfall, turns itself into scorched earth so that the advancing Red Army finds nothing. “It’s based on a true story. And it’s, of course, a story that’s hard to grasp,” says Schick quietly. What appeals to him about such young, small-scale productions is not so much the subject matter itself as the people behind them. One example is the graduation film Casino Europa, directed by Youab Dachraoui, who once fled Tunisia and cast Schick in the film. Films like these have the power to change lives, he says. The depicted realities remind him every time: “to stay alert, to stay curious, and to ask myself: what comforts do I actually have in my life? Do I need them?”

Between these two scripts lies a different world – geographically and in terms of production: The Boys from Brazil is an international Netflix series directed by Alex Gabassi and created by showrunner Peter Morgan, starring Jeremy Strong, Gillian Anderson and August Diehl. Here, too, Schick plays a Nazi, this time one who has fled to South America. He describes the difference compared with the German independent production without false modesty: more lorries, more time, more comfort. He says he is: “now completely unfazed, simply a storyteller”. Whether on the set of Casino Europa, with a crew of four in a single room, or on one of the biggest international stages in the streaming world, the essence remains the same for him. However, anyone who reduces Schick to his serious subject matter misses another, lighter side of him.

When he’s not filming, he’s dancing. On Sunday afternoons, often for two or three hours, preferably at Berghain’s Panorama Bar rather than on the main dance floor. What keeps him there is less a specific musical preference than the camera-free promise of the space: a place where people can remain unobserved. Just as it was during those early nights at the old Ostgut and in the early years of Berghain, when he would often be the first on the dance floor and leave early. This constant runs through his Berlin: dancing as a form of concentration, not unlike what he once sought in the monastery.

Politically, too, his curiosity has consequences that go beyond mere observation. As a member of the SPD and, for years, a committed observer of German security policy, he travelled to Afghanistan in 2008 and 2011 to visit German ISAF troops and perform for the soldiers there. Not out of a sense of duty, but simply because he had voted for a government that had decided on this mission and did not wish to avert the consequences. When asked whether he would do so again today, at a time when rearmament is once again a major issue, he replies without hesitation: “Immediately.”

At the end of the interview, following the photo shoot, one final question remains: what does curiosity, the theme of this issue, mean to him? Schick doesn’t have to think long. Curiosity, he says: “is the driving force behind my life – asking questions, searching, wanting to understand, reading faces, reading expressions. Always being curious, always being hungry. It never stops.” For him, it is existential. It defines his profession. And his life.

Season five of Babylon Berlin starts on 10 September 2026.

CREDITS
Photography by SZYMON STĘPNIAK
Creative Production JOHANNA ERDL, NINA MARIA DAHMS
Styling by KLAAS HAMMER
Hair & Make-Up SYDNEY RAAB
Photo Assistant MAX ODRADO
Light Assistant ROBERT SAMPLAWSKI
Production Assistant VINCENT ANDERS