Katja Riemann: Words Build Worlds

Anyone observing Katja Riemann, in interviews spanning several decades of public life, or now in conversation, she: on a sofa in London, the author: on hers in Berlin, quickly senses the all-encompassing impression of her unwavering alertness to detail. Riemann channels her thoughts with care, articulate and precise. Following them, moving forward together, that’s how she conducts things here and there, placing full stops, nudging, weaving immaculate threads of sentences, precisely because, one feels, she listens so intently. She knows full well that words build realities, worlds.

Always in motion, it seems, mentally and physically. She is currently in London visiting her daughter, with whom she is writing a science-fiction stage piece exploring youth and beauty, ageing and death, and capitalism too. Riemann will perform in it; her now-grown child, Paula Romy, will direct. And wow, how much she’s learning from her daughter and how thrilled she is by their collaboration.

One might say: Riemann’s thinking is always deep, her glances sharp, her humour free of dogma. Perhaps, one suspects, it’s because she understands how fluid perspectives are and therefore, so too, the answers. Beginning her career as an actress, she has since evolved into a cultural force who processes and shares content in a multitude of ways. An artist who has long been engaged in humanitarian work, continually sharpening her gaze and forging connections, with themes, people, places.

Whether on theatre or reading stages, as an ambassador, in front of cameras or through her own writing, language is her tool, the glue that binds it all. Finding words, changing worlds. Her writing began with two political non-fiction books. Her debut appeared in 2020, just before the first lockdown. In 2024, her second followed: Zeit der Zäune (Time of Fences), in which she narratively portrays the ideas and resolve of humanitarians she met in refugee camps. And this year, Riemann’s first novel has been released, also with S. Fischer: Nebel und Feuer (Fog and Fire).

Johaenne, called Jott, a singer and bassist in a band, abandoned, naked and frightened, stands on the windowsill of her fifth-floor flat on the first pages of the book, looking out over a cemetery. Her centre of gravity, the man she shared everything with, has vanished as if by magic. Now: jump or stay?, she wonders, poised halfway between in and out, embarking on a process of self-examination and – spoiler alert – doesn’t jump. After this cinematic beginning, she spends time, almost like a chamber play, with three very different women in a bungalow in Brandenburg. All are, in some way, lost, pursued, each in her own way. They seem oddly comfortable off-grid, at one point even without electricity, shrouded in fog, like the world around them. But through isolation, through this “gift” of time, deeper bonds form. Jott, Ayo, Jamal, and Shemni encounter one another through their individual pain and you get close to each character, feeling their wounds and stirrings all the way through to the end.

Riemann has a gift for shaping characters. “I do it constantly when I act,” she says. Trained in her twenties at acting schools but really refined through decades of doing. Yet the solitude of writing, the getting lost and resurfacing, the birthing of something into the world that didn’t exist before, and the impossibility of hiding behind anything, that, she finds, is truly different and truly beautiful. So much, so literary, and yet: these ideas about being human, which Riemann has written herself into, have – unsurprisingly – to do with her life, in shades. “Because it’s about emotions I’m familiar with.” Everything seems to flow in directly, without leaving the realm of fiction. Perhaps we are the sum of the life we’ve lived. Riemann says, “What’s lived travels within and with us.”

Talking with Riemann feels like gliding through themes, like an ocean changing temperature. Meticulously chosen words, alive with emphasis, thoughts you carry straight into your own life. Later, you find yourself channelling her, paraphrasing that hope is merely a symptom, one that should come only at the very end of the chain. What’s needed first is connection as prevention, perhaps the best there is. And Riemann says, “War is the opposite. War is the destruction of connection.” Or you end up Googling “shamatha” all afternoon and returning to breathwork because she says, almost blissfully, “Everything you’re supposed to be and do just flies off the curve.”

As an artist and as a human being, Riemann continues to dive into new terrains, moved and moving, driven by a pulsing curiosity with which she enters (and re-enters) spaces. She is once again on stage more frequently: recently at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin, soon at Schauspiel Hannover in a world premiere by and with Sibylle Berg, directed by Lena Brasch. As an actress, she has always expanded her emotional palette, so that it’s readily available, on cue. In front of the camera, everything must be there instantly, and bam, there it is, even when it shouldn’t be. Emotions burst forth into a moment at the supermarket or an interview. “I think of the muscles of a swimmer, visible even in private life.”

With her, it’s the muscle of emotion, trained for decades, always present, stirred in a feeling, how beautiful. But for a long time, she says, there was no filter between private life and work, so immersed she was in the craft of acting. Yet Riemann wouldn’t be Riemann if growth – including in her own character – meant nothing to her. The question of “how” always echoes through. Everything shifts, oneself, perspectives. Better not get too cosy; perhaps that’s it. And why do some people stop learning, as if at a certain age they no longer need to? But what about at 40, 50, 70? Riemann often asks this herself.

Perhaps it’s this attentiveness to the world that she has carried since the 1980s – in a life where she is constantly seen. And that visibility can wear one down. When she started acting, she recalls, it was “more escapism than a craving for the spotlight.” But as a body read as female, as a woman, invisibility is hard to come by. And as someone who’s been entering the living rooms of a nation since 1987, it’s been impossible for decades. Not a day passes without someone entering her space. It seeps, she says, constantly into her everyday. “I can’t learn to love that people always want something, even if it’s just a smile.” That discomfort, when no line is drawn between character, actress, and person. And yet, she is dependent – on looks, on attention, and on the outside world. Even in performance, she relies on the other, on the collective. “As a performing artist, you work in groups, in hierarchies, patriarchal ones, sometimes more, sometimes less.” At her first engagement at the Münchner Kammerspiele, she already felt it, and later, in film, grasped it fully: you’re the last one on board, always executing, and then on posters, the face of the campaign, “while the brilliant director slips past unseen on the red carpet.”

And yet: always her rebuttal, her attempt to resist the chronic sense of being at others’ mercy. She orientated herself early on around what was possible, taking her resources by the horns. First reaction, then desire. Perhaps that’s how it was when she and her Bandits (1996) co-stars Jasmin Tabatabai and Nicolette Krebitz decided to write the soundtrack themselves. The music offered to them had been appalling. Riemann likes to enter things she doesn’t know much about. She dives deep – “I’m the daughter of teachers,” she says, laughing – and discovers. Sending out feelers, steering, and deciding freely and for herself. Sometimes turning down what gives her a stomach ache. So, no villa on the island then… This inexhaustible drive in her, the clarity and foresight, the scanning of the world with her own mind as a defence against fossilisation, perhaps this is what has sustained her in her creative roles all along.

But even she is subject to the gaze cast upon women over 50. Looking at the German-speaking film world, one rarely sees women of that age in leading roles. Gaping absence. It doesn’t embitter her, she says, because she learnt early on to minimise certain dependencies. “But it’s sad. Surprising. Also incomprehensible. Elsewhere, you still see them: Pamela Anderson, Trine Dyrholm, and Juliette Binoche. Why can’t they think of anything in Germany?” At the height of her abilities, after all these years, she could be drawn from. Instead, desolation or: “You play your age…just like non-white colleagues are expected to play their background or skin colour.” But Riemann, self-determined and with integrity, has long stretched her neck out of the system without losing, least of all herself. And perhaps it is precisely that which carries her with such poise through this eclectic madness.

CREDITS

Photography: Nina Raasch

Styling: Saskia Jung

Hair: Selina Reimann

Make Up: Susanna Jonas

Styling Assistants: Tania Aquaro, Lena Lauer

Creative Production: Hannes Aechter, Saskia Jung