Victor and Lotte, do you know the story of how your parents met? Victor Witte: Sure, it was at drama school – and Götz probably smelled a bit of sulfur.
Götz Schubert: But not because I was rehearsing Mephistopheles, but because of a medical skin cream.
Lotte Schubert: And after a party you went home together on the tram and supposedly said goodbye quite innocently.
Simone Witte: Let’s just leave it like that for now…
Victor, you are the writer in the acting clan. If you had to summarize your family’s story as a plot, what would it be?Victor: I’m afraid we wouldn’t be suitable for novels or series; that would require more conflict, drama or tragedy. Fortunately, those don’t exist. This family is only suitable for a sitcom.
As an actor, you, Götz Schubert, are often involved in disastrous family relationships. What is it like for others to see their father as a tyrant? Götz: Fiction thrives on condensation, so I find it a stroke of luck that most of it doesn’t exist in private.
Lotte: You learn to abstract when you come from an acting family. And yet to this day I still feel a different empathy for characters played by a family member. Especially as a child, it was hard for me to bear it when Götz died on stage for hours. Then I saw my dad in particular.
Victor: I still remember the first time I consciously noticed you, Götz, as an actor. That was at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. I must have been four or five and Simone sneaked into the back of the auditorium with me during the performance. But I didn’t last long there because the situation overwhelmed me. I just thought, Wow, my dad is standing there on stage and all these people have come to watch him. It wasn’t admiration, but a childlike awe that left a deep impression. It took me a long time to free myself from this paternal template, and sometimes I still judge myself by it today.
In the ARD multi-part series “House of Glass”, in which Götz plays an egocentric father, one of the children says to the other: “Just because we have the same parents doesn’t mean that we had the same childhood.” Do you recognize yourself in this sentence?Lotte: I was born seven years after Victor, so that probably applies to us.
Simone: A new child always means some kind of competition.
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