Formative Encounters
Armin Mueller-Stahl’s life has been shaped by a number of important encounters with people of Jewish origin. He studied at the Berlin Conservatory of Music under Isaac Stern and learned his craft at Fritz Wisten’s theatre. Jurek Becker was among his friends. He was given significant roles by filmmakers Agnieszka Holland, Barry Levinson and George Sluizer. Not to be forgotten is the German-born agent Paul Kohner, who moved to the USA in 1920 and built bridges to the film industry in West Germany after the Second World War. It was he who brought Mueller-Stahl to Hollywood.
But Mueller-Stahl was also deeply influenced by “Jewish friends and companions” from the past: composers such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Fanny Hensel, writers such as Franz Kafka and Grete Weil, and others. The artist pays tribute to them all with this important series of portraits. The subjects portrayed recall European and global Jewish history, which is characterized by freedom and integration, but above all by a terrible extent of exclusion, persecution and destruction of Jewish life in the Shoah.
In many of his film roles, Armin Mueller-Stahl has devoted himself to coming to terms with National Socialism, remembering the Holocaust, and exploring the diversity of contemporary Jewish life. His series of portraits of Jüdische Freunde (Jewish Friends) is a logical continuation of his personal engagement with a history and culture that moves and fascinates him.