The title that director Frank Wierke gave his film with Michael Krüger fits: “Appointments with a poet”. In fact, this film is not about the life of the long-standing Hanser publisher, writer and poet, not a biographical station portrait, but a stage for Krüger on which he can indulge his thoughts, memories and observations.
Krüger speaks to Wierkes in front of the camera, rarely addressed directly, and he is initially in the offices of his Munich publishing house, at the end of 2013, which shows that the appointments with him went over a long period of time.
Four and a half years later, the same attitude continues: Krüger in his work library, in the garden of his house in Munich, in a large, representative room in the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (with a long brown leather sofa), finally in the garden of his wooden house on Chiemsee.
Here he lived in strict quarantine during the first year of the pandemic because he was being treated for leukemia.
Shortly before this time, the film ends, after a sometimes fascinating 90-minute monologue, which is occasionally interrupted by short lines of poetry with a gray background.
Michael Krüger talks about the tree in front of his publishing house window, about the trees in his garden, about the fruit trees of his childhood in Zeitz in Saxony-Anhalt or the many faces of Lake Chiemsee in all kinds of weather conditions.
He describes death as an “unknown” and an “intruder”
Of course it’s about writing poems for him, about how they develop inside, how they want to get out, but can’t always get out (no bad luck either); he talks about religions, the possibility of having a foothold, the walks with his grandfather.
Again and again, the almost 80-year-old reasoned about the remaining life time, about “no longer being the master in one’s own house”, about death. He only describes him as an “unknown”, as an “intruder”, but of whom Krüger naturally knows that in the end he “will also win the matter”.
And as he says in between: “Perhaps it is enough to have read three beautiful poems.”
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Source: Tagesspiegel
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