INTERVIEW WITH LARS EIDINGER

You can find him on the theater stage or in front of the camera, in the director's chair or at the mixing console – Lars Eidinger has many faces, and not just as an actor. Now he has published his photographic works for the first time. Dagmar Taube in conversation with Lars Eidinger about his book Autistic Disco.

Mr. Eidinger, many consider you a symbol of a new kind of man. Can you still define what "masculine" is, or should we abandon this word?

Perhaps the values associated with this term.

What is it about then?

I find the English term "sex" very apt. It stands for both biological gender and the sexual act, the becoming one, which we all long for. Singleness of gender is the ideal and the separation into two genders is the cause of all evil. Here we are at Adam and Eve and original sin.

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Is it true that an oversized photo of you, 1.50 m x 2 m, hangs in your living room?

Yes, I adore the photographer Juergen Teller. He took the picture ten years ago for a ZEITmagazin cover and gave me a print. I framed it and hung it on the wall.

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You yourself are a good photographer and have just released the photo book Autistic Disco. Your book begins with a hamster peeking out of a toilet roll. 

That's my golden hamster Speedy. I was six when I took that photo.

You see many hotel rooms. How often do you sleep in strange beds?

In the last two years, I've been in 160 hotels.  

Don't you sometimes have brutal fits of loneliness in these anonymous hotels or guesthouses in small towns in central Germany?

Every category of hotel room fascinates me. The stranger, the better. My cheapest room recently was on vacation in Dijon, my wife booked it: a single bed in which the three of us slept.

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Disco is glitter and glamour, but in Autistic Disco you see bleak pictures. "It's hard to print tears," Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer, once said. You seem to be able to. 

"It's hard to print tears" – can that please be the headline for this interview! In the foreword of my book, Simon Strauß writes about the "cut sadness in the cosmos of silent signs". I found that very apt. 

An interview by Dagmar von Taube. The complete interview can be read on the website of ICON Magazine .