Caroline Peters: The frontier worker

There are supposed to be people who still do not know who Caroline Peters is. Well, for those in short: Caroline Peters is the brightest star in every night. She is a superstar with a sex appeal. Everyone wants to have a child of hers, to drink vodka with them, to go dancing, to move around houses for nights. At least that's how it sounds in the punk-rock homage to Caroline Peters, who released the band Temp-Eau in 2006. Now you have to know that Temp-Eau was a project of the actor and musician Jan Plewka. Caroline Peters once shot with him and played theater in Hamburg, "since then Jan is my best friend," she says. But still: "A song, for and about me, hach, I thought that was really great."

There are not many actresses in Germany who have such a thing. It must be something very special, this Caroline Peters. At first glance you do not see that. There are these people who flood a room with their aura. Caroline Peters, 41, does not do that when she comes to Barcomi's Deli in Berlin-Mitte. The most striking thing about her is a pink felt dress, otherwise she looks rather restrained. She is a bit tired, she says. It's Berlinale right now, so it's up to actors who live in Berlin to be seen at parties. "Without a double mocha, I say nothing," she says and grins.

This woman really impresses only at second glance. It's different in her job. There Caroline Peters is a kind of natural event, an actress with force that can explode on stage. In 2012, she received the Ulrich Wildgruber Prize, a theatrical award that means a lot to her: "Being named Wildgruber in one movement makes me extremely proud." Then there's a Grimme Award, which she got in 2007 for the TV movie "Arnies Welt"; and she has just been re-nominated for the role that she has made known: Commissioner Sophie Haas, a city crime criminal who is transferred to an Eifel village. "Murder with a view" is the title of the series that has been running since 2008.

With more than six million viewers per episode, Peters is the most successful televangelist after the "Tatort" colleagues. Together with her colleagues Bjarne Mädel and Meike Droste, she has created something that did not exist in Germany before: a series full of strong characters and with almost British humor, in which almost nothing happens in a rural setting. Except that a big city woman takes on the challenges of the province and incidentally casts a few clichés over the pile. Because Sophie Haas is not looking for the great love.

Caroline Peters in "The Ideal Man" at the Vienna Burgtheater

Caroline Peters in "Murder with a View"

The role has made her famous, "and fame is strange," says Peters, "people know us from their living room, they always take me for my role." At the Volksbühne in Berlin, the Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and at the legendary Vienna Burgtheater, where she has been part of the ensemble for nine years, she has earned a reputation as an outstanding actress, but she was left alone outside the venerable walls.

Since "murder with a view" is on television, she has to listen to questions about sensitivities and relationships. "I think it's clever when actors do a business out of their own private lives, but I can not do that," she says. "I think private life is too complex to explain in public, so I'm beautiful and not alone, that's what I can say." She lives a cultural balancing act. Still, in the theater world, it is not very popular to be in television. "In Germany, everything has its own subject," she says, "but it's much better when the disciplines mix." She is more open. Thanks to her parents, she says. The father was a psychiatrist, the head of the mental hospital in Cologne. Her mother: a slavist. "They had a relaxed concept of culture, theater and books were our everyday life." Culture was not a special effort for her, purely genetically: "My parents were very relaxed and enthusiastic." That did not mark her too short.

Caroline Peters in the new TV movie "Im Netz"

Since 1995 she lives in Berlin, at that time the East was still wild and demolished, "and you could live in huge apartments for virtually no money". Now, above all, he is chic. Sometimes it alienates them to see all these hipsters, the laptop guys who commute between Berlin and Paris and do something with fashion or the media: "Then I think: Hey, do not forget, we were there before you invented it " She herself has a healthy distance to the Internet, and the role she plays in her new TV movie "Im Netz" (March 27, ARD) has encouraged her.She is Juliane, a management consultant who is suddenly arrested for suspected terrorism - someone has taken over her entire network identity. Gradually, she loses control of her life. If she could happen in reality? "Sure, everyone," she says. "If someone wants to crack you, he'll make it, those out there are better than us."

In the past, when her worldview was vaguely leftist, Caroline Peters even distrusted the banks and paid their rent in cash, like the RAF in the 1970s. "When I was young, there was still this block thinking," she says, "either you became a cabbage devotee, or you took to the streets against the census and the NATO double decree, and I opted for the left-wing variant, without any real Knowledge." "Im Netz" looks like a mixture of the realtime thriller "24" and the agent series "Homeland" and is unusually exciting and well narrated. The director was Isabel Kleefeld, with whom Caroline Peters has already worked at her first Grimme Award.

Peters himself has never been seen like this. How her figure slips away from life is as eerie as it is oppressive. "One does not expect such a thing on the German television", says Peters, "because otherwise too little is married, usually old habits of seeing are served." The psychological problem had irritated her, not the criminalist, "and the chases: time to say nothing, but just run away from evil, broad-shouldered men, that was great." Because that's the other side of the high culture woman Caroline Peters: She has a penchant for action movies since she moved to Saarbrücken at the beginning of the 90s to go to drama school. Linda Hamilton, the lead actress from the Terminator films, was her first big role model: "There were never any roles in which women beat and shot themselves, which fascinated me."

Today, they are interested in other actresses: "Helen Mirren, Charlotte Rampling, Meryl Streep. I am very much in the age group 60-70. My long-term goal is to age so dignifiedly." That's how it has been since she turned 40. I woke up four days before my birthday and was in a bad mood - and did not know why, "she says. "The birthday was like a bottleneck through which I had to pass through, and it felt like someone was standing by and saying, 'There's not much luggage going on, you have to think carefully about what you're taking with me. In the meantime she has forgotten what the problem was: "I even forgot what I took with me."

Today she finds over 40 to be "irretrievably liberating: I do not have to be young and cool anymore, I can insert a DVD on the sofa in the evening, without any party compulsion, because I'm just at that age". She laughs. And says: "In me matures a healthy age opportunism." Caroline Peters has achieved a lot in recent years. But there is one thing that pokes her - she does not matter to the cinema. "No idea why this is so," she says, "perhaps because the current model of success in German cinema does not provide for actors to be seen on television." Maybe she'll tackle the problem someday, but right now she has other things to do. For example, their series "Murder with a View" continues to turn around and the third season will be produced this year. And then? Write a good script, produce, play yourself? She just shrugs and smiles crookedly. Should probably mean: It would be possible. After all, it would not be the first limit Caroline Peters crossed.

To person:

Her first engagement was with Caroline Peters in 1995 at the Berlin Schaubühne; For nine years she has been at the Vienna Burgtheater. Her TV career began with guest roles and a. in "In the name of the law". After her role in the TV movie "Contergan" she received in 2007 the offer for the great regional crime series "Murder with a view".