In 2004, I first saw Ruth Rupp on the stage of the St. Pauli Theater in the Threepenny Opera with Ulrich Tukur as Mackie Messer. She sang, after an idea in the role of an old whore the final scene and reaped thus alone standing on the stage the dangerous final applause of the play. Half of the audience howled with emotion. Me too. And I swear, if this little lady comes across my way one day, I'll address her.
Six years later, at the Hamburg St. Pauli Theater, I heard a laughing adult woman's voice call as I walked: Damn, now one of these types of red wine tilts into my cleavage just because I'm so small. My glass stopped just a few millimeters in front of her. I looked at a 141 cm tall woman. We sat chatting in the empty theater for a long time. Others were celebrating the opening of the new season at the bar and we made an appointment. Ruth's words: If you've been after me for six years, then we have to do that with this portrait.
After a week she sat with me for the first time in the Blankenese studio. Ruth is now 85 years old. After nursing her sick mother for eight years, she discovered the spectacle at the age of seventy-seven. First the stage and occasionally film.
Before the war, she studied music and singing. During World War II she was a girl in Hamburg on the flak. Inconceivably. Later, she was a nanny for Map Falk in Blankenese. His daughter Karin found her, after 49 years, through my painted portrait of Google again. That's Ruth, my nanny of yore. A telephone call: Can it be? Yes! Now they visit from time to time and are friends for the second time.
So painting is not quite so pointless.
Clicking on the rose leads to Ruth and Ruth
© Manfred W. Jürgens
Detail
of the image
Heaven Can Wait: We Live Now
A documentary
by Sven Halfar
Portrait Ruth Rupp