Michael Lederer

Michael Lederer - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Michael Lederer

Michael Lederer (born July 9, 1956, in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist currently living in Berlin, Germany. Die Welt has called him "an archaeologist among the great American writers."

This profile of Michael Lederer covers Early Life and Family Background, Career and Rise to Fame, "Casual Baggage", Dubrovnik Shakespeare Festival and "The Great Game".

Early Life and Family Background of Michael Lederer

Michael Lederer was born in Princeton, New Jersey, where his father Ivo Lederer taught contemporary Russian and East European diplomatic history at Princeton University. His father was a native of what is now Croatia. In 1957 the family moved to New Haven, Connecticut.

In 1965 they moved again to Palo Alto, California. Six months later the parents divorced. Lederer attended Palo Alto schools, graduating from Henry M. Gunn High School in 1974. At age 12, Lederer joined the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) to work as a child actor in San Francisco. In 1972 he played Gandalf in a production of The Hobbit at Palo Alto Children's Theatre. The role of Smaug the dragon was played by future best-selling fantasy author Tad Williams.

In the mid-seventies, Lederer lived in a tipi on a hippie commune called The Land in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. The community was founded by Joan Baez and her then-husband David Harris as the Institute for the Study of Non-Violence. An extensive interview with Lederer about his time on The Land can be found on The Land website. Asked about the experience by SFGATE in 2023, he replied "Living at The Land was about seeing commonalities between ways of thinking. Why are we here? How does one live a good and true life? What is our position in a bigger universe? How do we treat others? Those questions brought many of us up that mountain.”

In 1981, Lederer received a B.A. In Theatre Arts from Binghamton University in New York. Lederer was an original acting member of Tony Award-winning TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. Roles there included Lucullus in Brecht's The Trial of Lucullus, Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac, Prince Serpuhovsky in Tolstoy's Strider, and Sigmund Freud in Fraulein Dora. In 1989, Lederer played Claudius in a touring production of Hamlet in London and Hong Kong. During that year in London he helped break the news of the discovery of The Rose Theatre, the first Elizabethan era theatre ever unearthed. After stumbling upon the archeological dig on London's South Bank, he alerted The London Evening Standard, making the first public call to save the ruins of The Rose from destruction by real estate developers.

Career and Rise to Fame of Michael Lederer

In 1984–85, Lederer and his first wife Judy were living in La Herradura, a fishing village in the south of Spain. In a 2014 interview, Lederer told Deutsche Welle television "I was drunk and stoned one night, climbing up the balconies to our apartment, and I fell from the fourth story down to the parking lot." While recovering with a broken leg in Granada's Hospital Clinico de San Cecilio, he began work on a novella. It is the story of a family that must decide whether to sell their small farm to real estate developers. "Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore" was published in 1999 in Barcelona and Cadaqués by a small publishing house called Parsifal Ediciones as "Ya Nada Dura Eternamente." In 2001, the Catalan writer David Marti, reviewing the book in the French literary journal "Remanences," wrote "No one as yet has been able, like Michael Lederer, to engender the calmness of our life and dreams on the shores of the frail yet powerful Mediterranean Sea." In March 2013, a revised edition of "Nothing Lasts Forever Anymore" was published in both English and German by PalmArt Press in Berlin and presented at the Leipzig Book Fair. The German title is "Nichts ist mehr für die Ewigheit."

In 1998, Lederer co-founded the Safe Haven Museum in Oswego, New York. The museum chronicles the voyage of the only group of Jewish refugees admitted into the United States from Europe during World War II. The 982 refugees included Lederer's father, who had been born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, as well as his aunt and grandparents. Upon arriving by ship in New York harbor, the refugees were immediately interned in a refugee camp at what is now the site of the museum. The story of those 982 refugees is told in the 2001 movie "Haven" starring Natasha Richardson and Hal Holbrook. The story is also explored in Lederer's own stage play "Casual Baggage".

In 1997–1999, Lederer founded the 17th century Sir George Downing manuscript collection at Harvard University.

In 2000, Lederer co-wrote and co-starred in the art film "Las Venice" which was shot both in Venice, Italy, and at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas. The two settings were intermixed in an aim to "blur the distinction between the real, the plastic, and real plastic." Narrating the film's end, Lederer predicts an artificial plasticized reality spreading "until eventually Atlantic City in New Jersey and Las Vegas in Nevada will grow and grow until finally, if they have their way, the two will meet and the entire country will become one commercial theme park." Bending over a bed of artificial flowers at the Venetian, he notes, "I love the smell of plastic."

From 2015 to 2023, he has contributed a series of articles to the American Studies Journal Blog.

In December 2016, writing for Politico Magazine, Lederer responded to the Christmas market attack in Berlin.

"Casual Baggage"

In January 2023, in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the U.S. Embassy in Berlin presented a staged reading of Lederer's play "Casual Baggage" at the English Theatre Berlin International Performing Arts Center.

The play is based on the true story of a small group of Jewish refugees admitted into America during WWII. Brought from Naples to New York on a single ship, the USNS Henry Gibbins (T-AP-183), and numbering only 982, they were kept behind barbed wire in an internment camp in Oswego, New York until the war's end. That group included Lederer's father Ivo Lederer, his aunt Mira and his grandparents Otto and Ruza. In a filmed embassy interview with the U.S. Cultural Attaché, Lederer said, "The real power of this story is not in what was done for the 982, but in what was not done for all the others so desperate for safe haven." Oswego's Palladium Times newspaper, writing about the play, noted the reading at English Theatre Berlin would include a filmed discussion with Lederer. In that discussion, Lederer explained the play's title. "As they were not immigrants and had no legal status, the refugees including my dad were forced to wear cardboard tags on strings around their necks identifying them as 'U.S. Military Casual Baggage.' As if they were things, not people. Not the first time in U.S. History that had happened."

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Lederer), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.