The Berliner who gives war its dirty face

By Markus Tschiedert

Most of the time, makeup artists have to make performers look more beautiful in front of the camera than they might be.

The Berlin-born Heike Merker (56), however, was supposed to go the opposite way for the war film “Nothing New in the West” (currently in cinemas, on Netflix, from April 28 as Blu-Ray and DVD). Stars like Albrecht Schuch, Edin Hasanovic and Felix Kammerer play the soldiers here. And their faces, covered in dirt, mud and blood, should reflect the full horror of the First World War on battlefields and in trenches.

“It was above all a physical exertion,” says the make-up artist. “All the mud that you see on camera also existed behind it. We were all in the same situation,” she says, describing the misanthropic setting.

She almost had to walk up and down like a soldier in the trenches herself – and always with her make-up case, which weighed several kilos, to make repairs to the boys’ faces.

When shooting in spring 2021, the strictest corona rules still applied. “All the actors and extras had to put their FFP2 masks back on after each take, which always caused marks from the rubber bands on their mud-painted faces,” Merker remembers. Of course, no real mud was applied. You couldn’t know if it wasn’t causing any allergies.

So a special make-up was made. For the artificial mud, she had a palette with up to 15 different colors and shapes from creamy to crusty at her disposal.

Since it was her first war film, for which she armed herself with a brush and powder puff, she researched film and photo archives beforehand. This helped her get a sense of the terrible suffering of the soldiers.

An effort that was worth it. Because the Berliner was nominated for her work for the first time for the Oscar. She and her husband traveled to Los Angeles for the ceremony in March, but unfortunately she couldn’t get the Oscar for “Best Mask”, which ultimately went to “The Whale”.

But she is by no means disappointed: “I know how hard it was to make our film. In this respect, as a nominee, I already felt like a winner and not a loser for a second.”

She smiles, partly because “The Whale,” in which Brendan Fraser plays an obese teacher who was given facial prosthetics for the role, was her personal favorite. After all, she knows how much work was necessary in this case as well. After all: “Nothing New in the West” won in four other categories, including “Best International Film”.

The make-up artist does not yet know whether the Oscar nomination could bring her a ticket to Hollywood. But she has long been used to big movie stars. Many US blockbusters have also been created in Berlin and Babelsberg in recent years.

Keanu Reeves (“Matrix Resurrections”), Halle Berry (“Cloud Atlas”), Ralph Fiennes (“Grand Budapest Hotel”), Michelle Yeoh (“Crazy Rich”) and Tom Hanks (“Cloud Atlas”) have already sat in her chair. & “A Hologram for the King”).

She is particularly taken with Hanks. “He is a really great person, very approachable and interested in others. He is also very interested in German history and I was always amazed at how much he knew, often more than we Germans.”

Local stars have long appreciated the make-up artist’s talent. Jürgen Vogel made Merker into a Stone Age man for “The Iceman”, Alexander Fehling transformed her into “Goethe!” and Natalia Avelon for “The Wild Life” into Uschi Obermaier.

Thus, Heike Merker has long been one of the most successful make-up artists in German film. The trained social worker came to her craft rather by accident.