Arts and Culture: Five Favorites of the Week – Culture

Design: The forgotten Bauhausler Erich Dieckmann

What a swing! There is no stopping, no hesitation or groping. Instead, pure dynamism and a glamorous streamlined style that the pen captures on paper. The chair that Erich Dieckmann designed in 1931 was intended for lying down. Whereby: The former Bauhäusler thought of a tubular steel armchair when designing it, and furniture designer Rudolf Horn puts it in a nutshell: “this material wants just such a swing.

There are many aspects that can be seen in this gem exhibition “Chairs: Dieckmann! The forgotten Bauhausler Erich Dieckmann” in the Berlin cultural forum could highlight. The concentrated star power, for example, with which the cleverly curated show, which was first shown in Halle, was implemented: designer Stefan Diez was responsible for the exhibition architecture, Erik Spiekermann designed the typography and Burgtheater actress Bibiana Beglau recites letters from Dieckmann in the video and documents of his time.

Also worth mentioning is the contribution of Rudolf Horn, who was born in 1929, was a former furniture designer in the GDR and a university lecturer at the Burg Giebichenstein Art Academy in Halle. His enthusiastic description of Dieckmann’s work, his work in the twenties in the area of ​​tension between emerging industry and handicrafts and his desire to develop standard furniture for the small settlement apartments that were newly built at the time, make it immediately clear what a treasure this exhibition is raising.

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Who would have thought that something like this would be possible three years after the Bauhaus anniversary? To present a forgotten Bauhausler of the early years in Weimar, who, like Marcel Breuer, took lessons from Walter Gropius, and who, with his strictly geometric design language – or, as Breuer put it, with his “generous simplicity” – was represented at the most legendary exhibitions of that time, in the Haus am Horn in Weimar as well as in the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. And rightly so, as the exhibition with around 120 pieces of furniture, graphics, drafts and drawings shows. The show and the catalog also report that this dynamic career ended so tragically, with Erich Dieckmann pandering to the National Socialist regime and his early death in 1944. Therefore: go there! Laura Weissmuller

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Music: George Antheil’s Futurism

When George Antheil played the piano himself, he would sometimes put his loaded pistol on the grand piano to demand the audience’s attention; a pianist’s fingers were his ammunition and his machine guns. When he composed, the music rattled like an apparatus, industrial urbanity boomed. Antheil loved airplanes and cars, was a futurist but never a fascist. Patricia Kopatchinskaja has now recorded his first violin sonata of 1923 with pianist Joonas Ahonen (Alpha Classics) and surrounded it with works by composers Antheil was influenced by (Beethoven) or whom he influenced. The sonata is insane, motoric, crazy machine music, with a blinking desert night starry sky in the middle movements. Brilliantly uncompromisingly recorded. Egbert Tholl

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Movie: With your back to the wall

A dead man lies on the floor, his razor whirrs in the bathroom and he couldn’t put it down. The fatal end of an adulterous love, now the husband has to get rid of his wife’s dead lover… “With your back to the wall” (on DVD and Bluray at UCM One), the first feature film by Édouard Molinaro, 1958, his assistant director was Claude Sauté. Molinaro later became world famous with “A Cage Full of Fools”, Sautet as the director of Romy Schneider. This is a bourgeois, existentialist film noir, blacker than any Chabrol. Betrayed love and its nasty inventiveness. The husband sent the couple anonymous blackmail letters, the wife, Jeanne Moreau, was forced, like “Madame de …” in the famous Ophüls film, to swindle more and more money from him. Fritz Goettler

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Podcast: The shot of Porz

At the end there is a judgement. At least for the time being, because it is not yet legally binding. But the assessment of the Cologne Regional Court remains, then Hans-Josef Bähner has to be imprisoned for three and a half years. The man in his mid-seventies shot a young man of Polish descent shortly before New Year’s Eve 2016. Bähner no longer denies the shot after initially denying it, but argues with a self-defense situation and that the shot was accidentally released when he was attacked by the person who was then shot. The court does not believe him – and gives very understandable reasons for this. Instead, it classifies the act as intentional – and, which aggravates the penalty, as racially motivated. Spicy about the case: Bähner was a local politician for many years, at the time he was a member of the CDU district committee in the Porz district of Cologne.

In their five-part podcast, Stefanie Delfs and Antonia Märzhäuser reconstruct “The shot from Porz – A politician pulls the trigger” (ARD audio library) the events of that night when Bähner felt his peace disturbed by four young men on the street in front of his property and derived from this the right – according to the court – to defend himself with force of arms. But the two journalists don’t leave it at that in this WDR production. You research in the local CDU, but also within the Cologne-Porzer SPD. Mostly interview older residents of the district on the right bank of the Rhine, who increasingly feel strange in their traditional neighborhood. Talking to the victim’s friends, most of whom are read in migrant terms by the long-time residents and who feel exposed to everyday racism. The man who was shot was born in Cologne. Bähner is said to have insulted him on the garden fence as a “dirty skank”.

The central question of the podcast is this: In which social climate is such an act possible? The answers to this are not clear, because this individual act cannot automatically be derived from a larger whole. But one thing becomes very clear in “The Shot from Porz”: how widespread the fear of an alleged foreign infiltration is. And how small many worldviews are. Stephen Fisher

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The costumes in the “Barbie” film

There is probably no film that so many people are so excited about as this one: The first set photos of the upcoming “Barbie” film by Greta Gerwig, which is due to be released next year, are currently closing on Twitter and Instagram a riot of color in neon pink. In between the extra artificially tanned faces of Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken. The two are seen engaging in barbie-esque activities like rollerblading in Venice Beach and driving the pink Barbie convertible, and they wear very, well, consistent costumes. Skin-tight sports suits, open waistcoats, knee pads in such a bright neon yellow that you can see them long after looking at the pictures when you blink. Jacqueline Durran designed the outfits. The British costume designer is known for her work on film adaptations of historical novels such as “Pride and Prejudice”. She was awarded an Oscar for the costumes in Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” and Joe Wright’s “Anna Karenina”. Kathleen Hildebrand