When Volker Meyer-Lücke talks about coffee, he becomes passionate. “An incredibly fascinating product,” says the 55-year-old. It’s good that he was able to turn his passion into a profession. In 1987 he began his coffee career at a Bremen coffee roaster. It is clear that Meyer-Lücke (in the photo on the left) originally comes from the north, although he worked for more than two decades at Dallmayr as an authorized signatory in a leading position in Munich. Now he has become self-employed. Meyer-Lücke founded the coffee brand Alrighty together with Daniel Rizzoti (middle), whom he met in the Munich delicatessen, and the marketing expert Sebastian Kroth. The three Bayern goalkeeper Manuel Neuer were able to win over as a further partner.
Think socially and fairly and act accordingly, that is the credo of the company, which wants to act according to a self-proclaimed “care trade philosophy”. The coffee beans are said to come primarily from African countries, where they are largely managed by small producers, preferably young and run by women.
Giving the underdogs of the coffee world a future is their concern, the company founders announce. The focus is on Ethiopia, which Meyer-Lücke says he has visited 35 times, as well as Uganda and Tanzania. Meyer-Lücke is a fan of primate researcher and environmental activist Jane Goodall, whom he has supported for years. For every kilo of coffee sold, 25 cents will go to their Roots & Shoots projects. The network of the company founders helps: Alrighty coffee is already available online, in restaurants and soon in supermarkets.
Marianne Koch: actress, passionate doctor and advisor.
(Photo: Stefan Schmidbauer/imago images)
advisory
Marianne Koch received the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class. For her life’s work. The 92-year-old has starred in more than 50 feature films and a dozen TV series and films. Older viewers might still remember her from Robert Lembke’s “What am I” guessing team. The actress and doctor has been giving advice in the Bayern 2 health talks for more than two decades. She interrupted her medical studies in the early 1950s for acting, then continued at the LMU in 1971 and received her doctorate in 1978. She ran her own practice in Munich for twelve years.
Touching
“Goethe in Buenos Aires” is the title of Henriette Kaiser’s latest book, in which the author and filmmaker traces the history of German-Jewish immigrants in Argentina. She interviewed the last contemporary witnesses who spoke of the persecution by the Nazi regime in Germany, of the escape and the new beginning in South America.
These are touching stories with sometimes adventurous twists. This is how the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi met the man of her life in Buenos Aires: a Holocaust survivor, with whom she returned to Germany. “They were able to rob us of our homeland. But not our culture and language,” the emigrants concluded. In an interview with the journalist and South America expert Sebastian Schoepp, Kaiser will present her book on Thursday, March 9, at the Jewish Community Center on Munich’s Jakobsplatz. Beginning 7 p.m. Film excerpts from the interviews are also shown. Registration requested by phone 089/202400-491 or by email to: [email protected].
Ali Nikrang, new professor at the University of Music and Theater in Munich.
(Photo: Robert Bauernhansl)
inquiring
At the Munich University of Music, it will no longer just be teachers and students who compose, sing and make music, but also computers, at least in teamwork. Artificial intelligence has long been able to compose Beethoven sonatas, Puccini arias or rock ballads that can hardly be distinguished from the original. Ali Nikrang wants to explore the creative dimensions of AI. On April 1, he will take over a half-professorship for artificial intelligence and musical creation, financed from the High Tech Agenda of the Bavarian State Government. For years he has been researching the creative possibilities of the interaction between man and machine.
He worked at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna before moving to the Ars Electronica Futurelab in 2011. Ars Electronica is an international festival that has been held in Linz every year since 1979 and combines music and art with technology and social issues. Nikrang was involved in several projects in the field of music and AI, including the “Mahler Unfinished Project” performed with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz in 2019: the AI, dubbed “MuseNet” by its creators, had finished composing Bruckner’s last, unfinished symphony – “an extremely soulful piece of music”, as the critics found. MuseNet was previously trained with hundreds of thousands of pieces of music.
Ali Nikrang was born in Tehran and came to Austria at the age of 18, where he studied computer science at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz as well as composition with a focus on new media at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and earned a diploma in piano performance.
Manfred-Ernst Kienle was President of the “Men’s Choir of Former Munich Choral Boys eV” for 50 years
(Photo: Michael Nagy)
singing
For 50 years, Manfred-Ernst Kienle, 81, was president of the “men’s choir of former Munich choirboys”. For this extraordinary honorary post, he has now received the bronze medal “Munich shines” from the hands of Mayor Katrin Habenschaden. “Manfred-Ernst Kienle plays a key role in the fact that the men’s choir still exists today,” said habenschaden. He is the good soul of this community of young and old singers. As the first director, Kienle was the mediator between the members, and on the choir’s trips abroad he was also an ambassador for Munich. He still manages the finances of the choir.