Pop: “Volcano” from “Jungle”
It’s a shame about every summer day when you didn’t know “Volcano”. The new album by jungle, the English dance-soul-pop duo, is Aperol Spritz for the deepest convolutions of the brain – how to drift under the canopy of leaves in Munich’s Eisbach. Best disco and soul swinging anywhere between the years 2023 and 1973. Would you like another project until autumn when Jungle are on tour, also in Germany? Learn the gorgeous choreography from the Back on 74 music video. Among others, the dancer Will West moves through the song in an elegant weirdness. Looks a bit like a cross between Austin Powers and the “Rocky Horror Picture Show” – only with better music. Aurelie von Blazekovic
Movie: “Everyone writes for themselves”
Henrike Stolze, the sister of the writer Bernhard Vesper, and Anatol Regnier.
(Photo: Piffl Medien GmbH)
“Day that ends the summer, heart on which the sign fell…” One of the most famous German poems, by Gottfried Benn. Autumn mood, but also political findings, “a farewell poem, although the whole disaster is yet to come”. Can one love Benn’s poems when in his speech “The New State and the Intellectuals” he refers to the dark ideology of the Nazis with the coldness of the Expressionist. The dilemma is the focus of Dominik Graf’s new film “Everyone writes for themselves”.
The film was made based on the book of the same name and with the help of Anatol Regnier, son of Pamela Wedekind and Charles Regnier. It is about German authors and intellectuals in the “disaster landscape” of the “Third Reich” who, unlike Brecht or Thomas and Heinrich Mann, did not go into exile after 1933 but stayed in Germany: Gottfried Benn, Erich Kästner, Hans Fallada, Ina Seidel, Jochen Klepper, Will Vesper – partly devoted to the new ideology, partly ducking away. Inner emigration – a game of hide and seek with yourself? A term of forgiveness?
It’s elementary cinema, as always with Dominik Graf. It is an attempt to reconstruct what has disappeared from what remained, the invisible from the present, regardless of whether it is a shoe left on the street or literary texts, pamphlets, letters. Imaginary documentation. Anatol Regnier sets off in search of clues, in the basement of the Marbach Literature Archive or on Lake Starnberg or in Sanary-sur-Mer, in the Hotel de la Tour, where Klaus Mann lived in exile in room 17 for a long time.
Regnier and Graf, the perspectives of the two generations sometimes rub shoulders. Other readers and enthusiasts are sought, Günter Rohrbach and Albert von Schirnding, Florian Illies or Gabriele von Arnim, they struggle with questions of morality and politics. How Graf stages them, you can watch them very closely as they prepare their thoughts while speaking, between irritation and coolness.
“The Day That Ends Summer” was written in 1935, and in 1938 Benn was banned from writing. The film isn’t a well-structured historical essay – it’s not interested in separating the good and the normal from the bad like black from white. With the flood of images, Graf causes the clean arguments to tip over, a pulsating Rorschach test. Cinema loves the ambivalent and unclean, fleeting and irretrievable. Fritz Goettler
Punk: “Time for Tommi Stumpff”
On the albums with the band “Der KFC” Stumpff called himself Stumpf, earlier Thomas Peters.
(Photo: Kai Kestner/CC BY-SA 4.0)
“Too late you shit. Here is: Tommi Stumpff” was the name of his solo debut in 1982. And now it really is too late because this summer this punk pioneer and poltergeist passed away. But that just means that you should turn up your music all the louder now: the Elektrokrawall, the Stumpff – nope Thomas Peters in Dusseldorf, Corn Grandi in Paris and in Brussels – partly captioned in flawless Jacques Brel French. Or the hit “Blut, Brain, Massacre”, to which people danced enthusiastically and in love together in discos around 1990. On the albums with the band “Der KFC” (1978-1982) Stumpff called himself Stumpf. Therefore best online after the video “Blunt is trump” are looking for: a rampaging hymn to Bavaria and even John Paul II, who rages even further than guitar, bass and drums with their insidious mosquito sound can no longer do it. Peter Richter
Children’s book: “Luckily you’re not a mushroom!”
“There are no people splashing around inside us.”
(Photo: Klett)
Learning is wild, an adult reminder of that when you get your hands on this children’s book by Annie Barrows and Leo Espinosa. Sometimes you learn something that makes things seem clearer, then everything is turned upside down again. For example, this highly abstract fact that the human body is made up of 95 percent water. What to do with it? The cheerful little boy who guides us through the cognition process in Luckily You’re Not a Mushroom realizes we have a lot in common with a swimming pool. More so than with a can of tomatoes, anyway, because “nothing good will come of it if you open our lid”. And yet there are limits to similarities, including the one with the swimming pool: “We don’t have people splashing about in us.” This book is a small, clever order of things, but a joyful one to bursting. Kathleen Hildebrand
Art: Julian Rosefeldt in the Völklingen Ironworks
Rosefeldt’s message: We voluntarily let capitalism eat us up.
(Photo: Studio Julian Rosefeldt, Berlin / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023)
The tiger smells it instinctively: money doesn’t stink, it just has a seductive smell. At the beginning of Julian Rosefeldt’s expansive media art work “Euphoria”, the big cat of capitalism roams through a deserted supermarket as an animated tiger and quotes philosophical set pieces with the voice of Cate Blanchett, a taxi driver in the style of Robert de Niro’s “Taxi Driver”, assembly line workers in a mail order business, dependent teenagers or homeless people, not surprisingly reminiscent of Rosefeldt’s earlier work “Manifesto” (with Blanchett in the 13 leading roles), they all wander between the shelves.
In several episodes, Rosefeldt tells the two-thousand-year history of human greed and a world shaped by power, money, lies and fraud. It is a critique of capitalism at its finest and finely garnished with a good dose of gallows humor. All of this can be seen in the center of a 360-degree installation with numerous screens on which a choir and drummers musically advance the action.
The wild ride through the history of capitalism culminates in a brilliant scene in a bank: Accompanied by the sounds of a parading brass band and the rhythms of the drummers on the screens all around, employees in dark suits and costumes dance through a bank branch, a dance around the golden calf, which ends in the form of a carnivorous flower – so beautiful and suggestive that one would like to throw oneself to it. In the spirit of Rosefeldt: We voluntarily allow ourselves to be eaten up by capitalism.
It is not just the large-scale cinematic installation “Euphoria” in the World Heritage Site at the Völklingen Ironworks, but the entire use of the more than 6000 square meter blower hall with its mighty flywheels entitled “When we are gone” that makes this show (until September 3) makes a sensation. It is also a journey through time: with films from two decades that look into the past 100 years of German history as if into a dystopian future. With images, texts, music and choreographies that flow into each other and create parallel universes. You can stay in it for hours. Evelyn Vogel