Classic film: “Escape route to Marseille”
One of the great, forgotten films of the 1970s, restored and now available on DVD in the Filmmuseum Edition: “Fluchtweg nach Marseille”, 1977 by Ingemo Engström and Gerhard Theuring, with Rüdiger Vogler and Katharina Thalbach. A film essay about flight, resistance, memory, a journey through France to Marseille, once a meeting place for emigrants fleeing fascism – Anna Seghers told about her in the 1941 novel “Transit” (which Christian Petzold filmed in 2018). For Engstrom/Theuring, the novel serves as a guiding figure, their method deriving from Brecht’s “work journal,” the merging of landscapes and camps, newsreel footage, and survivor stories. “What should I tell you …”, it says again and again in the comment. At that time, fifteen years after the Oberhausen Manifesto, storytelling had lost its implicitness: “We speak of France in the age of venal dreams… We speak of longing that no longer knows any place. We speak of images that have no memory .” Fritz Goettler
Art: Ibrahim Mahama in Osnabrück
The artist Ibrahim Mahama in front of his work.
(Photo: Imago/Detlef Heese)
The city of Osnabrück is celebrating several anniversaries this year, including the 375th anniversary of the Peace of Westphalia. After all, the Kunsthalle is turning 30 and has commissioned works from contemporary artists. The best known is certainly the Ghanaian Ibrahim Mahama, who has already taken part in the Venice Biennale. Mahama’s Osnabrück project is called “Transfer(s)”. It combines the topic of postcolonial historical observation, which is currently very popular, with a Christo gesture: the artist has covered the facade of the empty Kaufhof building with jute sacks sewn together. It points to the trade routes between the linen-producing city of Osnabrück and Africa, but above all it enlivens the otherwise visually rather unpleasant Neumarkt with an eye-catcher. Alexander Menden
Design history: Paul Jaray in the Kunsthaus Dahlem
Paul Jaray’s streamlined shapes didn’t fit into the emerging Nazi design-muscle concept.
(Photo: Arsenale Institute)
The work of Paul Jaray, the visionary car engineer and aerodynamicist from Vienna, can now finally be studied in a large exhibition in Berlin. That is of course much better than the small exhibition that the cultural historian Wolfgang Scheppe organized two years ago in his private exhibition rooms in Venice. Because in Berlin Scheppe can show a lot more, a lot more people can and should see it – and above all: Jaray is shown in the former “state studio” that the Nazis had built for the sculptor Arno Breker.
Since the Kunsthaus Dahlem has resided in the building, artists who were persecuted during the National Socialist period have been shown here. In the case of Jaray, who comes from a Jewish family, this is also the case because the muscle heroes, for which Breker is known as a sculptor, are, in Scheppe’s words, actually only “anthropomorphic bodies” – pure surfaces, without reference to some underlying skeleton, while Jaray’s scientific obsession with streamlining conspicuously also corresponds to the artistic avant-garde in sculpture. However, this is just one point among many. This also includes the replica of the Auto Union Type B record car that goes back to Jaray, which is now again laid out in a neoclassical columnar architecture like at the International Automobile and Motorcycle Exhibition of 1935, when the pre-war Nazi racing driver cult was in full swing.
Right next to it is the left-wing motor journalism with which Jaray fought in the 1920s for the proletariat’s individual motorisation. And Besides in turn, statements written at the same time about the finite nature of fossil fuels and about what is now called “renewables”. Or those that already point to the topic of artificial intelligence (“The liberation of man by the machine”). “Paul Jaray: The Reason for the Streamline” runs until September 3rd. But if you really want to penetrate the entire dizzying network of themes, forms, references and cross-connections by then, you should start today. Peter Richter
Classic: Biography of Ferenc Fricsay
It is worth discovering Fricsay: “Ferenc Fricsay: The Conductor as Musician”.
(Photo: edition text + review)
There is a famous film document: The Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra rehearses Smetana’s “Moldau” in 1960 under the direction of Ferenc Fricsay. The ascetically slender conductor fascinates with wit, vividness and friendly austerity. Among the important conductors of the mid-20th century, Fricsay stands out for his intellectual fire, rhythmic verve, tonal sensitivity and exceptional ability to communicatively transfer his musical ideas to the orchestra and audience. Fricsay was born in Budapest in 1914. For around 15 years after the Second World War he was a central figure in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich and especially in Berlin for the rebuilding of musical culture. It is due to his early death in 1963 that, despite a large number of live recordings and disc productions, he is now more of a specialist than anything else and has a resilient and witty conducting style. After that, the media-savvy Herbert von Karajan finally rose to become the sole conductor, not only in Berlin, whether in countless record productions, in videos, on worldwide tours or at the Salzburg Festival.
In the book series Solo (edition text + kritik), which is dedicated to programmatically performing musicians, the music historian Peter Sühring, born in 1946, has published the monograph “Ferenc Fricsay: The Conductor as Musician”, which explains Fricsay, his thinking and his importance in a way that is worth reading . This also applies to his biography: as a boy prodigy, he received piano lessons at the age of six at the legendary Liszt Conservatory in his hometown, later he was able to study with Béla Bartók, Ernst von Dohnányi, Leó Weiner and Zoltán Kodály. From 1933 to 1944 he was military bandmaster in Széged, like his father. In 1939 he conducted for the first time at the Budapest Opera, helped Jewish artists and the persecuted, and was therefore accused by the military. The Gestapo watched him, he went into hiding in Budapest. In 1945, after the Red Army invaded, he conducted the first concert and was supposed to rebuild the Budapest Philharmonic. Soon he was invited to Vienna and to the Salzburg Festival. In 1948 his time in Berlin began. It is worth getting to know this great conductor better. Harold Eggebrecht
Architecture: “Growing Architecture”
One thinks one is standing in the forest: “Growing architecture: Introduction to building botany” at Birkhäuser, 224 pages, 52 euros.
(Photo: Birkhäuser Verlag)
In Hamburg, an old Nazi bunker is being converted and a park is being built on the bunker roof. In Milan there is the “Bosco Verticale”: green residential towers. And in Singapore, so many buildings have vines that you think you are standing in a forest. Green architecture is the order of the day – and usually looks great as a computer simulation. The problem: Not every chic green design ultimately passes the horticultural reality check. Building botany is a young science – although the motif of the “primal hut” according to Vitruvius already shows that the origin of all architecture is vegetable. In “Growing Architecture: Introduction to Baubotanik” Ferdinand Ludwig, Professor of Green Technologies in Landscape Architecture in Munich, and Daniel Schönle, architect and urban planner in Stuttgart, provide precise and vividly inspiring information about the age-old futurism of Baubotanik. You never want to come across a planning office that raves about green architecture and doesn’t have this book on the shelf. Even before the flower pots. Gerhard Matzig