Discourse Analysis: The Social Media Format “Controversy”
A sentence that has probably never been heard in talk shows from Lanz to Maischberger: “I have to think about it, maybe you’re right.” A channel in the social media, which is not famous for level-headed debates, is now analyzing what causes most public debates to fail. “Streitgut” on Instagram and YouTube is dedicated to topics that are difficult to ignite, such as arms deliveries to Ukraine, gender, climate protests – purely in terms of discourse analysis. Because the truth does not lie in the middle of the steely fronts, but rather between speaking and hearing, how word and ear miss each other, or in the wrong meta-perception with which we feel criticized even before we speak. The moderator Daniel Privitera massages his own thickly plastered skull with scientific findings from psychology or political science, explains the condescending effect of the word “man” in conversations and reminds you to ask yourself: What are the arguments of my counterpart? What would convince me otherwise? There is no better way to be exposed. Marlene Knobloch
Classic: Jean Rondeau, “Gradus ad Parnassum”
The harpsichordist Jean Rondeau discovers pieces that were not actually intended as harpsichord music.
(Photo: Erato/ Warner Music)
This compilation is bold: Palestrina, Beethoven, Debussy, Mozart and everything in between. The harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, one of the most interesting of his profession, leaned out of the window to bring together what definitely doesn’t belong together. Let’s take Palestrina. He is the most famous representative of the heyday of European vocal music. His compositional style has been taught in schools as so-called counterpoint for two hundred years, and his choral pieces really have nothing at all to do with harpsichord music. But what a surprise: the long drawn-out vocal lines become individual sound balls, small planets that form their own cosmos. After that, everything else that was also never intended for the harpsichord is considered normal, or else highly inspiring. Helmut Mauro
Action art: nail polish for women’s day
Feminist middle finger dip.
(Photo: KIZ/Instagram)
A few years ago, a young artist applied to a local public company with an idea. She was building her headquarters and wanted to have a sculpture in front of it, so she announced a competition on the subject of sustainability. The proposal – hastily rejected – was to install a flat metal plate and pointlessly heat it all year round. Title: The Placebo Pill. You can quote this story here because the rap group KIZ came up with an equally appropriately bold placebo dip. On Wednesday they brought out a nail polish “exclusively for the World Women’s Day” in violet, the color of the women’s movement – which is only slightly more brazen than others, which are completely serious pink washing-Actions for women’s jubilee day. The slogan for this is: “We make up for you all!” In an Instagram post the band replaced the word “makeup” with a cartoon finger with purple nail polish. Probably a middle finger, but that would be pure speculation. Philip Boverman
Literature: “Medea” new translation
Euripides puts a layer of urban irony on the horror of myth. Today’s readers can now also experience how he does this linguistically.
(Photo: Manesse Verlag)
The tragedy of Medea is about raging, self-mutilating jealousy. Medea not only kills the rival whom her lover Jason has married, but also their children in the fury of revenge. Previously, she had already committed the most serious crimes for Jason, sorcery, incitement to murder by dismembering and then cooking the body parts. The myth as a slaughterhouse. The tragedy of Euripides looks at this with the alienation of civilization, which feels repelled by Medea as a barbarian: a woman from abroad who does not fit into Hellas.
You have to translate that, with a sense of pitch. Kurt Steinmann, currently the most knowledgeable German of ancient dramas, has created a version of “Medea” that stays close to the wording (Steinmann calls it “documentary” in the sense of the model Wolfgang Schadewaldt), while also unpedantically picking up the original meter, while at the same time reproducing it something of the Euripidean casualness in dealing with the myth. This “Medea” (Manesse Verlag) is both accurate and contemporary. Jason, who takes Medea far too harmlessly, accuses her: “It has gotten so far with you that when things are going well/in bed, you women think the whole world belongs to you.” I beg your pardon, “when things are going well in bed”? Yes: orthohumenes eunesgenitive absolute, would be more concise: “if the bed is correct” (orthosthis is known from Orthodoxy).
Such discoveries abound in this opulent bilingual (if not typographical error-free) edition. The rival who was treacherously gifted with a deadly wardrobe by Medea puts it on and does her hair in front of a mirror: “brings (…) her hair into shape”, Steinmann translates, the Greek word means “schematizetai” (pronounced: s-chematizetai) , that sounds like a hairdresser’s trade: “Today a little more schematic?”
Euripides lays a layer of urban irony on top of the horror of the myth, and thanks to Steinmann’s transposing documentation, today’s readers (m/f/d) can now also experience this. The accompanying essay by Thea Dorn in the somewhat unironically illustrated volume is also very nice. Gustav Seibt
Documentary: “Three Minutes. A Lengthening”
Bianca Stigter made a short story about the recordings of a Jewish community in 1938.
(Photo: JM Berlin)
Riot in a small Polish town, in the spring of 1938: the children crowd around the camera, laughing, the adults turn to her, the people who have just come out of the synagogue cannot take their eyes off it. Most of them, you can tell, have never seen a camera, let alone one pointed at themselves. At one point the camera looks over the heads for the buildings behind them, but the boys and girls win, soon you can see their faces again. The recordings last three minutes, which an American tourist took when he was on a trip to Europe, visiting the place on the Polish-Ukrainian border where he was born and which he had left as a small child. They show a Jewish community, soon almost everyone you see here was deported, most were murdered in Treblinka.
Bianca Stigter has woven a short narrative (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) around the images, half essay, half research – when the recordings surfaced in 2009, it was first necessary to find out where exactly they were taken. Bianca Stigter brings together the happy before and the horrible after. Little by little, with the help of the few survivors, historians and scientists, the 150 people you see here get a story. With the girls, says a voice-over, he can’t help, he didn’t know them, things were too strict in his family. It is not true that the film transcends death. But he keeps the memory alive. Bianca Stigter’s “Three Minutes. A Lengthening” was presented at the Jewish Museum Berlin and has been on display since March in the media center of the Federal Agency for Civic Education accessible. Susan Vahabzadeh