Favorites of the week: Fighting your way through life – culture

Exhibition: “Home Street Home”

It’s a long way from the street to the Bundestag. For Ralf-Peter Brille, 60 years old, eight of whom were homeless, it was also a path to realization: apparently someone is interested in him and his life.

Glasses entered a Bundestag building for the first time when the photo exhibition “Home Street Home” opened in the Paul-Löbe-Haus. There he stood as a guest of honor in front of pictures in which he could look at himself and his everyday life, smoking on the balcony, washing dishes in the kitchen, the three stuffed animals on the window sill. These are his roommates. For years, Glasses says, “no rooster crowed at him.” And the fact that his story is now being told in this place, in the large foyer where the Federal President was re-elected last year, has now also become part of this story.

The photographer Debora Ruppert traveled through Germany for months to portray 18 people who lived on the streets and who have found a home again. Formerly homeless people invite people to view their apartments – that may sound like a slightly cerebral idea, but the result is extremely impressive. Housing is a human right, and these 18 people fought for it back. Partly with a lot of effort, partly with a bit of luck or – that also exists – with sensible housing policy such as the “Housing First” project. This is how Ralf-Peter Brille returned to an apartment in Berlin-Gropiusstadt.

Before that, he lived in emergency shelters for the homeless for almost eight years, “because of an unfavorable Schufa entry,” no one wanted to rent anything to him. Glasses was a landscape gardener, painter’s assistant and fire eater in the circus. The first part of his story is that of a man who tries to make his way through life, but somehow always has bad luck and eventually no longer has a roof over his head. In his experience, there is no way you can prevent an innocent citizen from ending up on the street from one day to the next. “It comes as it is.”

Ruppert talks about his happy ending and the 17 others sensitively, calmly and without a trace of transfiguration. It’s not just in Brille’s case that you can see that a fitted kitchen can also mean loneliness. Boris Herrmann

Camera magazine: “Camera”

“Film is not dead” was the rallying cry on the Internet a few years ago. What sounded like the desperation of a few freaks before being guillotined by the digital world has long since given life to a larger scene worldwide. Analogue photography is alive, and how much it is alive is shown in the new magazine Camera, which is all about taking photos with real old film. The first issue is promising: great photos, interesting overview stories (e.g. about the famous Japanese camera brand “Pentax”) and meaningful tests on relatively new color films. It makes you want to pick up the old cameras again and take portraits in black and white. The pictures by the Swiss Chantal Convertini also show how beautiful and even how unique they can be Camera presented in the interview. Marc Hoch

Graphic Novel: “I’m Still Alive”

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“What you are about to read is my wound”: These words appear at the beginning of Roberto Saviano’s book, which was published in Italy in 2021 under the title “Sono ancora vivo”. What follows is a diary, process chronology and political manifesto, the mixture spanning the past 15 years.

According to the book, it has been 5,457 days since Roberto Saviano exposed the criminal actions of the mafia and involvement in politics in his hometown of Casal di Principe in his bestseller “Gomorrah.” Since then he has been receiving death threats. But his commitment goes beyond fighting the mafia. Saviano, an important voice for the left in Italy, is now an object of hate for the right. His program on Rai, which Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is gradually restructuring in her favor, will not be broadcast; he was sentenced to a fine for insulting Meloni as a “bastard”.

The Israeli illustrator Asaf Hanuka captured Saviano’s conflict in clear images. Of course, it’s a lot about Saviano’s main opponents, the mafia, scenes from court cases appear, but also memories of his mother, his grandfather and his brother, to whom he dedicated the book. Anger also occurs: Hanuka sometimes draws Roberto Saviano as a caged gorilla who bares the scene. Or despair: There the protagonist sits in armor after a date that has broken down. On the cover, the water is not only up to his neck, but up to his nose. One reason for the book was that he could express in a graphic novel what he couldn’t with words, he says in interviews.

“I’m still alive. In the crosshairs of the mafia” (published by Cross Cult Verlag) is not easy fare. The drawings radiate anger, thoughtfulness and desperation. The book, in which the narrow writing is unfortunately very difficult to read, seems like a very personal battle pamphlet by Saviano, against forgetting, against overlooking, against coming to terms with it. The message is clear: at one point Saviano imagines his own funeral, and at the end his fist breaks out of the coffin: “I’m still alive, you bastards.” Carolin Gasteiger

Radio play: “Crow private”

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Tom Ripley, Frank Abagnale, Anna Sorokin – compared to Crow, these are just pocket-sized con artists. Regardless of whether they are a literary character or a real person, they have gained vile advantages solely for the sake of material gain. Crow, however, which one can assume is actually a bird, claims to have shaped Western culture over the past decades, and even to have created it in the first place. Like Forrest Gump, he is always there when something crucial happens, only not in world history but in pop history. “Crow private” (SWR 2, October 28th, 11 p.m.) is the crowning conclusion of the allusive and very funny “Crow” radio play trilogy by the author Ulf Stolterfoht and the musician Thomas Weber. With a main character who practices cultural appropriation with impressive nonchalance. Stefan Fischer

Halloween album: “Duran Duran”

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The British synth eccentrics from Duran Duran have a new album. Not new in the traditional sense, a few of the songs – “Nightboat” or “Secret October 31st” for example – come from their own catalog and have just been reworked. There are also a few cover songs on “Danse Macabre”: a pretty great version of Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend,” for example, with all kinds of darkness, rumbling drums and heavy bass. “Paint It Black” by the Stones or “Psycho Killer” by the Talking Heads. Their own song “Lonely In Your Nightmare” segues, not incredibly subtly, into Rick James’ “Superfreak”, is then called “Super Lonely Freak” and is quite fun in it. Former guitarist Andy Taylor is back on a few songs, which is absolutely fantastic. Plus, for whatever reason, the whole thing is a Halloween album. Jacob Biazza