Favorites of the week: four recommendations from the SZ editorial team – culture

The volume “Der Schwarze Spiegel”

Sometimes disaster and paradise are very close to one another. In 1951 Arno Schmidt published “Schwarze Spiegel”, a short story that formulated in sharp-edged, experimental and allusive language what haunted the minds of German citizens: What if the Cold War got hot one day and the bombs pelted down from the sky? Schmidt’s narrator says: “It’s just a good thing that everything was over”! As the only survivor of a nuclear war, he cycles through depopulated Lower Saxony in search of food, equipment and of course reading material – and thinks it’s great! Finally peace and quiet, finally time to read. Schmidt’s narrators are usually a mixture of Klopstock and Rambo or Goethe and Conan, the barbarian. So what world would be better suited to such a hero? The Viennese draftsman and caricaturist Nicolas Mahler is not the first who thinks he recognizes Schmidt himself in these figures, who for the last 20 years of his life has holed up in a wooden house near the village of Bargfeld.

In Mahler’s drawn version of “Black Mirror” (Suhrkamp, ​​191 pages, 24 euros) the hero now clearly bears Schmidt’s features: the severely furrowed cheeks, the merciless gaze (despite or precisely because of Mahler’s mostly missing eyes), the curly hair, as if combed back by the wind. Of course, the cultural pessimist Schmidt always cycled against the wind. Mahler is right to draw it like this, with a few sparse lines like the landscape, just a scribble, two or three crossed bars, over them a few line clouds or a sad moon. This is what it looks like after the nuclear war. The innumerable allusions and quotations with which Schmidt mined his text against the ignorant are of course largely missing. Mahler only saved the most beautiful ones, adding a few new quotes from other works by Schmidt. The loneliness and the self-deception of this brutal hero (today one would speak of toxic masculinity) seem completely new. And how the fuss dissolves in the wind when a woman appears, only to disappear again, and some text passages merge word for word into pictures, this quirky narrator best sums it up himself: “Now everything was quiet: and more beautiful ! ” Nicolas friend

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A gorgeous Magellan biography

Was it mankind’s greatest adventure? Magellan set sail in August 1519. He wanted to go to the place where the pepper grows: the spice islands – and at the same time provide proof that the earth is a sphere. But the Portuguese seafarer was not successful. When the team reached the Spice Islands exactly 500 years ago, their leader was already dead – killed by the locals on the Philippine island of Mactan. The “genius” who “conquered all storms and conquered people” died “in a pitiful banter”, as Stefan Zweig wrote in his novel “Magellan”. With this book, Zweig set a literary monument to the “most wonderful odyssey”. If you are in the mood for adventure and great language, you should read it now for the anniversary and let it explain to you why “in the beginning” was the spice. Marc Hoch

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A Berlin guide from Kirsty Bell

The warmest and most accurate books about the German capital are written by the British, something that has actually been known since Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories”. Art critic Kirsty Bell, who, like Isherwood, comes from the Manchester area, has lived in the city since 2001. Since then, on the one hand, she has acquired a completely accent-free German, but on the other hand, she has retained a strange, sometimes strange, and at least nothing to take for granted look. And with “Gezeiten der Stadt” (Kanon-Verlag) she has now written a Berlin book that is accordingly researched on the one hand with Prussian accuracy and on the other hand is in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of personally held “memoirs”. This is definitely an advantage in this case, because Bell, who also talks about the failure of a marriage, is primarily interested in the female characters in the history of the city, i.e. more in the perspective of Luxembourg and Tergit than always just that of Döblin or Isherwood. It begins with moving into an old apartment on the Landwehr Canal, which is so often water damaged that the house literally seems to cry over its past – and Bell then consistently pursues this past of a house and its residents. It’s a city walk on the timeline, if you will. “Tides of the city” is called “The Undercurrents” in the original version, which will later be published by Fitzcarraldo in London. Because all poetic and metaphorical approaches to Berlin do well in the end to start from the actual development history of the city. And it is only apparently and superficially a stone desert. In truth, it is a quagmire that is still being drained and a swamp into which people kick and sink – which is also a curious pleasure for most of them. But that’s also sinking into a good book. Peter Richter

Russian rap by Oxxxymiron

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The video starts with a slap. A kitchen in Russia, two men on their knees, tied up, surrounded by types of muscles in voluminous jackets. “Apologize,” one of the man orders. “I apologize,” mumbles the man on the floor. Then the muscle type hits him in the face, not too hard, but still traumatic. Because the man on the ground is perhaps Russia’s best-known rapper, Oxxxymiron, bourgeois Miron Fjodorow, who was born in Saint Petersburg, grew up in Essen-Rüttenscheid and studied in Oxford, who battles in three languages ​​like no other and who plays a very large part in it, that rap became in Russia what rock was in the phase of the collapsing Soviet Union: political art.

The slap scene in dirty black and white is the spectacular start of his latest video “Account Ubil Marka? Who Killed Mark?“. It goes back to a dispute with rival musicians, about which Oxxxymiron had made fun of in song lyrics. But because he practically comes to terms with this humiliation ten years ago, sings about trauma and psychotherapy, about the pressure to succeed and self-esteem deficits, the song is already valid for a few days after its appearance as historical. “This is the new masculinity to admit that one is not omnipotent, that one was in the wrong, that one was ashamed that one’s soul was damaged”, writes the user “Marie S.” under the video on Youtube, which a music critic called the “biggest therapy session of the year.” 8.5 million people have listened to the song so far – a spectacular comeback.

Because for a few years it had been quiet about Oxxxymiron. Now he raps down an entire uprooted life in ten minutes, his origins as the son of Jewish intellectuals, his school days in Germany where he was an outsider, London, concert luck in Russia, political protests, the slap in the face. He quotes JRR Tolkien and titans of Soviet light music like Mark Bernes, he moves through time, from east to west, with a thoroughly conciliatory message to his former adversary: ​​”Call and we’ll talk about everything in peace,” he sings. Revolutionary. Sonja Zekri