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

Art: When garbage blooms

Plastic waste is also part of the “Flower Power Festival”, which is currently making Munich a realm of natural beauty. As it should be, the garbage comes from Berlin. The flower arrangement shown here can be seen in the botanical garden in Nymphenburg – as an example of the “throw away culture” of the Berlin phenomenologist Juli Gudehus. It’s called: “Ariel, Edelbunt, Gemeiner Sprühkopf & Heidedose” and consists of packaging madness. So from the remains of indestructible bottles, cans, cups or tubes with which we fill up the world by the ton every day. Part of it ends up with Gudehus, who, as a florist, turns the omnipresence of plastic into “garbage blossoms”. She calls her action “The Nature of Things”, which already reveals the ambivalence between the environment and the world of things. Isn’t the garbage beautiful? But why is it garbage – and not a recyclable material? Gerhard Matzig

“Heike Monotagari”: Japanese classic, author unknown

“Poisonous insects such as horseflies, mosquitoes, wasps and ants flocked to his body and stung and bit him, but he did not move at all and lay there for seven days.” Mongaku wants to know. Therefore, “when the blades of grass stood there motionless in the blazing sunlight”, this Buddhist monk and ascetic lay naked in nature and allowed himself to be tortured by the insects. But for someone like Mongaku, that’s nothing. Therefore, in snow and icy wind, he also stands in a waterfall and begins the three hundred thousand repetitions of a Dhāranī invocation. At the first attempt he is aborted, at the second, he is dying, a god intervenes to help. It is logical that a religious extremist like Mongaku would incite a rebellion.

“Heike Monogatari. The Tale of the Heike” (Reclam), the author is unknown, is overflowing with such vividly portrayed characters. They like to fight and behead, but also love and even more intrigue. This Japanese medieval classic is about a brutal power struggle that lasted for decades between two clans, the Heike, also known as Taira, and the Genji (Minamoto). To this day, the narrative, which has never faded out of Japanese culture, provides the raw material for films, pop and literature. Only the even older and psychologically more refined “Genji Monogatari” (Tale of Prince Genji) is similarly popular. But while “Genji” has been available in a modern translation for some time, “Heike” had to wait for the great translator Björn Adelmeier, who, after years of work, was able to bring out the 844-page book (Reclam, 80 pages). Adelmeier easily manages the balancing act between the levels of language, the sober tone of chroniclers, the fantastic, war rhetoric, religion, emotionality and the interspersed poems. As distant as these twelfth-century intrigues are, they are just as familiar and close to today’s political readers. And in the blood-soaked final showdown, all hopes and illusions are mercilessly swept away. Reinhard Brembeck

“Element of Crime”: Please never change

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There are those bands that you wish would never stop, never change, never start recording songs with female rappers out of a hipness panic. The band Element of Crime has taken all this to heart on her new album. Even the title “Morning at four” indicates that the musicians are stuck where they started a few decades ago: late at night in the pub haze, in confusion, sighing melancholy because it’s too late for anything sensible at this time and now only wrong decisions are made. Musically, too, they have moved pleasantly little. On their 15th studio album, they remain true to the charmingly plucked guitar, the accordion, occasional strings and heartbreaking lines like “life without love isn’t as easy as you think”. “We don’t have a solution, we have songs,” sings frontman Sven Regener. And you don’t want anything else, you don’t need anything else from this band. Marlene Knobloch

“Protect them” series: Need welds together

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Owen leaves only one note for his wife Hannah (Jennifer Garner): “Protect her” is written on it – meaning Owen’s daughter Bailey, a stubborn high school teenager who doesn’t like his stepmother. Owen himself simply disappeared, he went to work in the morning, but when the FBI raided his office because the software company, Wirecard says hello, cheated its investors and the software doesn’t even exist, he’s not there. The seven episodes of “Protect Her” (Apple TV+) are really exciting. Among the thriller series, this one is also a little special: there is something comforting about the story. Almost all the protagonists here are not thoroughly evil, just driven by their own biography. In any case, the need welds the two women together, as a mother-daughter team, almost as if they had grown. Susan Vahabzadeh

Book “Suddenly Hip(p)”: White Female German. And jazz pioneer

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Jutta Hipp, the great forgotten figure of German post-war jazz, has been experiencing a long overdue rediscovery for several years – not only as a pianist somewhere between cool and hard bop, but also as a fearless, internally independent artist. Ilona Haberkamp, ​​herself a jazz musician, recently published a well-researched biography of this jazz pioneer: “Suddenly Hip(p): The life of Jutta Hipp between jazz and art” (Cloud V.-G). One reads them with bated breath, also because Jutta Hipp’s life decision for jazz is often daring and risky.

When she recorded three records for the Blue Note label in New York in 1956, she was not only the first German, but also the first white musician to sign with the world’s most famous jazz label. At the age of 17, in Leipzig, in the middle of the Second World War, she discovered the music that was banned in Hitler’s Germany: “Jazz was our religion,” she later said. “I remember nights when we didn’t go to the air raid shelter because we were listening to records. Even though the bombs were falling all around us, we felt safe, or at least, if we hadn’t survived, we would have died with beautiful music.”

Immediately after the war, at the age of just 20, she became a professional jazz musician. Because things didn’t go well in Leipzig for long, she moved to the West in 1946. She quickly plays with the important German jazz musicians, greats like Albert Mangelsdorff or Hans Koller. Photos show a wildly made-up beauty with long, red hair, a jazz radical, at the time the only woman on the jazz club stages. A few years and many club appearances later, she is the first German to dare the leap to the jazz capital of the world and go to New York – a pretty tough place, especially for a woman, especially for a German. She jams with Charles Mingus, admires Horace Silver and plays in hip clubs, but after three years in the New York jazz struggle for survival, she can no longer do it. She leaves abruptly and consistently and works for the next 37 years, until she turns 70, as a tailor in a textile factory in Queens, the price of a self-determined life. Peter Laudenbach