Favorites of the week: The table fireworks bang – culture

Distant World: New Year’s Show in Moscow 2013 with Selenskij

In the depths of the internet lies a lost world: The New Year’s show of Russian state television from 2013 has reappeared. The top acts of the tabloids sang and danced back then, and the audience included Filipp Kirkorov, a confidant of Putin, a kind of Russian gossip, and TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, who is now one of the most uninhibited warmongers. The evening was hosted by two comedians, Maxim Galkin, who the Russian Ministry of Justice recently declared a foreign agent and who fled Russia – and Volodymyr Zelensky, who cracked jokes about blondes in Russian. A year later Russia annexed Crimea and nine years later it invaded Ukraine. Putin’s supporters are now wishing Ukrainian President Zelensky a bullet in the head. But back then, in 2013, the table fireworks banged – and nothing else. Sonja Zekri

Radio history: ARD Audiothek Retro

Who in the category “Retro” the ARD audio library goes, which has now been created according to the pattern of the “Retro” section in the ARD media library, sees an old analogue editing suite for magnetic tapes. This is how radio was made before digitization – everything was a bit more complicated than today, but no less close to the people and to world events. And not a few programs from the post-war period have the quality of historical documents. Around 1000 audios from contemporary and cultural history before 1966 were made accessible in a first step, programs from the archives of Deutschlandfunk, Rias, SWR, RBB and SR. Including an interview with Willy Brandt, then Governing Mayor of Berlin, in which he talks about his private life, several contemporary articles about the mirroraffair and a lot of true crime from the fifties. Stephen Fisher

Exhibit: The Gommern shield boss

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One of the most beautiful pieces in the exhibition “The Fall of the Roman Empire” in Trier, which is rich in magnificent exhibits (until November 27th) is a late 3rd century shield boss. The find comes from a princely grave that was discovered in 1990 in a sand dune in Jerichower Land near Gommern (Saxony-Anhalt) and then recovered in one block. Such humps, mostly made of iron or bronze, once protected the hand on the inside of the shield that was used to hold the shield. But later it became an ornament for ceremonial shields to boast. And they were buried with powerful men, such as that prince of Gommern.

The Trier show makes it clear in a variety of ways that “the” fall of the (Western) Roman Empire did not happen in the way that ideologues propagated in the 19th century and historical painting liked to depict dramatically: here the Germanic conquerors, who were imposing despite all their brutality, there the decadent Romans, weakened in their civilization. The exhibition impressively proves that the “downfall” was a lengthy process of disintegration into particular interests, but also of an unstoppable transformation. The various peoples on the other side of the Limes and Rhine wanted to share in Rome’s prosperity and lifestyle without destroying it. Many served as legionnaires and military leaders and proudly displayed their Roman ribbons, which they often imaginatively combined with their traditional equipment.

The shield boss from the grave near Gommern is a magnificent example of such an ennobling transformation: a silver Roman bowl forms the crowning of the boss. Around it, the craftsman has placed an intermediate band that rests on a gilded brim with circles for glass and other precious inlays. The intermediate band shows a ring of stylized bird masks, a Scandinavian motif. A bar button was also applied to the bowl. The whole forms a fascinatingly composed unit that does not testify to barbarism or vandalism, but rather to creative artistic appropriation and aesthetic development. Harold Eggebrecht

Subtle play: Laurence Rupp in “Barbarians”

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You can find some things ridiculous about the Netflix series “Barbarians”: all the Germanic kitsch with fur clothing, war paint and mead sipping in the firelight, the sometimes almost slapstick-like hyper-brutal violence, the dialogues that jump back and forth between archaic invocations of gods and today’s therapy tone. But a performance keeps this colorful and yes, yes, entertaining mix together again and again. Laurence Rupp, 35 years old, from Austria and trained at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, plays Arminius, the leader of the barbarians. Rupp was already seen as a child in “Kommissar Rex”, then in 2016 in the finely thoughtful radio play recording “Die Traumete” as speaker of Paul Celan’s letters to Ingeborg Bachmann. So now muscles and sword fighting in the mud, fine too. But the really great thing is that subtlety shines through in his game and makes the barbarian wonderfully complex. Kathleen Hildebrand

Classic CD: The 119th Psalm by Heinrich Schütz

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Heinrich Schütz is the first famous German composer, he died this Sunday 350 years ago in Dresden. German is meant literally here, because Schütz used German texts as a basis for a large part of his vocal pieces, which according to the catalog raisonné 494, instrumental pieces are not among them. Most of them come from the Bible translated by Luther. The young Schütz was quite impressed by secular Venice, where he lived for a few years and studied with Giovanni Gabrieli, the famous organist at St. Mark’s Church. “Spring, youthful time of the year, lovely mother of the blossoms” and “Oh, you bitter sweetness of love” he sets to music there, intoxicatingly in love and in Italian in his first collection of pieces. When she appears, Schütz is 26 years old. Back in Germany he soon went to Dresden, where he was court music director from 1617 until his resignation in 1671, a year before his death. In between he lived through the Thirty Years’ War, he wrote the first opera with a German libretto, which has been lost. He travels to Venice again to see the then star composer Claudio Monteverdi and continues to compose.

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Shortly before his death he finished the setting of Psalm 119, the longest, which he divided into eleven sections that could also be performed individually, total length one hour. This is a powerful work, without any doubt about the God who is universally praised here: state-supporting church music. Schütz casually demonstrates with virtuosity everything that a master composer can do with two choirs. This amazes and inspires, even if it lacks every radical trait, everything visionary and boldly future, as can be found in Monteverdi and later in Johann Sebastian Bach. Here, an unimpressed master composes against the devastation of war, against hunger, poverty, cold, torture and every belief in progress that must seem dangerous to him in the face of such a world that has gotten out of joint. In his complete recording of Schütz (Carus), Hans-Christoph Rademann captured this monument of confidence in all its imperturbability and all its splendor, which is enhanced by instruments. Reinhard J Brembeck

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