Favorites of the week: Wagner’s Germanness in the disco – culture

everyday experiences of violence

“At the last party, a guy just grabbed my breasts under my shirt. I just accept it, I have no idea what to do anymore. It happens all the time anyway.” 17 seconds, three sentences and an oppressive feeling. Just like after the other 68 chapters of the pop band’s “Audio Book on Sexualized Violence”. Blond – no rambling analysis, no moral sermon either, but the direct portrayal of everyday experiences by mostly women. After their song “Du und Ich” Blond started collecting reports from people who had experienced sexualised violence. These are read out anonymously by the singer Antje Schomaker, the actress Zeynep Bozbay or Blond herself. “It happens all the time anyway,” hopefully the audio book counteracts that a bit. Eve Goldbach

clubs on vinyl

No, there will hardly be a week without a football tournament for the rest of the year. So you have to force yourself to take the time to lounge comfortably on the cultural meta-level that characterizes this sport so much. The card game that is best played there: “Clubs on Vinyl” (available from the “11 Freunde” shop, among other places), a quartet that tells of the relationship between music and football. Each of the 64 cards presents a curious club anthem, from “FC Bayern-Marsch” by the Garmisch mountain division to Zeltinger’s “Müngersdorfer Stadion” and Polish punk for FC St. Pauli – including a QR code with which you can listen to the music right away . If you don’t feel the old enthusiasm anymore, you should play this one. It’s still in the songs. Joachim Hentschel

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Tina Bausch’s body score

Timeless icon, stirring dance theater: since 1975 Pina Bausch’s “Spring Sacrifice” has moved people all over the world. The choreography packs the violent relationships between man and woman, the individual and society in ruthless images – and yet the intoxication of the ritual still grips the audience with every performance. At the weekend the production runs live at the Ludwigsburg Castle Festivaluntil July 11th it can be performed under the title “Dancing at Dusk” Stream at www.sadlerswells.com. An extraordinary cast shines here and there: three dozen dancers from all over Africa navigate through Stravinsky’s revolutionary sound cosmos and Bausch’s body score. The trip they take us on is simply gorgeous. Dorion Weickman

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Dance the Richard Wagner

The famous Festwiesen finale in the opera “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” has long been met with shaking heads – about Richard Wagner’s Germanism, about the romantic brutalism of the booming patriotic folk festival. The young master student Walther von Stolzing, tenor Klaus Florian Vogt, has won the singing competition, but does not want to end up in the bourgeois master guild and runs off with his Eva. Absolutely perfect.

Master Sachs only has his closing speech to the people of Nuremberg, no, to the German nation: “Don’t despise the masters and honor their art!” So the man is alarmed, Germany’s downfall is imminent. And Sachs warns: “Be careful! Bad tricks are on the horizon,” he rumbles, “first the German people and empire will fall apart, in false Italian majesty no prince will soon understand his people anymore, and what a haze with what Italian trinkets they are planting on us in Germany. ” Sachs in a panic: “No one knows what is German and real anymore, if it doesn’t live in German masters’ honor”.

In Hamburg, director Peter Konwitschny had an outrageous idea: to break it off. Conductor Ingo Metzmacher put down the baton and called out to the singers: “Do you actually know what you’re singing?” Instead of singing, they engaged in a debate about Germany’s democracy and chauvinism. Then continue with Wagner. The final choral thunder “Honour your German masters” is only really disturbing when it feels like it keeps an eye on Paul Celan’s lyrical concentration camp commemoration: “Death is a master from Germany”.

So what does the Swiss director Jossi Wieler and his team at the Deutsche Oper Berlin think about this? Stage designer Anna Viebrock has clearly recreated the scene as the Nazi building of the Munich Music Academy, making the Nuremberg masters actors of an ossified patriarchate of professors. But beware! The young generation turns Wagner’s intolerant folk festival into a party – casual, un-German, you dance as a choir and free yourself from Wagner’s Germanness in the disco (still on June 18, 22, 26 and July 2 and 9). Wolfgang Schreiber

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Historical Influencer

Even those who think they already know everything about Napoleon Bonaparte will discover something new in the book “Napoleon sleeps with Mona Lisa”. Because it is anything but a classic biography. More of a road movie – a pop culture foray into the life of the Frenchman, who was commander, reformer, dictator and tyrant in equal measure. It is two hundred years of history transformed into the present day. And there are also many parallels due to the current war.

His self-staging serves as a template to approach the supposed authenticity and the concept of historical truth. Because a lot has been written about Napoleon – alone 2100 books are listed. But: “What is fake? What is fact?” asks the author Stefan Schlögl at the beginning and starts looking. He gets to the bottom of quotations, questions traditional processes and, above all, examines the image that Napoleon created of himself. “It’s not the truth that matters, it’s what people think is the truth,” is a quote from Napoleon.

Napoleon was what today would be called an influencer. Even if he didn’t have Facebook or Instagram, the native of Corsica regularly used his biography to always underpin his rise to consul with the right picture stories – or to conceal and exaggerate. However, he was not the first to use pictorial staging as a means of manipulating public opinion. Illustrations, prints from archives and museums, which are also shown in this book, bear witness to this.

Graphic artist Wolfgang Hartl places these historical depictions of supposed reality in a new context and thus manages to transform them into a surprisingly up-to-date aesthetic that fits the social media age. This compendium thus creates something that cannot be found in any school book: an exciting treatment of historical material that critically questions Napoleon’s heroic epic. “‘Tell story(s) in a new way’ is the credo of the still young Viennese “Edition 5Haus”. This opulently designed book lives up to this claim. Alexandra Föderl-Schmid