Five favorites of the week – cultural recommendations from the SZ editorial team – culture

Theater: “Agnes Bernauer” by Franz Xaver Kroetz in Munich

“Rich man and poor man stood there and looked at each other. And the poor man said pale: If I weren’t poor, you wouldn’t be rich.” Bertolt Brecht’s little rhyming basic theory of capitalism could stand as the motto for the play “Agnes Bernauer” by Franz Xaver Kroetz, premiered in 1977 in the GDR – Kroetz was a DKP member at the time – and has not been seen on a program for a long time. In the Cuvilliéstheater in Munich it is now, artfully and comically polished up by Nora Schlocker, like a pre-Christmas present: a fairytale parable of unjust social conditions – with the good news that someone is thinking, getting up and breaking out. Not even in order to become politically active, it is not a lesson à la Brecht. But just to live differently. Agnes Bernauer, played by the glowing Antonia Münchow, emancipates herself from empathy. And the first one is already following her: It’s her own husband (Max Rothbart). Until then, he says at the end: “Here I am.”

Kroetz’s protagonist is the daughter of a bankrupt hairdresser (Max Mayer), who marries into the wealthy Werdenfels family, with a castle in Straubing. Father Werdenfels (strong in his lack of residual conscience: Christoph Franken) worked his way up from the bottom up, he makes rosaries that are made by low-wage workers who work at home. When Agnes realizes their misery, she wants to do good, help them, but is met with harsh rejection and is even robbed and abused by the village youth. In order not to hate in the end, but to leave the easy path of the capitalist with their departure into an independent life.

You have to read it as a parable. Schlocker does not use Kroetz’s realism either, although she remains in his Catholic-Bavarian 70s milieu. She stages, crystal clear and concentrated, a kind of church cabinet piece, a hyper parabola with hyper figures, which thanks to the curiously formidable equipment and the excellent actors goes surprisingly up and down your head. The stage (Marie Roth) is a rotating confessional system made of dark wood: windows, boxes, purple curtains, the “Ave Maria” painted on top of the ledge. The costumes (Jana Findeklee, Joki Tewes): an exaggerated madness in the 70s memory look. The wage workers’ crocheted patchwork vests alone are worth the entry fee. Or the rosary beads: apple-sized balls made of fabric. The gloomy music of the live quartet around Leo Gmelch (tuba) and Jan Kiesewetter (tenor saxophone), alienated in terms of wind music, is also very grand and delicate. A political fairy tale. Worth seeing. Christine Doessel

Comic: Frédéric Ciriez and Romain Lamy: “Frantz Fanon”

In August 1961 an important meeting took place in Rome: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lanzmann met Frantz Fanon, the important psychiatrist and writer whose book “The Damned of the Earth” became a classic. For three days they will discuss philosophy, colonialism and the liberation movements. Fanon also tells his life as a boy from Fort-de-France in the Antilles, as a soldier, doctor and politician. Topics that have remained controversial and taboo to this day have been addressed, unfortunately hardly anyone remembers this episode in the history of ideas. That is why Frédéric Ciriez and Romain Lamy wrote a graphic novel in the days of Rome (Hamburger Edition, 230 pages 25 euros), which is now also available in German in a translation by Michael Adrian. It is a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with highly topical political and philosophical issues and at the same time to go on a colorful, mental journey through time and space. Nils Minkmar

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Art: “(Blackout)” by Mischa Kuball in Marl

Blinding white, pulsating light shines from the ground floor and transforms the tall concrete building into a lantern in the cloudy gray of November days. The glass box, the museum in the industrial city of Marl, has never been more visible than during the intervention “(Blackout)” by artist Mischa Kuball, the last one before it had to move out. For almost 40 years, the Glaskasten Museum symbolized the will of post-war society to use “culture for everyone” in unusual places. In Marl the open space opened up by the brutalist style town hall, the area under the meeting room was fenced in with glass windows – and the room was declared a museum. Even if the glass case will be reopened in another location in three years, one of the brightest initiatives of the art-friendly, democratic 80s will go out when the light is switched off by Mischa Kuball on January 9th. Catrin Lorch

Movie: “The Addams Family 2”

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Holidays with the camper, that was the trend this summer and autumn. The Addams Family, who otherwise always live and act in a slightly different way, goes on a grand tour in Greg Tiernan’s and Conrad Vernon’s second Addams drawing film escapade. After the TV series in the 60s and the movie by Barry Sonnenfeld in 1991, with Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá, animation is the third manifestation of the mischievously macabre clan around Mother Morticia and Father Gomez, and with each of them it is a great piece for us come closer – the development of American family TV comedies is mirrored here. In the 60s they were rather stiff and formal, completely new English bourgeoisie, with a pleasantly vulgar, horny touch. In animation they are now a lot more ordinary, terribly normal middle class. And, like any decent American family, they take a trip across America, from Niagara Falls to the Grand Canyon and Death Valley. As a family therapy, so to speak. And the family today seems outrageously diverse in a very natural way.

This time the Addams are concerned with the (genetic) substance. The daughter Wednesday, melancholy and very ingenious, shone in a youth research competition with an experiment in which she mixed the genetic makeup of various life forms – and with it the interest of one mad scientist (from Sausalito!) excited. (As a late consequence of this, Uncle Fester becomes more and more polyphonic, developing new tentacles on his body over and over again during the journey and the film.) Suddenly there is an outrageous claim in the room: Is the annoyingly cool Wednesday really an Addams? Was it possibly reversed at birth? Was it born to something higher, to great science and – with this mostly in a double pack – total world domination?

“I’m not a freak,” Wednesday said to two kids who chatted stupidly to them on the beach in Miami: “I am a force of nature.” You and the tall Lulatsch Lurch – the ominous house servant of the family – make a wonderful couple. In a bar they spontaneously deal with a confrontation with a group of motorcycle rockers. Show them what you can do with your cold, lifeless fingers, she asks him, and he pounds off: “I will survive …” that there is no piano in the room … Fritz Goettler

Pop: Moonchild Sanelly

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Contrary to what is often claimed, pop music is still moving. You just have to want to hear it. A few years ago South Africa, for example, brought the still too unknown, grandiose new genre Gqom, a mixture of hip-hop, kwaito house and break beats. Gqom tracks sound like a kind of syncopated stumbling, accelerated and decelerated at the same time. But very danceable and very relaxed. The name is admittedly a bit of a problem, because the majority of humanity will find it very difficult to pronounce it correctly even after these instructions: after the G, which is pronounced like the German G, there is a kind of tongue click, then the last sound: gom. But who cares when there are Gqom stars like the South African singer Moonchild Sanelly! Just listen her hit “Yebo Teacher” and their new single “Demon”, which crazily also became part of the soundtrack of the extremely popular video game “Fifa 22”. Jens-Christian Rabe