Five favorites of the week: From the IAA in Munich to Anita Daniel – culture

Virtual reality glasses for passengers

If you haven’t had enough of the cars that were standing around so grandly covered in make-up this week at the IAA in Munich, with that charming sweetheart-how-about-look that used to only be found outside of the restricted area: How about a Holoride? ? So: The startup “Holoride”, which is affiliated with Audi, has developed a “completely new content category for passengers” in the car, as it is called in the content parlance, which also contains something treasure.

What is meant is: front-seat passengers and passengers in the rear (formerly: whining children in traffic jams in front of the burner, who no longer feel like listening to the educationally well-intentioned radio play or “The Other World” again) receive virtual reality glasses in which the VR -Contents are synchronized with the real driving movements of the automobile. So you can finally use the automobile drive for films, video games and interactive content – without feeling sick.

Because if the car drives a right turn while playing, flying and shooting after strange clone warriors in the universe, you as a hunter now also take a right turn. If you are virtually in the spaceship as a gamer and the car is actually accelerating – the spaceship is now also accelerating. It becomes interesting, of course, when you are racing through a wormhole as if through dimensions in a futuristic vehicle, using a warp drive, and the car is at the burner. In a traffic jam. Then, unfortunately, futurism is also stuck in a traffic jam.

But still: The holoride has potential, because firstly you don’t always have to shoot around, you can also have the architectural and urban sensations of Rome demonstrated to you, wherever you are ideally going. Or an introduction to the baroque, if you are headed to Salzburg. There are no limits to further training in the rear. And best of all: You don’t have to see a car anymore. In addition, at some point there will actually be autonomous cars, we will have a lot of space in cars that will then be converted into living rooms and a lot of leisure for realities beyond reality. The other world is also grandiose. Gerhard Matzig

A little samba

It was one of the lucky coincidences in the drama of world politics. The Brazilian singer Chico Buarque had to go into exile. In 1968 his musical “Roda Viva” angered the military dictators who threw him in prison for it. Two years later he moved to Rome, where he had lived as a child, for a year and a half. There he teamed up with the producer Sergio Bardotti, who arranged for him the film composer Ennio Morricone as arranger for recordings. Buarque sang Italian, the language of his school days. Morricone brought a large orchestra, a lot of percussion and the pop stars Mia Martini and Loredana Bertè as a choir. The melancholy of samba pop and the pathos of Italian western films then came together for a dozen songs to form a unique, enchanting unit. “Per un pugno di Samba” was the name of the album that has now been released. Loosely based on Sergio Leone’s Western: for a handful of samba. Andrian Kreye

Paul Plamper’s radio plays

Open detailed view

The radio play maker Paul Plamper is a meticulous observer of reality. Whether it’s about gentrification or everyday racism, about moral courage or stereotypes of family conflicts: the 49-year-old researches very carefully before condensing contemporary material into a radio play. The pieces are characterized by his feeling for nuances and what is not clearly expressed. Now Plamper has been awarded the Günter Eich Prize for his complete oeuvre to date. The WDR is therefore presenting a six-part program in the ARD audio library Work show. It includes Plamper’s latest work “Der Absprung” about conflicts over refugees who make use of new rights. In addition, the fantastic “Ruhe 1”, “Tacet”, “The Impossible”, “Henry Silver Goes To End” and “Top Hit Made Easy” from 2002 about the supposed predictability of success. Stefan Fischer

The tightrope act

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On this weekend to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, you can of course watch all kinds of films and documentaries about the attacks and their aftermath. But if you want to understand what effect the twin towers of the World Trade Center had on people back then, what a symbol of modernity and the ambitions of the late 20th century they embodied, the documentary “The Wire Rope Act” (currently on Mubi and Prime ) much better. It tells the story of the very outdated figure of the French high wire artist, pantomime and juggler Philippe Petit. In the summer of 1974, he secretly stretched a wire rope between the two not quite finished towers and walked around it for 45 minutes at a height of 417 meters. But you can too Robert Zemecki’s feature film “The Walk” in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the tightrope walker. Same drama, same pathos. Fred Shipman

“Chic is no longer modern”

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She chats about drinking water, about lipsticks, asparagus, about the joy of first strawberries, the opera, vain men and the beloved bed (just to hang around in it). Anita Daniel, born in Romania in 1892, was an important society reporter in Berlin in the 1920s and is now, wrongly, hardly known any more. She wrote for the magazine The Lady, the most important fashion and society magazine of the Weimar Republic and had its own column in Eagle owl. In 1933 Anita Daniel, a Jew, had to emigrate to Switzerland, and later to the USA, where she also worked for the New York Jewish émigré newspaper construction worked.

Anita Daniel wrote countless little feature articles and aphorisms full of clever observations, for example about elegance: “Elegance emanates from the wearer, not from what is worn.” Or on the subject of distance: “The most beautiful form of love: Maintaining a conscious distance that unconsciously flies away again and again.” On the subject of happiness: “Paradise is always yesterday or tomorrow.” She met Max Liebermann in Berlin, King Gustaf of Sweden in Stockholm, even John F. Kennedy in the White House. Similar to Vicki Baum, she was a society hugger, lovingly depicting shimmering and nasty little scenes from cafés in Berlin, then from New York. The pain of war runs through her texts again and again, for example when she writes about mothers in 1942, but surprisingly it is never bitter. Anita Daniel was a keen observer of her time, had a great love for fashion and at least as great a quick wittedness.

Edition Memoria, which is committed to the legacy of authors in exile, has now compiled more than 100 short and longer texts, sayings and scenes and published them in the book “Anita Daniel: Mondän ist no more modern” (edited by Thomas B. Schumann and Katja Behling, Edition Memoria, Cologne, 2021, 35 euros). A wonderful discovery. Christiane Lutz