province
At the German Photo Book Prize Anna Aicher was awarded gold in the “Self-Publishing” category. Her volume “Like Father, Like Son” was created through a solo exhibition in her hometown of Traunstein. After graduating from high school, she moved to Berlin and now lives in Munich and Salzburg. Ten years apart, she took photographs of where she grew up. “I focused on young people who grew up in rural areas with old traditions,” says Aicher. The photos show girls by a stream that used to run a mill and boys in party huts on the edge of the forest.
Parade role
Brandon Miller.
(Photo: Christian Hartmann)
Brandon Miller won the second prize at the national competition for musicals and chanson in Berlin, worth 3,000 euros. The 26-year-old has been studying musicals at the August Everding Theater Academy in Munich since 2022. Miller grew up in a village near Frankfurt. There he attended a performance of “Alice in Wonderland” with his mother and sister, which sparked his passion for musicals. “I realized that it was more than just an act.” He was six years old then. His whole family then registered with a theater club in the neighboring village, which rehearsed a play and performed it at Christmas. “But then my sister left, then my mother left. I was left,” says Miller. He played in the youth group at the Wiesbaden State Theater, applied to several state schools after graduating from high school in 2016 and worked as a flight attendant.
He flew between the USA, South America and Europe for six years until he was able to secure one of seven places at the renowned August Everding Theater Academy in Munich in 2021. “What I like about musicals is the combination of dance, singing and acting,” says Miller. “They can process heavy food, but they can also be shallow.” One role he would like to play one day is that of Leo Frank in “Parade” – a play about anti-Semitism and a lynching in the USA in 1915. Miller doesn’t want to go to New York’s Broadway, even if he was born in the USA and also has an American passport. “It’s more fun for me to play in my native language,” he says.
Pump research
All good things come in threes, but in this case even four. Because so many LMU researchers are honored by the German Research Foundation and provided with research funding: the doctors Daniel Reichart and Florian Gärtnerphysicist Jad C. Halimeh and communication scientists Benjamin Krämer receive funding from the Emmy Noether and Heisenberg programs. Her research revolves around aging hearts, migrating immune cells, quantum simulations and the use of media. Reichart has been a doctor at the LMU Clinic since 2021 and leads the research group at the LMU Gene Center with the project “The aging heart: identification of new biomarkers of aging and evaluation of new treatment approaches”. He wants to use this to investigate the aging process of the organ and the gradual loss of cellular resistance at the molecular level, to explain why vulnerability to heart disease increases with age and also why people age at different rates.
Poetry slam
Philipp Potthast.
(Photo: Juliane Rummel)
At the annual showdown between the best actors in the poetry slam scene in the sold-out Volkstheater Philipp Potthast, 29, defend the title of the Munich city championship. The native of Freising has been on stage with self-written texts for eleven years, has already been awarded the Youth Culture Prize of the Freising district and is a Bavarian poetry slam champion. Since he used to make hip-hop music, his lyrics often rhymed at first. “I almost don’t rap anymore,” says Potthast. He is currently telling stories from the various districts of Munich in prose. In Haidhausen, for example, he dedicated a work to a scene of eco-parents and the sugar rush of their offspring. That evening at the Volkstheater he took on Maxvorstadt with “The Loneliest Heir of Munich”.
Some clichés, which he naturally exaggerates, would actually be true to a large extent. The gentrified student district would actually smell of truffles in the summer, because of all the fine Italian restaurants and the slick twenty-somethings who drizzle lots of truffle oil on their pizzas in the bar gardens. Potthast smelled that himself. One would think that his humor with local color only works in Munich, but Potthast has already toured his plays throughout Germany and made audiences laugh there too, including the snobbish and rich Munich. Only at the beginning would Potthast have to explain Haidhausen in Hamburg, for example. Young eco-parents and rich heirs aren’t just found in the state capital.
No more fear
Laura Finzi.
(Photo: private)
The Munich author Laura Finzi is nominated for the self-publishing book prize worth 30,000 euros with her children’s book debut “Erik and the Courageous Tiger”. From the 259 children’s and young adult books submitted, her title made it onto the longlist along with another nine. Finzi, who grew up in Munich and Esher, Great Britain and prefers to travel by bike rather than by car, tells the story of the little boy Erik, who was a scaredy-cat until he found the courageous tiger and dared to go down the big slide to slide down. The award ceremony will take place together with the Leipzig Book Fair 2024.