Although he was born in Würzburg and now lives in Berlin, Claudius Seidl is an enthusiastic Munich resident. He studied here and worked for the SZ for a long time. Now the cultural journalist and film critic has presented the biography of another Munich resident; a biography about the director Helmut Dietl, which is characterized by closeness to the country, affection and admiration and is at the same time a portrait of the time and city of Munich.
Monday: award ceremony
The actress Claudia Michelsen sits on the jury for the Michael Althen Prize with other prominent personalities.
(Photo: Mary Evans/imago images)
I’m still in Berlin, going to work in Berlin FAZ-Office that is right in the middle, just a stone’s throw (popular Berlin measure) from the corner of Friedrichstraße/Unter den Linden, surrounded by good restaurants that journalists only afford to go out on high holidays: Einstein, Borchardt, the new restaurant in new hotel “Chateau Royal”. I have to stay in Berlin because that evening the Michael Althen Prize for Criticism will be awarded – almost a Munich event, because it’s also about the memory of Michael Althen, who was born in Munich and has sympathies, the brilliant critic, who himself was criticized by those who were criticized valued, even loved, which is why the jury is made up of artists and not journalists. Claudia Michelsen, Dominik Graf, Daniel Kehlmann, and Tom Tykwer. the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung donated the prize, the Deutsches Theater provides a beautiful hall, it will probably be an atmospheric celebration. The prize goes to the head of literature at Die Zeit, Adam Soboczynski.
Tuesday: Supplies for Berlin
Traveling by car from Berlin to Munich. It’s quicker by train, and when I rode the route the other day, the train was on time, the internet worked fairly well, so I could work. But sometimes you have to fill the trunk with groceries and wine in Munich so that you can live reasonably well in Berlin. A stop is made at the Frankenwald rest area, the beautiful, modernist bridge construction from which one used to look into the GDR.
Wednesday: Homage to Dietl
Spectacular crashes and grandiose resurrections in love as in life: In “The Man in the White Suit” Claudius Seidl tells Helmut Dietl’s breathless career (Image: Dietl in front of Munich’s Siegestor).
(Photo: Rolf Hayo/imago images)
In the evening, Hanns Zischler, the wonderful actor and author, and I will talk and read together in the Literaturhaus, about Helmut Dietl and the biography I just wrote – and because Zischler, apart from Dietl, also with Spielberg and Wenders, who has worked with Chabrol, Assayas and Tykwer, he is the man who can place Dietl as a person and as a filmmaker in the larger context. We’ll have to plan and coordinate the evening and maybe rehearse a bit. If it’s up to me, we’ll start with a walk, simply through the city, in which neither of us live and are therefore all the more attentive, perhaps through the St. Anna suburb of the “Munich stories”. And then we sit down in “Schumann’s”, which is almost empty in the afternoon.
Thursday: City walk
Tatjana Trouvé’s sculpture of a metal mattress from which water is dripping. It is on Munich’s Stephansplatz.
(Photo: Leonie Felle)
The day begins with a walk through the Old Southern Cemetery. In front of it, on Stephansplatz, stands a wonderful sculpture by Tatjana Trouvé that the uninitiated will only recognize at second glance: a metal mattress from which water is dripping. If there’s time, I call all my Munich friends to see if anyone would like to go to the Weisses Bräuhaus with me and eat offal there. Something that is not known in Berlin or at least not offered in the restaurant.
Friday: Manhunt in Hollywood
Former gag writer for Harald Schmidt, then very successful screenwriter. Today he writes thrillers: the author Christof Weigold in the Old Northern Cemetery in Munich.
(Photo: Stephan Rumpf)
Another reading evening, this time in the Hotel Olympic, in a small, almost private group (only the three hundred very best friends are supposedly invited). The interlocutor will be Christof Weigold, formerly a gag writer for Harald Schmidt, then a very successful screenwriter – but today he writes novels, very tough detective stories that take place in Hollywood in the 1920s and revolve around crimes that really happened there at the time. The hero is a private detective, a German who couldn’t stand Germany anymore and looks where he is in the mysterious city of Los Angeles. The hero is called Hardy Engel, and the latest volume is called “The Last Loved One”.
Saturday: past and future
A trip back to the space age? Pawel Althamer’s “Bródno People” from 2010 in the Brandhorst Museum.
(Photo: Thomas Dashuber/Pawel Althamer)
No reading! No preparation, no stress. So it’s time that I can see the “Future Bodies From A Recent Past” exhibition in the Brandhorst Museum in the early afternoon – an exhibition that promises to look back into the past of the future; how the arts have reflected the interpenetration of the human body and advanced technology since the 1950s. I’m very curious, but also skeptical as a moviegoer. What art can do that as well as Robocop, terminator, total recall?
Sunday: design object bicycle
Togashi Engineering road bike from 1989.
(Photo: Kai Mewes/The New Collection)
When I was in Munich in the summer, I stood at the cash register in the Pinakothek der Moderne and asked if there were also press tickets. Yes, said the lady at the cash register. Then I would like a press ticket for myself and one each at full price for the two ladies with me. – Makes two euros! – No, tickets for all three! – Yes, makes two euros. I was embarrassed, one euro entry and I ask for the press card. I think I’ll spend half of Sunday there, first the bike show, then that Olympic exhibition, then maybe lunch break. And then once again through the New Collection – because the question always arises as to which everyday objects of today will one day be exhibited as particularly successful and typical in the museum. Then back to Berlin; it doesn’t help at all!
Claudius Seidl was born on June 11, 1959 in Würzburg. After graduating from high school in Bamberg in 1977, he studied theater and political science in Munich, as well as economics as a balance. Studying film history at the Munich Film Museum with Enno Patalas was just as important. Seidl wrote his first film reviews in 1983 in the SZ, since 1985 also in “Zeit”. In 1990 he came to “Spiegel” as head of a small department dealing with popular culture. In 1996 he moved to the SZ as deputy features editor. He has worked for the feuilleton of the FAZ since 2001. Claudius Seidl has written several books, for example about German film in the 1950s, about Billy Wilder and most recently about Helmut Dietl.