Prisoners play theater: The SZ recommendations of the week – culture

Theater in prison: “AufBruch” in the JVA Tegel

The name says it all and has at least two meanings: the theater group “break up” from Berlin’s Tegel prison enables symbolic departures and escapes from everyday prison life with their performances. One does not know what one should admire more, the strength with which the prisoners work their way through the great playwrights, from Kleist, Shakespeare, Schiller, Büchner to Beckett, or their own perseverance. With a changing cast, the theater group from prison has premiered at least one play every year for 25 years, often with choral force, great directness and always with enormous enthusiasm. When the scenes in the classics or in inmate-written plays deal with violence, crime, or the loneliness of the prison cell, the game develops an urgency of its own: these men know what they are talking about. The courage and honesty, but also the black humor with which they face the tough issues, turns their performances into great theatre.

Peter Atanassow, who has been the permanent director for 20 years, shows in his productions how strongly Einar Schleef’s theater and Heiner Müller’s texts have influenced him. Incidentally, aufBruch creates spaces for encounters between the inmates and the outside world when visitors see a performance in the courtyard of the JVA Tegel, or when the theater plays open-air performances under guard in Berlin’s Jungfernheide or on the Museum Island. One of the visitors from outside was the actor Edgar Selge, he was very impressed by the performance: “I admit that it really blew me away – as if I were suddenly re-understanding my lifelong work as an actor.” Now a magnificent theater book for the 25th anniversary allows insights into this very special theater work. In addition to the photos by Thomas Aurin, the rehearsal protocols, poems and diary entries of the prisoners are particularly impressive. While working on a piece by Heiner Müller, an inmate laconically stated that “verses are better for the skull than square wood”. Peter Laudenbach

“Nothing New in the West”: The film classic from 1930

When modern blockbuster directors venture into war films, a 1930’s classic about the First World War is still the most important reference – ‘The West’, in English, from Hollywood, directed by Lewis Milestone. “For me, this is the strongest anti-war narrative in cinema to date,” says, for example, “Inception” master director Christopher Nolan in the SZ interview. “So brutal and so unsentimental. How relentlessly the hail of bombs is shown. The good guys aren’t rewarded and the bad guys aren’t punished – what happens to people in war is indiscriminate and cruel. It’s shocking how powerful it still is.”

In addition to the Russian-born director and war realist Milestone, the Hollywood pioneer and studio boss Carl Laemmle was decisive in the filming. A German Jew who emigrated from Laupheim, who became an American long before the First World War, both in passport and heart, but still understood his old homeland – and bought the rights to Erich Maria Remarque’s novel. It was only possible to show the devastation of nationalism and patriotism so clearly in the cinema if Americans looked at Germany – a similar film about American soldiers would have been impossible at the time.

The hatred of the Nazis and conservatives was correspondingly great at the German premiere in 1930, Goebbels sent his SA thugs into the cinemas, and shortly thereafter it was banned because of “uninhibited pacifist tendencies”. But other countries that wanted to continue waging war also cut, cut and banned the film as much as it could. But Carl Laemmle recognized the coming horror from the Nazi reaction and began to get German Jews out of the country. Anyone who comes across the brand new German version of Edward Berger on Netflix should definitely appreciate this original film adaptation again – and its fabulous modernity. (Available on Google Play, Amazon Video, AppleTV etc.). Tobias Kniebe

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Nils Koppruch and the band “Fink”: What lyrics

Nils Koppruch painted with colors as SAM and as Gunnar Wikklund. Under his real name, however, he painted with words that he knew how to set in such an atmospheric way that his poems sometimes seem like exciting film sequences that immediately involve the viewer in the film. Consequently, Koppruch did not publish his poetry in books. Instead, he unfolded them in music that is not only the soundtrack to his lyrics, but also the tracking shot through the scenes he sang about. With that, his band succeeded finch at the same time to free German-language country music from its hit shackles.

Not that they were rewarded with commercial success. Most viewers probably reached Fink on her tour as the opening act for Element of Crime. And measured by their performance at the time in Munich’s Muffathalle, they didn’t reach those viewers at the same time. “There would be more atmosphere in Hamburg now. But I can see that you don’t know your own bands,” Koppruch reprimanded the audience at the time because it wasn’t even a piece by the Munich band that Fink had covered FSK knew how to appreciate. Later, when Koppruch’s collaboration with Gisbert zu Knyphausen as Kid Kopphausen finally seemed to reach a larger audience, the native of Hamburg died in his hometown on October 10, 2012 at the age of 46 from cardiac arrest as a result of heart muscle inflammation. “Hamburg mourns the loss of one of its best songwriters,” it said at the time mirror.

Ten years later and 25 years after Koppruch’s band Fink made their debut with the CD “Vogelobservation in Winter”, it is now available on vinyl for the first time. She and the other five Fink albums will be released by Trocadero on colored vinyl in a limited edition vinyl box with booklet in LP format. There are also the Fink albums from the years 1997 to 2005, specially remastered for the vinyl pressing by Chris von Rautenkranz (Soundgarden), as individual LPs. With such a loving edition, the label owner Rüdiger Ladwig commemorates an artist who sang about himself: “Chance brought me here and the opportunity”. Dirk Wagner

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On the outskirts of Europe City

Europe hasn’t just sounded like a promise for a while now. In urban development, when the term appears in front of new quarters, it actually stands for an absolute failure on all levels: architecturally, socially, socially and, last but not least, politically. Because what is called Europaallee in Frankfurt, Europaviertel in Stuttgart and Europa City in Berlin is nothing more than a huge piece of soulless investor architecture in a prime inner-city location, because the areas all used to be central marshalling and freight yards.

How this came about is reminiscent of a game of building blocks in the Wild West style. As bitter as it is to recapitulate the planning steps of the past 20 years, it is just as important. Because unlike the Gängeviertel in Hamburg or the banks of the Spree in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the city’s sell-out took place here almost silently, moderated in so-called workshop processes. Therefore an urgent reading recommendation for the new edition of the Berlin notebooks on the history and present of the city in which Alexis Hyman Wolff, Achim Lengerer and Yves Mettler found themselves in “On the outskirts of Europe City” deal with the Berlin district. “Resistance would have been worth it” is quoted a graffiti. Presumably. Laura Weissmuller