SZ favorites of the week: Jazz by Wülker, Putin in a graphic novel. – Culture

Real teenage feelings

That exciting tingling sensation when you touch the other’s hand for the first time, one look is enough, for a moment your heart stops. In the British Netflix series “Heartstopper”, stars sparkle and little hearts explode at exactly that moment – like in the comic book of the same name by Alice Oseman, which inspires a large queer fan base. But they don’t ridicule anything, they just underline what it’s really about.

Ever since it became known that Charlie (Joe Locke) is gay, the 15-year-old has been bullied at Trunham Grammar School for boys. And now he’s falling in love with Nick (Kit Connor) of all people, who’s a cool rugby player and seems so different from himself. But what if Nick isn’t gay? “Heartstopper” takes a light-hearted approach to teenage sexuality and the feeling of falling in love for the first time. The figures are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transsexual and do not appear cast together from the model catalogue. Sometimes the dull everyday life looks like a gray low pressure area, sometimes the world seems to be bathed in rainbow colors. The relationships are believable too. The embarrassing situations between Nick and Charlie are particularly nice, for example when a hug is cramped at first and then becomes really uncomfortable. Short dialogues, colorful pictures and the comic effects underline the playfulness of the series, as well as the soundtrack Chvrches and LGBTQ+ singer Girl in Red.

Compared to the murky, violent and intoxicating world of drug excess the hyped high school series “Euphoria”, “Heartstopper” is harmless, almost cute. No drug parties are thrown here at 15, the young people meet their dogs in the park and in the evenings they lie in bed at home and think about the next Instagram post. That should have more to do with the everyday life of most teenagers than the toxic network of relationships in “Euphoria”. And then, of all people, Oscar winner Olivia Coleman plays Nick’s sensitive mother – that finally makes “Heartstopper” an escapist feel-good place. Eve Goldbach

Jazz like a swarm of starlings

Strings are a thing in jazz. Usually too cheesy, too overloaded or too ambitious. But once it works, they can create a unique state of limbo. The trumpeter Nils Wülker did it. He recorded his new album “Continuum” together with the Munich Radio Orchestra of the BR. If you just want to pick out one moment, that would be the ballad “Nika’s Dream”. It begins with the strings, which are limited to a silky blaze, over which Wülker spins his lines on the flugelhorn and then immerses himself in the overall sound. A picture about it? Were these swarms of starlings soaring into the air in ever new formations over landscapes, only to then come together in a cloud formation. Kitschy? no Perfect aesthetics. Andrian Kreye

Bloody Lifeline: Graphic Novel about Putin

Open detailed view

Putin’s career in fast forward – as a graphic novel. From the backyard fights of young Vladimir, who is described as a fierce fighter who bit and scratched, who was happy with any means if someone had attacked or insulted him, to the KGB agent to the head of state, who also spared no means, people who stand in his way of silencing him. British author and “graphic journalist” Darryl Cunningham has published “Putin’s Russia” (English at Myriad Editions) in 2021. On 160 picture-packed pages you can read the bloody line that – with cases like that of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya or the Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny – stretches all the way to the brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. On several pages, Cunningham lists the sources from which he draws his information. The world must stop pretending that Putin’s regime is a normal state, he writes at the end of the comic. “Democracy or dictatorship? It’s our choice.” Martina Knoben

Hans Uhlmann’s Prison Diaries

Open detailed view

Communists were being arrested here, the Gestapo shouted at the crowd, so that it was immediately clear what was going on in Berlin. This is how the sculptor Hans Uhlmann, a member of the KPD, ended up in prison off the street in 1933. Today the name stands for steel sculptures that look like departing birds, for example in front of the Deutsche Oper or on the roof of the Philharmonie. While in the case of many art-in-architecture sculptors of the 1950s a past as a hero-kneading Nazi glorifier lay hidden beneath semi-abstract forms, Uhlmann had one as a Nazi victim. Consequently, there are now rarely seen drawings by this man in the Kunsthaus Dahlem in the former state studio of the chief hero kneader Arno Breker – and in Hatje Cantz’s “diaries from the prison years”. Depressing reading, liberating strong works. Peter Richter