The favorites of the SZ feuilletons – culture

Acting: “Stage abuse” at the Gorki Theater in Berlin

Theater self-criticism? Yet. It does exist. At least in the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. The very witty author Sivan Ben Yishai has written a “stage insult” based on Peter Handke’s legendary “audience insult” which premiered in 1966. In it, the tables are turned and the institution of theater is X-rayed for its ulcers, subtitle: “Do I not love it anymore or do I love it too much?” Not a piece with roles and dialogues, but a polyphonic continuous text with a supervisor’s view behind the scenes, into the bowels of the company. It is about the working conditions as well as questions of power, autocracy, obedience. Also about the allegations of bullying that were made against Gorki director Shermin Langhoff in 2021. In the world premiere by Sebastian Nübling, this is always ironized and made fun of. But at least.

The way those involved in this company outing go to great lengths to get to grips with the internals of the theatre, break through the fourth wall, interactively put the audience under their pelts, amuse and question them is full of sparkling playful energy. Rarely is it as true as in this play when one says: the actors are in their element here. That doesn’t mean they’re always brilliant. In the beginning, dressed in diva-like clown costumes, they perform the most diverse ways of bowing to a taped orgy of applause. Then they testify to their vanities, fears and neuroses in solo performances. Lindy Larsson likes to do it melodramatic and singing (he’s good at it); Aysima Ergün begs for stage directions and text in a panicked “Skript!” monologue; Mehmet Yilmaz works himself into a comical roaring speech in which he talks about the suffering of freelance and employed actors. One is constantly waiting for calls, the other is completely absent as a social being because he has a performance on New Year’s Eve himself. Navel-gazing as a hysterical number revue. This is soon no longer the original text, which the actors arbitrarily annex, supplement, make fun of and make fun of, but only those who know it (and appreciate it) know and criticize it anyway. On the Gorki they turn the “stage abuse” in the second part into an audience (charm) offensive. Most like that. When the text drifts off into the climate apocalypse at the end, it only comes off the tape while they try to build a new theater on stage with large building blocks. a better one. Christine Dossel

Movie: Actor Karl Markovics

The optician in Aaron Lehmann’s film “What you can see from here” is unhappily in love and nameless to boot, but full of fine self-mockery. Right at the beginning he hangs an empty picture frame in the shop window of the eyewear store, “Employee of the Month” is written underneath. He smiles coyly, because of course he’s always been alone here. From that moment on, this thin and mustachioed figure in knitted sweaters has completely smitten you. It should actually be dripping with sentimentality, but Karl Markovics plays the optician with such enchanting embarrassment that even those allergic to kitsch have to sympathize with him when he pulls hundreds of unfinished love letters out of his drawers, all discouragedly broken off and neatly archived for his beloved on his deathbed to read. Sofia Glasl

Exhibition: George Grosz in Soviet Russia

Open detailed view

The fact that trips to Moscow, which were full of expectations, later turned into embarrassing memories, is not just a phenomenon since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Almost exactly 100 years ago, George Grosz traveled to Soviet Russia, was received by avant-garde artists like Vladimir Tatlin and celebrated by poets like Vladimir Mayakovsky, attended the highest Bolshevik gatherings – and later only wanted to know a little about all of this. But the “Kleine Grosz Museum” in Berlin, an oasis in an old gas station near Potsdamer Strasse, has an enlightening, even revealing, effect on Grosz’s several-month visit to Russia exhibition dedicated. It not only shows early class-struggle material by the artist and communist Grosz, but also documents the stages of his journey to the Bolsheviks in a previously unknown depth of detail. These include amazingly idyllic drawings from a small town in Norway’s Arctic Circle, where Grosz was waiting for the crossing with the Danish writer Martin Andersen Nexø, and above all his arrival in Petrograd, today’s Saint Petersburg, where he was received by Grigory Zinoviev, the director at the time of the Comintern, executed a few years later.

The highlight of the trip and the exhibition, however, was Grosz’s participation in the 4th Comintern Congress, first in Petrograd and then in Moscow. Film excerpts show speeches by Clara Zetkin, the culture functionary Lunacharsky and Lev Trotsky. Incidentally, the latter, treated as the successor to the seriously ill Lenin, had no use for Grosz’ drastic caricatures. He called them “more cynical than revolutionary”.

The show (until March 31) does not hide how brutally the Bolsheviks acted against real or imaginary opponents – against social revolutionaries, philosophers, artists. And yet the question is whether Grosz’s repression actually initiated the change of mood that led to his resignation from the Communist Party in 1923, as he was later to claim. If you see his anti-capitalist agitation art from the mid-1920s, the monumental sunrise of the hammer and sickle from 1925 (“Revolution”, see photo) or the depictions of emaciated working-class families (“Hunger”, 1924), you’ve got quite a few Doubt. But for Grosz, who lived in the USA from 1933 and experienced the heyday of McCarthyism in the 1950s, the memory of the Russian adventure had long been worse than an embarrassment – it had become a risk. Sonja Zekri

Youtube Show: Bad Gear

Is a veritable clinical picture (and a civilization diagnosis): “Gear Acquisition Syndrome” (GAS), the constant urge to buy new equipment. In the genre of synthesizers, samplers and drum machines, the extreme financial devastation is wreaking havoc, so antidotes would be good. Enter AudioPilz. The Youtuber dedicates his “Bad Gear” videos to the “World’s Most Hated Audio Tools”, i.e. all those electronic instruments that are showered with a lot of complaints, disgust and infernal curses on the Internet (basically almost all of them). He analyses, explains and evaluates them – in ten-minute meme-flickering, epilepsy-triggering ten minutes, heavily Austrian-colored English and enormous pop-cultural depth (they’re funny, too). In the end you buy the stuff anyway – but at least you honestly laughed a few times before. Jacob Biazza

Dresden Christmas Circus

Open detailed view

The good old circus has been badly battered by the passage of time. In the hard fight for children’s eyes to shine, he is easily trumped by the new worlds that VR glasses and other home entertainment are creating. And in the meantime, there are often enough not grandparents with curious grandchildren standing in front of the tent, but angry animal rights activists with good arguments. It is all the more astonishing to experience once again what power and what magic still emanates from the circus ring. A pretty good place for that is the 25th Dresden Christmas Circus, which runs until January 8th. Popcorn crackles happily in the awning before the big wheel of death next door gets going. Appear: smiling artists with bandaged knees, a devil juggler wielding ten balls at the same time, the lightly clattering show orchestra. It all takes almost three hours, hardly a second of it is boring. Cornelius Pollmer