The favorites of the SZ feuilletons: more than horror – culture

Actor: Jenna Ortega

Wednesday, the stylish, morbid daughter of the “Addams Family”, was almost predestined for her role. Jenna Ortega became a world star overnight with Tim Burton’s Netflix super hit of the same name. So forever horror princess because she also starred in the slasher movies “X” and “Scream”? Hardly likely. The Californian with Mexican and Puerto Rican roots can do more, as you can see in the film “The Life After/The Fallout” (on Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play etc.) In it she plays Vada, who survives a massacre at her high school and at first thinks she has taken it all well – until her life becomes more and more frayed. A quiet film brimming with contemporary American teenage reality that prioritizes youth itself before terror and drama. Written and directed by Megan Park, who is also worth noting. Tobias Kniebe

Exhibition: George Grosz in Soviet Russia

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 cultural 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

Early Music: Silent Dance

Open detailed view

It is well known that music moves you to tears, that it can unleash emotional storms and even self-forgetting. Of course also that you can easily dream yourself into her and lose yourself in her. In the time of Elizabeth I in England, this became so much a fashion for melancholy that from the englishmalady was spoken. In aristocratic and scholarly circles one acted melancholy and full of pain, one complained and even cried, one cultivated the dark side of the soul. Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” can be understood as the prototype of such a hopeless melancholic. What is traded today as depressive, on the other hand, does not fit congruently with this older term of melancholy.

One of the masters of this darkly shining fashion of melancholy and sweet pain, famous throughout Europe, was the great lutenist John Dowland (1563 – 1626), who said of himself onomatopoeic: “Semper Dowland, semper dolens” – always Dowland, always suffering. Henry Purcell (1659 to 1695), England’s most important Baroque composer, who was decades younger, also wrote a composition that is one of the most beautiful hymns of lamentation in music history: “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”.

In her album “Silent Dance” (Accent), the widely acclaimed specialist for old harps, Margret Köll, spreads out the fullness of ravishingly melancholy, yet always flexible and virtuoso music by the two English masters on a replica Welsh triple harp. The arrangements are well done by the artist, even where one can hardly believe that the human voice can be “replaced”. But the old harp with its full, soft tone is so touching that there is never a suspicion that this or that needs to be added. With the first plucked note, the seductive power of this irresistibly supple, never tearful, but always noble and sad music sets in. Of course, “Dido’s Lament” is just as important as Dowland’s famous “Flow My Tears”. With her historically oriented harp playing, Magret Köll succeeds in opening up a whole world of noble sadness, tonal beauty and elegant perfection. When you start the album, you won’t stop until the last note. Harold Eggebrecht

Series: Devil in Ohio

Open detailed view

Can’t all shine. Not every series is the same as “White Lotus” or “The Rings of Power” or “Better Call Saul”, and millions are not always invested for star authors, star actors, star composers. Some series are just: okay. The acting is alright, the dialogue is a bit awful, but something grabs you. That’s how TV series used to be mostly, and if at least the bondage works, millions are still watching on Netflix: This is also the case with “Devil in Ohio”, a really mediocre and therefore endearing series about a psychiatrist, played by Zooey Deschanels elder Sister Emily, who takes in a mysterious girl who escaped from a satanic cult. There follow: oddly misplaced scary sound effects, stereotypically creepy crows, a perfect husband who, unsurprisingly, isn’t perfect – and Lucifer himself, of course, in the cornfields of Ohio. A – surprisingly – devilish fun. Aurelie von Blazekovic

Literature: Twelve rooms to yourself

You don’t have to like printed interviews as a genre. If you expect more authenticity from it, the impression of hearing someone speak, you will always be disappointed. The American Literary Magazine’s Writer Interviews Paris Review but they are a lonely entity, workshop reports that become life stories. The Kampa publishing house has now translated two dozen of these conversations with writers into German under the witty title “Twelve rooms for yourself”. Starting with one from 1956 with Dorothy Parker, via Doris Lessing scolding German professors, Susan Sontag, Elena Ferrante explaining why she remains hidden behind her pseudonym, to the most recent from 2022 with Jamaica Kincaid: they are all of knowing longing fulfilled after writing. Absolutely thrilling. Marie Schmidt