The favorites of the SZ feuilletons: Warm, soft dreams – culture

Picture book: At night in a dream

One becomes immediately calm when one opens this enchanting book from Bohem-Verlag. On two-page pictures one sees a child lying in his little bed in a warm, soft sleep, as if behind a soft veil. Then follows, on midnight blue pages, a little haiku-like text describing the child’s dream. Then the dream in the picture: Lucia rides through a stream on a stuffed rabbit the size of a pony. Ume pets a huge koi from the boat. Over Hakim, an evening wind seems to be blowing through yellow flowers that look like sea anemones. “Flowers that shine. Dance of the corals in the deep sea. I understand every word.” The images of the illustrator and author Sonja Danowski are a bit retro, but they show the desires of modern parents. The children build snowmen and ride in a duck-shaped wooden wagon, the colors are muted. Nobody sits at the tablet here, nobody dreams of action figures. Everyday life disappears. Even grown-ups sleep deeply, calmly and soundly after reading this quiet, beautiful art book. Kathleen Hildebrandt

Classic: Schubert songs with orchestra

16 years ago, the wonderful Danish baritone Bo Skovhus presented songs by Franz Schubert in an unusual tonal environment. Instead of piano accompaniment, one heard a full-voiced orchestra, and one could hardly believe one’s ears how global, spacious and colorful such a dreamy Schubert little song (Sony) can sound. Last October, the French baritone Stéphane Degout presented a phenomenal orchestral version of “Der Doppelgänger”. He had the great ensemble Pygmalion at his side, which in itself is an enlightenment in terms of sound and understanding of music (harmonia mundi). well has Matthew Goerne, the well-deserved Schubert baritone of our day, followed (“Schubert Revisited”, DG). The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen accompanies: strictly North German, straightforward. Goerne mostly highly dramatic, but sometimes also quieter, more lyrical, more Schubertian. Helmut Mauro

Series: Interview with a Vampire

Open detailed view

Humans have always had an ambivalent relationship with the undead, characterized by fear – and envy. Unlike normal zombies, vampires didn’t just escape death – they still look kind of sexy at the same time. Most of them anyway. And definitely the ones that Anne Rice chose for her 1976 novel “Interview with a Vampire” thought up, which was followed by a whole series of sequels in the “Vampire Chronicles”. The appeal of the vampire is its immortality, and so are Anne Rice’s books. Rolin Jones is now getting Louis and Lestat on the show in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, the first season is now on Sky – and a second has been commissioned before even the first episode aired in the US was.

Rolin Jones has strayed quite a distance from the original plot, the film version with Brad Pitt as Louis and Tom Cruise as Lestat from 1994 comes much closer to him, since Louis is a white plantation owner like in the book. The homoerotic undertone was somehow neglected. The TV series blurts it out, eschewing slavery as a rather tacky backdrop. The Rolin Jones series begins in 1910, with Louis as a black brothel owner who has achieved some prosperity, when Lestat shows up and begins courting him – being a vampire turns the balance of power on its head here, and so Jones gives the History a whole new twist.

Louis (Jacob Anderson) struggles with life in New Orleans when he meets Lestat, a mysterious stranger – and as a vampire he’s kind of a rookie at first. In the background story, which is the meaningful part, Louis tells a journalist in the present about his journey through the entire twentieth century: a sunless path through eternity that makes the heart grow cold, because vampires have to kill in order to live. The whole enterprise “Interview with a vampire” is a nice paradox, whether as a book or film or now as a series: A vampire actually explains why you should keep your hands off immortality. Fascinating. Susan Vahabzadeh

Movie: The Frighteners

Open detailed view

Sometimes it’s a bit of a shame when directors bury their weird early work under a mountain of computer-generated blockbusters. You can currently see this with James Cameron, who will probably spend the rest of his life with the mutant pixel Smurfs of his “Avatar” series. But even with Peter Jackson, the early films about his years of hobbit orgies have fallen into oblivion. One of his finest works is “The Frighteners” from 1996 starring Michael J. Fox. The horror comedy has now been released in a digitally restored version on DVD and Blu-ray. The signs of the CGI age can of course already be seen in this spooky story. But at heart, this film about a ghostbuster crook still has the quirky “Ghostbusters” charm of the 1980s. David Steinitz

Podcast: Everything said?

Open detailed view

You have to digress a bit. First, everyone agrees that society is divided. Second: Above all, those who work for institutions that are referred to beyond the social divide as “mainstream media” agree that division endangers democracy. In order to counteract this problem (and to generate clicks with online snippets about abortion and identity politics), public service broadcasters in particular come up with formats in which people from “left” and “right” talk about exciting topics and themselves come closer.

Such debate formats are usually very entertaining. What they usually aren’t is successful if by success you mean “overcoming social divisions” and not click numbers. Because they have two problems: first, people who are invited to represent a position are rarely willing to leave that position – after all, it’s their job to be anti-abortion or pro-vaccination, and nobody likes a bad job. On the other hand, these programs lack the one ingredient that discourse really needs: time.

That’s where it comes from time-Podcast “Everything said?” comes into play, because in addition to two extremely good-willed moderators (Christoph Amend and Jochen Wegner), he has above all endless amounts of time. There is no argument here, but a single guest is given the opportunity to explain his or her view of the world in full, with all the previous stories, digressions, intermediate questions and additional information. As long as he wants – even twelve hours.

It’s not as entertaining as the debate formats, but – it has to be said – it makes you a better person. Someone who understands that positions that you don’t share can also stem from personal motives and that “the other side” also consists of people. When author Juli Zeh tells her medical story, you understand everything that used to get you excited about Corona issues and no matter how you feel about gender, after a few hours it is completely clear why the feminist linguist Luise Pusch has to see language in exactly the same way. From Jens Spahn to Thea Dorn, Alice Hasters to Alice Schwarzer – in the end you want to hug them all. It remains to be seen whether that will save democracy, “Is everything already said?” a podcast like joint putty for the gap in us. Nele Pollatschek