Germany
Sarah Kent
Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective begins with a soft focus picture of her by New York photographer Arnold Genthe dated 1927, when she was working as a fashion model. The image is so hazy that she appears as dreamlike and insubstantial as a wraith.It exemplifies one of the hallmarks of a good model – the ability to become a screen that invites projection, rather than expressing your own personality. And in shot after shot for British and American Vogue, Miller remains an enigma – impassive and searingly beautiful. Would the exhibition bring her into sharper focus, as I hoped, or would Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Does the orchestra that sways together play together? Quite apart from their (reliably gorgeous) sound, the tight-packed strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig made quite a sight at the Proms as they collectively surged through key passages of Dvořák and Sibelius as if staging a succession of seated Mexican waves. That, of course, was merely the visible token of the seamless integration that their music director, Andris Nelsons (pictured below), sought and found in this concert that brought the Leipzigers’ legendary focus, density and polish to the Royal Albert Hall. All that fabled Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.Benesch's portrayal of a committed night nurse working in an understaffed hospital in Petra Volpe's Late Shift doesn't allow for such awkward silences. The taut medical drama plays out as a nerve-wracking thriller.The Guildhall-trained Benesch is probably best known to British audiences for co-starring with David Tennant in the Around the World in 80 Days miniseries and for playing Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But if two things are certain, it's that his performance as an emotionally withdrawn conductor in Matthias Glasner's Dying confirms him as one of the finest German actors of his generation, and that he has a sublime talent for character-building.In the film, which is divided into five chapters, Glasner explores his personal relationship with his mother. Yet the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Despite the title of Matthias Glasner’s award-winning drama, and the death that swirls around its characters, dying isn’t really its subject, but the mess of living. Dysfunctional family, eccentric love affairs, addiction, depression, creative obsession that teeters towards suicide, and the worst advertisement for dentistry you will ever see – it’s all here, in a German canvass of misery and survival so casually engaging and provocative that its three hours pass far more smoothly than any number of action-packed, plot stuffed franchise pictures. Writer/director Glasner won the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
German singer Claudia Brücken has had a long and busy career, initially defined by her role in Propaganda. They were a cult 1980s band on ZTT Records who laced their opulent synth pop with an appealingly morbid Teutonic sensibility. Decades later, it seemed they’d been forgotten until Brücken and fellow Propaganda singer Susanne Freytag released an album in 2022 as xPropaganda. It scooted up the UK charts. Her latest solo outing follows elegantly in its footsteps and contains good things.It's far from her first non-Propaganda material. As well as once being in long-defunct duos Act and OneTwo Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.His Dogme 95-influenced Grill Point (2002), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin, follows two couples in crisis. Cloud 9 (2008) and Stopped on Track (2011), both Cannes prize-winners, addressed sex in old age and dying respectively. Gundermann (2018) is a biopic of the East German singer-songwriter and Stasi informant Gerhard Gundermann. The real-life Guantánamo drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush (2022) depicts the eponymous Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In the Saxony of 1725 – still in the grip of Europe’s “Little Ice Age” – Bach and his musicians would seldom have had to deal with the sort of midsummer sauna that enveloped Trafalgar Square last night. Yet, at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Masaaki Suzuki, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists managed to beat the heat with an exhilarating shirt-sleeved journey through the cantatas that Bach wrote exactly three centuries ago for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Suzuki and his crew always looked cool but, excitingly, didn’t sound it. Here was choral and instrumental Bach performed Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Do you know the name of the propaganda minister of England, or America, or even Stalin? No. But Joseph Goebbels? Everyone knows him.” The cynical, grinning Dr Goebbels (Robert Stadlober), perhaps the first master of fake news, is not short on confidence.Joachim Lang’s controversial film Goebbels and the Führer (Führer und Verfürer, or Leader and Seducer, in German) spans seven years, from the Anschluss in March 1938 to the last days in a bombed-out Berlin in May 1945, when, after the death of Hitler, Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children, probably with cyanide, and then killed Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“It is so disgraceful, what happened there,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, in a comment that is the understatement of the century. She is referring to the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was held prisoner.Six million Jews were murdered in the camps, but Lasker-Wallfisch survived because she was a musician. She describes the “welcoming” ceremony in which arrivals were “stripped of every vestige of human dignity”. Stark naked, they had their heads shaved and a number tattooed on their arms.But the woman conducting this identity- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
There used to be an unwritten rule among BBC commissioners about how long an interval had to pass before greenlighting a new documentary on a familiar subject – Shakespeare, Ancient Egypt, Andy Warhol – they all came round again with a decent interlude between reassessments. But if the pitch involved Nazis, all bets were off. And maybe in Germany itself, that’s been the case with film-maker Leni Riefenstahl who may have had more documentaries made about her than she made herself during her years as Hitler’s favourite director.The latest, Riefenstahl comes with the promise of new revelations Read more ...
Leila Greening
Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse is a collection of 515 notes, each contributing to an expansive kaleidoscope of mountain encounters. Translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire in Prototype’s English-language edition, a narrator travels in the Swiss Alps across disparate fragments of prose, converging occasionally with five central characters.Gahse captures conversations in mountain refuges, in cars traversing steep cliffs, on journeys to ragged quarries or distant hikes across granite. Many of these notes are gestural. Note 229, for instance, reads, in full, "I am more of an observer of Read more ...