Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

The “Occupy Frankfurt” protests and the euro meltdown were not the only headlines in Germany’s financial capital in October. Also in the news was “Beckmann & America”, an exhibition of the late works of Max Beckmann, a German expressionist painter, at the Städel, Frankfurt’s most famous art museum. 

For both the artist and the gallery, this exhibition is a homecoming. The Städel, founded in 1815, is one of nine museums on the south bank of the Main. It is next to the Städelschule, a fine-arts college where Beckmann taught from 1925 until 1933, when Hitler’s regime stripped him of his professorship. He moved to Berlin and then to Amsterdam after the Nazis classified his paintings as “degenerate art”. So it is meaningful that the Städel, which has been undergoing a big reconstruction since September 2009 (including an immense new underground extension), chose Beckmann to mark the reopening of the Peichl Bau, the museum’s wing for special exhibitions. This also happens to be one of three Beckmann shows in Europe this autumn. An exhibition in Leipzig concentrates on his portraits, and one in Basel, Switzerland explores his landscapes.   read more »

It was in August 2002 when Dresden, Saxony’s culture-rich capital—Germany's “Florence on the Elbe”—was hit by an unprecedented flooding of the Elbe river. One of the casualties was the Neo-Renaissance Albertinum, a former arsenal of the Saxon rulers and an art museum since 1887. Having emerged from the Dresden bombings in 1945 more or less unscathed, the museum was suddenly under attack once again, this time by an influx of water.   read more »

Today's New York Times has an article about one of the creepiest, most disturbing collections of photographs I have ever seen. It belonged to Karl Hoecker, the adjutant to Auschwitz's commandant, and it comprises 116 photographs of Auschwitz guards and personnel frolicking during their off hours. A slide show accompanies the article (unfortunately, some rather grating and obvious narration from an archivist accompanies the slide show), so you can see Auschwitz's joyous guards for yourself. The image - or rather the person from an image - that stays with me is a young German woman holding a bowl upside down and contorting her face into a mock sob because she just finished her portion of blueberries. At first it seems a typical summer idyll, before you realise that it was taken just a few miles away from an Auschwitz operating at full capacity.

A round-up of news from the arts world:

The Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC, has announced this year's recipients of its lifetime achievement awards, presented at the 30th annual Kennedy Centre Honours in Decembre. Recipients include Diana Ross, Brian Wilson (founder of the Beach Boys), Martin Scorsese, Steve Martin, and Leon Fleischer (pianist and conductor). Mr Martin's response : "I am grateful to the Kennedy Center for finally alleviating in me years of covetousness and trophy envy."  read more »

After years of struggling to stay alive, the Babelsberg Film Studio seems to be enjoying some success. Founded in 1911 in the beautiful town of Potsdam, south of Berlin, the film studio had been adrift ever since the UFA closed up shop. The UFA was Germany’s pre-war film production company, which produced such gems as the famous “Der Blaue Engel” ("The Blue Angel"), starring Marlene Dietrich.

But the studio's luck is changing. There are some big German productions at Babelsberg right now, such as “Der Baader Meinhof Komplex”, a film about the terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, based on the bestseller by Stefan Aust, editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, and produced by Bernd Eichinger. Many of Germany’s best actors are involved, such as Bruno Ganz (who played Adolf Hitler in “The Downfall”), Martina Gedeck (who was Christa-Maria Sieland in “The Lives of Others”) and Moritz Bleibtreu (from "Run Lola Run").

Hollywood has also started to descend on Berlin in full force. The city has hosted crews for “Valkyrie”, a film about the legendary plot to kill Hitler, directed by Bryan Singer (United Artists). It stars Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who made the assassination attempt. Earlier this year, Studio Babelsberg produced “Speed Racer”, another big-budget film (a German-UK production), featuring John Goodman and Susan Sarandon. A Hollywood adaptation of "The Reader", Bernhard Schlink’s award-winning novel, is also expected to come to Berlin and Babelsberg this autumn. Nicole Kidman will star as Hanna Schmidt, an illiterate former SS guard in post-war Heidelberg who has an affair with a 15-year-old boy.

According to Carl Woebcken, the studio’s chief executive, 11 movies (four of which are international) will be produced in Babelsberg in 2007. That doesn't include all the TV productions lined up for this year.

What explains this turn-around? Mr Woebcken says there are several reasons for the sudden boom, but the main catalyst was a new system of state subsidies provided by the National Film Board, regional film boards and the German Film Fund. And, he says, Berlin is still “the most lively, most creative and cheapest city in Germany”. According to Berlin’s traffic coordination office, every day there are a dozen locations in the city where some sort of filming is going on.  read more »