Afterwards: “Standing upright – 100 years of Johannes Mario Simmel” – on April 8th from 10:30 p.m., ORF 2
Vienna (OTS) – The “kulturMontag” presented by Clarissa Stadler on April 8, 2024 at 10:30 p.m. on ORF 2 is dedicated, among other things, to the adventurous globetrotter Marco Polo, who is being celebrated primarily in his birthplace Venice on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of his death. The program also highlights a piece of true Tyrolean family history: the dramatization of the novel “Café Schindler”, which will premiere tomorrow (April 6th) in the Innsbruck State Theater. The magazine also deals with the first Vienna Climate Biennale, which starts today. The documentary “Walking Upright – 100 Years of Johannes Mario Simmel” (11:15 p.m.) will then be on the program.
An Odysseus from Venice – The adventurous worlds of Marco Polo
He discovered the Far East from Venice and wrote a bestseller with his travel memoirs “The Wonders of the World”. 700 years ago, Marco Polo died, whose “remeasurement of the world” – whether true or not – is considered the first sign of globalization and continues to fascinate. Hardly any traveler is as famous as the Venetian who, in 1271, at the age of 17, embarked on a 24-year journey to Asia with his father and uncle. During the Crusades, the Polos reached the court of the grandson of the famous Mongol ruler Genghis Khan, Kublai Khan, via Palestine and the famous Silk Road. While his father and uncle went about their business, Marco learned various languages in the Mongol Empire. Kublai Khan entrusted him with special diplomatic missions that took Polo through Tibet, the regions on the Yangtze and Mekong, to Burma, into the territory of today’s Thailand and Vietnam and possibly even to Siberia in almost two decades. His expeditions took place long before the expeditions of the 18th century and before those of the conquistadors and explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries. On the 700th anniversary of his death, Venice is commemorating his legendary son with a large-scale exhibition in the Palazzo Ducale. More than 300 works from Venetian collections, from the largest and most important Italian and European institutions as well as loans from museums in Armenia, China, Qatar and Canada paint an insightful picture of the “Worlds of Marco Polo”. The show raises current questions: How can you enter into dialogue with other cultures without giving up your own identity? How can relations between peoples and countries be regulated?
A Tyrolean family saga on the State Theater stage – Meriel Schindler’s search for the truth
Kurt Schindler was a dazzling, but rather “failed existence”. His daughter Meriel, who works as a lawyer in London, had a hard time trying to classify her father’s many stories: Is the family really related to Franz Kafka and Oskar Schindler? Or with Hitler’s Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch? What happened on the night of the pogrom on November 9, 1938 in Innsbruck when the National Socialists beat Meriel’s grandfather Hugo, operator of the well-known Café Schindler, half to death and searched the house? When Kurt Schindler, who had to flee at the age of 13 after the night of the pogrom, died in his cottage in the English county of Hampshire in May 2017 at the age of 91, he not only left behind a pile of debts, but also a lot of documents. His daughter Meriel then decided to dig through the mountains of files and photos and embarked on a breathtaking journey of discovery that took her to Innsbruck. She meticulously researched the fascinating and touching history of her own family, a story that also tells that of the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and became a bestseller in 2022 under the title “Café Schindler”. Now this chronicle of expropriation and expulsion as well as the Holocaust in Tyrol comes to the stage of the Innsbruck State Theater. How present is the approach to Jewish heritage in Tyrol and how visible is it in Innsbruck today? In cooperation with city institutions, an intensive research process accompanied the dramatization of the novel. Documentary material, original sounds from numerous contemporary witnesses and musical references accompany the theatrical implementation. Meriel Schindler is expected at the premiere and can finally give her father the long-awaited resting place, as he will be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Innsbruck at the beginning of April.
Future worth living? The first Climate Biennale Vienna
The world is in upheaval. Impending climate catastrophe, digital revolution – change is having an impact on people’s self-image. The scope for actions that follow old thought patterns becomes narrow and leads to a dead end. Could art become more important in this situation? Could it help generate creative solutions, mindsets and attitudes that make it easier to navigate the radical changes of our present and near future? The first Climate Biennale Vienna starts today (April 5th) and is dedicated to the acute issues of global change, the climate crisis and the extinction of species as well as the effects on humanity and nature at the interfaces of art and science, politics and economics for 100 days. Structure. How do we want to live in the future? How will our society deal with global warming? The KunstHausWien serves as the headquarters and through the participation of more than 60 cooperation partners, the entire urban space becomes an exhibition space. In her work at Foto Arsenal, the German photographer Beate Gütschow, for example, deals with the change in ecological systems, the effects on the environment and the resulting culture of protest. Your Austrian colleague Oliver Ressler has had ecology and economics in mind for around 30 years and tries to design and make social alternatives conceivable in his filmic works at Belvedere 21.
Documentary “Walking upright – 100 years of Johannes Mario Simmel” (11:15 p.m.)
The women loved him, Marlene Dietrich flooded him with admiring letters and even carried out telephone terror, the icons of German-language literary criticism Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Joachim Kaiser paid him tribute. A lot of honor – but it came late in the career of the Austrian writer and screenwriter Johannes Mario Simmel, whose birthday will be 100 years old on April 7th. With a total circulation of around 70 million books, which were translated into 33 languages, he topped the bestseller lists for decades. That probably made him suspicious – for a long time he was thrown into a book box with Heinz G. Konsalik as a kitschist and trivial author. Simmel always took on socially critical topics, sweetened with a pinch of romanticism. After the war he wrote numerous screenplays, including for films with Hildegard Knef and Romy Schneider. His breakthrough as a novelist came with the novel “It Doesn’t Always Have to Be Caviar,” which became a cinema hit in the film adaptation, as did “And Jimmy Went to the Rainbow.” His sense of mission as an ardent anti-fascist was probably also based on his biography: almost all of his Jewish father’s relatives were murdered by the Nazis. On the occasion of Simmel’s 100th birthday, director Gustav W. Trampitsch follows the life of the successful author.
His novels such as “Love is just a word”, “Hurray, we are still alive” and “And Jimmy went to the Regenborgen” were aimed at the brain and mind of a society that was slowly waking up from the intoxication of the economic miracle. The middle class in particular felt threatened by dangers and uncertainties such as old and new Nazis, iron curtains, the Cold War, and energy and environmental crises. The Austrian portrayed all of this accurately and became a reliable chronicler. Many of his bestsellers were made into films and became box office hits in post-war German cinema. However, it could have turned out completely differently: his father was able to escape to England in time to escape the brown terror, but a large part of his father’s relatives were kidnapped and murdered by the Nazis. This trauma of his youth, the experience of merciless inhumanity, formed the basis for his alcohol addiction on the one hand, and on the other hand for his keen view of the zeitgeist, love and suffering, as well as magnanimity and villainy.
Johannes Mario Simmel wanted to be together with his Lulu for life, but separated because of a childhood love and finally returned to Lulu. Throughout the years he had an open and intense relationship with Gabriele, his long-term lover. This was the name of his typewriter, which accompanied him on all his travels and to which he remained faithful to the last letter.
Gustav W. Trampitsch’s film features, among others, Iris Berben, star of several Simmel film adaptations, his Viennese friend of decades, the journalist Peter Huemer, the literary critic and journalist Heinz Sichrovsky, the author of his recently published biography, Claudia Graf-Grossmann, and the “new Simmel”, the Austrian author Marc Elsberg, who lives in Vienna.