<p>While Berliners have incorporated the city's notorious wall into museums and public art, restoring the site of the Berliner Schloss of the Hohenzollerns and then the Palast der Republic of the East German government has been much more contentious. The Humboldt Forum has been criticized, but its design and reception exemplify the tensions inherent in democracy.</p>
Petzold was advised by friends to include an introductory text outlining the fable. Still, the director refused. “Nobody knows the undine myth,” he says. “In Germany, too, they know the word ‘undine’, they know it’s something to do with water nymphs, but they don’t know the story behind it. And when you don’t know something and it’s surrounding you, you have to work.” He compares it to the westerns he consumed as a child that were based on Greek myths and Bible stories he’d not yet been taught. “I like movies that don’t explain it concretely.”
Transit, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Undine (Paula Beer) is an apparently self-sufficient Berlin freelance historian in her mid-twenties who lectures on the city s post-war reconstruction for the Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing. Except for her name, she gives no sign she’s a water nymph living high and dry, or different to any other calmly efficient professional, Until, sitting at an outdoors table at the City Museum’s cafe, she tells the lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) who’s hurriedly dumping her that he better reverse his decision or she’ll have to kill him.
Undine review - respecting the nymph | reviews, news & interviews Undine review - respecting the nymph
Undine review - respecting the nymph
A captivating if unexpected mythic romance from director Christian Petzold
by Graham FullerWednesday, 07 April 2021
In too deep: Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer in Undine Curzon Artificial Eye
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy
Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence.
Illogical in its twists and turns, elusive as a fading dream but not stylistically dreamy – Christian Petzold’s optimistic romantic tragedy
Undine is a ciné-conundrum par excellence. It seems, at first glance, a dismayingly insubstantial work for the maker of such discomfiting German cultural and political critiques as
German Nonfiction Prize Names Its First Round of Finalists
Eight titles now are in contention for the €25,000 honor, in the delayed first award cycle of the German Nonfiction Prize.
Winner Announcement: June 14 in Berlin
Because of the circumstances of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the German Nonfiction Prize has become one of the longest awaited events in the dense forest of world publishing’s many awards programs. Created in May 2019 by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels,Germany’s publishers and booksellers association, its expected first year was scuttled by the timing of the contagion.
So it is that only today (April 6), this two-year-old €42,500 (US$50,227) prize program is issuing its first list of finalists. And not unlike the issue-driven Aspen Words Literary Prize, a criterion of this honor is that the winning title is not only to be a work of nonfiction written in German but also one that “inspires social debate.”