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GERMAN OF THE WEEK

OPERA

Leading opera singer turns to comedy

Thomas Quasthoff left behind a sparkling career as a concert bass-baritone last year to pursue new projects. Now he stars in a comedy show in Berlin's West End. One of the country's most acclaimed performers, he is our German of the Week.

Leading opera singer turns to comedy
Photo: DPA

Quasthoff’s career in music had a challenging beginning. His physical disabilities, caused by his mother’s exposure to the drug thalidomide, prevented him from playing the piano and he was thus denied admission to study at Hanover’s academy of music.

Instead he studied privately and in 1988 he won first prize at the ARD international musical competition in Munich – the first of many international honours and awards he was to receive.

His music has earned him an impressive trophy cabinet. Quasthoff has won three Grammies. He was awarded Germany’s Order of Merit in 2005, the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2009, and the Gold Medal of London’s Wigmore Hall in 2011.

Alongside his performances, Quasthoff has taught music since 1996, initially at the College of Music in Detmold, and since 2004 at the Hans Eisler School of Music in Berlin.

But in January 2012, Quasthoff announced his withdrawal from concert life. “My health no longer allows me to live up to the high standard that I have always set,” he said.

He thanked his colleagues in the singing world, which he called “this wonderful profession”, and his audience, for their “loyalty”. “I am looking forward to the new challenges that will now enter my life”, he said.

One of those challenges was his series of Nachtgespräche [Night talks], in which he interviewed many prominent musical, cultural and political guests on stage at the Berlin Konzerthaus.

Last Monday, though, Quasthoff launched his next, somewhat different, project – a comedy variety show called Keine Kunst [Not Art] featuring himself and seasoned variety performer Michael Frowin at the Wühlmäuse cabaret theatre in Berlin’s West End.

Quasthoff was keen to underline that the show was not a political satire, but rather dealt with art and culture. The material makes fun of amusing “foyer chats”, actors’ odd habits, bizarre art critics and college entrance exams, the Berliner Morgenpost reported.

Despite mocking the habits of fellow performers, overstatement was off the agenda for the new cabaret: “I’m obviously not going to get up on stage and just wag my finger”, said Quasthoff. “I’d rather just neatly point to something using care and subtlety”.

The aim, he said, was to provide a “relaxed, sophisticated evening”, without coming off as “two intellectuals on stage, reveling in their own education”.

The 53-year-old was quick to distance Keine Kunst from mainstream comedy, seeing cabaret as a vehicle for something cleverer. “It’s better, I find, to make satire with a few choice words, and good acting, expertly combined,” he said. “In a show like this, you can do so much with tones of voice and different characters.”

But communicating subtle concepts to an audience can be a challenge. “You really have to think a lot about how to make sure what you want to say comes across to the audience in the right way,” he said in the Berliner Morgenpost.

It seems his efforts have not been in vain. The men’s lifestyle magazine GQ, which selected Quasthoff as its “Man of the Year” for 2012 in the culture category, credits him with an “incomparable sense of humour and a brilliant talent for voice impressions”.

He modestly told GQ: “Whether you’re good or not depends if you’re on form and on the tastes of the people watching”, said Quasthoff. By all accounts he must be on form.

Alex Evans

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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