Der Tagesspiegel 17.01.2009

In an interview with Philipp Lichterblick, Israeli pop singer, Aviv Geffen, who also happens to be the grandnephew of Moshe Dajan, talks about the war in Gaza, how he avoided army service ("I had a bad back") and how difficult it is to avoid becoming cynical: "It's almost impossible. I have a friend who, like me, was a member of the radical left. A few days ago he came to me and said: 'We demonstrate for peace and they shoot at us. Now we're wiping them out.' Hamas has seen to it that people like me feel stupid. But anyone who believes that we can achieve anything with this war is even more stupid."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 17.01.2009

In an interview that fills nearly two pages the script writers of the film "Operation Valkyrie", Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander, and the historian who advised them, Peter Hoffmann, stress their strict observance of historical authenticity in their portrayal of the German resistance. "Alexander says: Henning von Tresckow [played by Kenneth Brannagh] best describes Stauffenberg's motives when he says to his fellow conspirators that they have to attempt an assassination to show the rest of the world that not all Germans are like Hitler. It was a moral decision. They had seen horrors committed and without these horrors and the Holocaust, as professor Hoffmann quotes someone in one of his books as saying, there may never have been a 20th July plot.
Hoffmann interjects: ... there would certainly have been no 20th July plot! It was Axel von dem Bussche who said this. Stauffenberg's first statement, that Hitler had to be overthrown, came in reaction to a report about the mass murder of Jews in the East. That was in April 1942. April 1942! It had nothing to do with Stalingrad, Tunisia or how the war was proceeding."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 19.01.2009

Kai Strittmacher writes an optimistic article on the second anniversary of the death of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink: "Things have happened since which, two years ago, no one would have dared dream about. Like President Abdullah Gül's surprise trip to Armenia. But more than anything else, the 'Özür diliyoruz' - we apologise - campaign, launched by four of Hrant Dink's friends, has now been signed by almost 30,000 Turks. Turks are publicly apologising to the Armenians for the 1915 massacre, for 'injustice' and 'suffering'.We have never seen anything like this."


Der Tagesspiegel 20.01.2009

Peter Steinbach, head of the German Resistance Memorial in Berlin believes that "Operation Valkyrie" runs into problems because it is conceived as a thriller: "This means that everything is geared to the protagonist. The hero drives the plot and stands at the centre of all events. We learn nothing of Stauffenberg's development from an advocate of National Socialist politics to its critic and eventually to his unconditional opposition to Hitler. In an early scene that was obviously added as an afterthought, Stauffenberg's motives are listed in a fictional diary entry – but that's it. One man in the driving seat and a bunch of passengers - this has nothing to do with the reality of the attempt on Hitler's life in the summer of 1944."


Frankfurter Rundschau 22.01.2009

It was an illustrious hour, writes poet Dürs Grünbein. What a shame though that Elizabeth Alexander's "Inauguration Poem" was not more than "a piece of upright prose". "The most poetic line of the entire event was delivered by California Senator Dianne Feinstein. 'The sweet reality of this hour.' It could be a line from a poem. And she spoke it will such a perfect smile that it became something truly wonderful." And another thing: "Did you notice, while he was signing the inaugural documents, that the president is left-handed? I hope that in Barack Obama, we will be seeing a dialectician entering the White House for the first time in American history."


Die Tageszeitung 22.01.2009

Iranian artists who were oppressed in the wake of  the Islamic Revolution are now being rediscovered by auction houses in the West, as Gisela Fock reports. Parviz Tanavoli, for example, whose bronze sculpture "O Persepolis" recently fetched 2.8 million dollars at auction. "Parviz Tanavoloi is one of the leading representatives of modern Iranian art, whose work received very little attention after the revolution. After successive revolution tribunals the new regime banned him from exhibiting or working as an artist and he also lost his job as professor for sculpture at the Tehran Fine Art Academy. He was forced to leave Iran with his family in 1985."


From the blogs 23.01.2009

Every country wants its own Obama now. The graphic designers at ITVnews show us here what we can expect if this dream comes true.






Die Tageszeitung 23.01.2009

Psychoanalyst Martin Altmeyer is appalled that anti-Semitism has gained respectability on the left. "Anti-Semitic radicalisation reached its climax when Naomi Klein, icon of the anti-globalisation movement, called in the Guardian for a worldwide boycott of Israeli products, companies and institutions, finally giving respectability within anti-gloablisation circles to the boycott-Israel initiative of Palestinian groups. Professors in universities throughout Britain immediately took up the call, chanting 'Israel must lose!' - among them the unavoidable Slavoj Zizek..."


Frankfurter Rundschau 23.01.2009

The Oscar nomination for the "Baader-Meinhof Complex", writes Daniel Kothenschulte with obvious misgivings, is the culmination of years of work by director Bernd Eichinger. "German cinema is no longer associated with its art tradition, but with its commercial mainstream. ... Many people have had a hand in this process, which tiptoed sheepishly into life after Fassbinder's death in 1982, and went on to make grave changes in film funding and education, before opening the way for market-oriented products. Another milestone was the disempowerment of the expert juries at the Federal Film Awards. The largest pot of German funding money, the BKM funds, is now allotted without the scripts being read. In accordance with the wishes of a number of commercially-oriented producers expressed in the 80s, subsidies are handed out with no consideration of artistic merit."