Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Elet es Irodalom (Hungary), 21.10.2011
"Father, you are a smart man. How could you be so dumb?†asks the son of the famous Hungarian economist Janos Kornai, a communist until 1956. Adam Michnik read Kornai’s biography along with the memoires of Sandor Marais and the Polish philosopher Adam Sikora. The link between these three books, he writes, is their uniquely honest testimony of the communist period: "They have understood Aristotle's thoughts on tyranny, which, as Sikora writes, 'incites mutual distrust, since despotism cannot be overthrown as long as individuals are unable to trust one another'. We should take this notion to heart, since the despotic tendencies of the powerful still prevail, even after the demise of Marxist-Leninist ideology...Bolshevism may be dead, but it is being revived in new form as Social Nationalism, which could develop into an ideology capable of destroying masses of people in its wake - as shown in the bloody Balkan Wars. Even if this ideology borrows from anti-communist rhetoric, it is nevertheless the perfect mirror image of communism."
Rue89 (France), 22.10.2011
Daniel Cohn-Bendit is a member of the "Spinelli Group", a group of European representatives demanding fundamental institutional reform in the face of the euro crisis - federalise Europe. In an interview with Pascal Riche from Rue89 he asks: "How can Germany, France, and the Netherlands otherwise form a common support mechanism? There is only one way to do this: The decision structures and funds necessary for managing crises must be communalised."
La vie des idees (France), 21.10.2011
In La Vie des idees Enrique Klaus has written a well-informed investigative article about the role of state and private presses and the Internet in the Egyptian revolution. One learns how the private press was muzzled under the Mubarak regime, despite a certain degree of freedom: "The virtual monopoly of the Al-Ahram Advertising Company on the advertising market enabled the state newspapers to hoard the lions share of the advertising profits, whereas the so-called oppositional press (regardless whether affiliated with a party or independent) existed in a ongoing state of precarious finances. For a long time, the state printing presses were the only ones allowed to print newspapers, so that undesired editions could easily be withheld at printing."Â
Die Welt (Germany) 20.10.2011
Stefan Koldehoff is incredibly bored by the database of some 11,000 works of Nazi art, which went online this past week. A record of the works presented the "Great German Exhibitions" between 1937 and 1944, the archive further lifts the taboo on Nazi artistic production, while avoiding the official sanction of a museum display. No one needs to be protected from these drab paintings of submarine commanders, wounded soldiers, the Autobahn, or forward-striding blond families. “Were these paintings to be sold today at auction, many would find a buyer. They are not timelessly beautiful, or even timelessly successful, but so timelessly average and banal, that even today they would fit in every other middle class living room.â€
Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), 23.10.2011
There is not much reason to celebrate in Italy at the moment. Once upon a time things were very different, Patrizia Gabrielli reports in her historical look back at the Italian economic miracle "Anni di novita e di grandi cose". In the 1950s and 1960s Italian society underwent major changes similar in scale to those in Germany, comments Emilio Gentile. But there was no growth on the political side. "It was nothing less than a miracle as to how fast this radical transformation took place, both in cities and on the countryside, in every part of Italy, affecting labourers, farmers, employees, artists, housewives, and students. During this time millions of Italians fundamentally changed the way they lived, from what they ate to the kinds of transport they used, the music they listened to, and the clothes they wore...New wealth gave the country's 50 million inhabitants a new way of thinking. It made them more into Italians than they had ever been in prior centuries. But it did not necessary enable them to become citizens of the national state, which celebrated its centennial anniversary in 1961."
Babelia (Spain), 22.10.2011
The Spanish philosopher Jose Luis Pardo suggests literally capitalizing on the current omnipresent sense of insecurity: "The constant fluctuation of financial values has transformed facts, once indisputable reference points of reality, into something so puzzling, that the factor of the emotional states of the participants has long been uncoupled from the facts. If someone who is even thousands of miles away can change the price of a good merely through the mental energy of his 'future expectations', why shouldn't we then be able to improve our own prospects by simply believing in them with all our might? Why can't we again pump up the sagging slump in our future expectations with an extra infusion of positive self-evaluation? Of course reality is resistant to this kind of endeavour, but the 'indicators' used to confirm our current bankruptcy and our failure on all levels by no means stem from intractable reality itself, but from the people - the professional risk analysts - who not long ago constantly assured us that reality is as flexible and elastic as our desires and only dependent on how we view the world."
Highlights from the Anglophone Press
The Daily Beast profiles Wael Ghonim, the reluctant Facebook hero of the Egyptian Revolution. A 15-page article in Fast Company describes the coming tech war of 2012: between Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The New York Review of Books is puzzled by the paradoxes of the Occupy Wallstreet movement and its initiators Adbusters. Prospect discovers the substantive difference between British and Russian novelists. In The Economist a biography of Deng Xiaoping explains the stability of China compared to the Arab revolts, and the magazine marks the death of Gaddafi in a lengthy obituary. The New York Times Sunday Magazine is amazed by Haruki Murakami's concentration, and the Book Review gushes about the authorized "iBiography" of Steve Jobs.
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The Republicans are waging a war against women, the New York Magazine declares. Perhaps it's because women are so unabashed about reading porn in public - that's according to publisher Beatriz de Moura in El Pais Semanal, at least. Polityka remembers Operation Reinhard. Tensions are growing between Poland and Hungary as Victor Orban spreads his influence, prompting ruminations on East European absurdity from both Elet es Irodalom and salon.eu.sk. Wired is keeping its eyes peeled on the only unassuming sounding Utah Data Center.
In Telerama, Benjamin Stora grabs hold of the Algerian boomerang. In Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulic tells the Venetians that they should be very scared of Chinese money. Bela Tarr tells the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Berliner Zeitung that his "Turin Horse", which ends in total darkness was not intended to depress. In die Welt, historian Dan Diner cannot agree with Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands": National Socialism was not like Communism - because of Auschwitz.
In Perfil author Martin Kohn explains why Argentina would be less
Argentinian if it won back the Falklands. In Il sole 24 ore, Armando
Massarenti describes the Italians as a pack of illiterates sitting atop a
treasure trove. Polityka introduces the Polish bestseller of the season:
Danuta Walesa's autobiography. L'Express looks into the state of
Japanese literature one year after Fukushima.
In Merkur, Stephan Wackwitz muses on poetry and absurdity in Tiflis. Outlook India happens on the 1980s Indian answer to "The Artist". Bloomberg Businessweek climbs into the cuckoo's nest with the German Samwar brothers. Salon.eu.sk learns how to line the pockets of a Slovenian politician. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Navid Kermani reports back impressed from the Karachi Literature Festival. 
In La Vie des idees, historian Anastassios Anastassiadis explains why we should go easy on Greece. Author Aleksandar Hemon describes in Guernica how ethnic identity is indoctrinated in the classroom in Bosnia and Herzogovina. In Eurozine, Klaus-Michael Bogdal examines how Europe invented the Gypsies. Elet es Irodalon praises the hygiene obsession of German journalists. And Polityka pinpoints Polish schizophrenia.
The New Republic sees a war being waged in the USA against women's rights. For Rue89, people who put naked women on the front page of a newspaper should not be surprised if they go to jail. In Elet es Irodalom, historian Mirta Nunez Daaz-Balart explains why the wounds of the Franco regime never healed. In Eurozine, Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev see little in common between the protests in Russia and those in the Arab world.
In Letras Libras Enrique Krauze and Javier Sicilia fight over anarchy levels. In Elet es Irodalom Balint Kadar wants Budapest to jump on the Berlin bandwagon. In Le Monde Imre Kertesz has given up practically all hope for a democratic Hungary. Polityka ponders poetic inspiration and Wislawa Szymborska's "I don't know". In Espressso, Umberto Eco gets eschatological.
Poland's youth have taken to the streets to protest against Acta and Donald Tusk has listened, Polityka explains. Himal and the Economist report on the repression of homosexuality in the Muslim world. Outlook India doesn't understand why there will be no "Dragon Tattoo" film in India. And in Eurozine, Slavenka Drakulic looks at how close the Serbs are to eating grass.
In the French Huffington Post, philosopher Catherine Clement explains why the griot Youssou N'Dour had next to no chance of becoming Senegal's president. Peter Sloterdijk (in Le Monde) and Umberto Eco (in Espresso) share their thoughts about forgetting. Al Ahram examines the post-electoral depression of Egypt's young revolutionaries. And in Eurozine, Kenan Malik defends freedom of opinion against those who want the world to go to sleep.
Il Sole Ore weeps at the death of a laughing Vincenzo Consolo. In Babelia, Javier Goma Lanzon cries: Praise me, please! Osteuropa asks: Hungaria, quo vadis? The newborn French Huffington Post heralds the birth of the individual in the wake of the Arab Spring. Outlook India is infuriated by the cowardliness of Indian politicians in the face of religious fanatics.
In Nepszabadsag the dramatist György Spiro recognises 19th century France in Hungary today. Peter Nadas, though, in Lettre International and salon.eu.sk, is holding out hope for his country's modernisation. In Open Democracy, Boris Akunin and Alexei Navalny wish Russia was as influential as America - or China. And in Lettras Libras, Peter Hamill compares Mexico with a mafia film by the Maquis de Sade.
Are books about to become a sort of author-translator wiki, asks Il Sole 24 Ore. Rue 89 reports on the "Tango Wars" in downtown Buenos Aires. Elet es Irodalom posits a future for political poetry. In Merkur, Mikhail Shishkin encounters Russian pain in Switzerland. Die Welt discovers the terror of the new inside the collapse of the old in Andrea Breth's staging of Isaak Babel's "Maria". And Poetry Foundation waits for refugees in Lampedusa. 
Technology Review sees Apple as the next Big Brother. In Eurozine, Per Wirten still fears the demons of the European project. Al Ahram Weekly features Youssef Rakha's sarcastic "The honourable citizen manifesto". Revista Piaui profiles Iraqi-Norwegian geologist Farouk Al-Kasim. Slate.fr comments on the free e-book versions of Celine's work. And Die Welt celebrates the return of Palais Schaumburg.
Andre Glucksman in Tagesspiegel looks at the impact of the Putinist plague on Russia and Europe. In Letras Libras Martin Caparros celebrates the Kindle as book. György Dalos has little hope that Hungary's intellectuals can help get their country out of the doldrums. Le Monde finds Cioran with his head up the skirt of a young German woman. The NYT celebrates the spread of N'Ko, the West African text messaging alphabet.
MicroMega cheers recent landmark Mafia convictions in Milan. Volltext champions Hermann Broch. Elet es Irodalom calls the Orban government’s attack on cultural heritage "Talibanisation". Magyar Narancs is ambiguous about new negotiations with the IMF. Telerama recommends the icon of anti-colonialism Frantz Fanon. Salon.eu.sk quips about the dubious election results in Russia, and voices in the German press mark the passing of Christa Wolf. And in the Anglophone press Wired profiles Jeff Bezos, while the Columbia Journalism Review polemicises the future of internet journalism.