Telerama  15.03.2012 (France)

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Algerian war of independence the French media is full of stories on the subject. In an interview French historian Benjamin Stora explains that May 1968 helped prevent open political debate about this chapter in French history.  "By calling the state into question, this anarchist movement blanketed all the big questions which emerged from the Algerian war and swept them under the carpet. Not until the 1980s did the memories associated with the war resurface, with the growing strength of immigrant movements, racism and the Front National. The real turning point came in 1992 with the outbreak of civil war in Algeria." This war traumatised the Algerians and also triggered memories in France of the war of independence, Stora says. "It was as if this page of history had been turned, as if Algeria had disappeared from the French imagination, and then it returned like a boomerang, recharged by a new parameter: political Islam."


Der Tagesspiegel 19.03.2012 (Germany)

In an interview with Peter Laudenbach, sociologist and cultural analyst Dirk Backer describes the sort of theatre that grapples with the powerful and ruling classes as naive, not subversive. He would be more interested in questions such as "What do certain people do with the resources of power? When can you have too much of something, and when can you have too little of something – for example in relations between economy and state. The sort of political theatre that you describe is entertainment for people who want to feel reassured in the theatre about doing nothing in their professional lives against circumstances which are actually extremely comfortable for them."


Die Welt 17.03.2012 (Germany)

The historian Dan Diner raises an objection to Timothy Snyder's book "Bloodlands" which has just won the Leipzig Book Prize, and which constructs a spatio-temporal unit out of the Nazi and Stalinist perpetrated murders in Eastern Europe. The gaping hole in the book is Auschwitz, Diner says. "Auschwitz suggests another historical topography of violence that competes with Snyder's 'bloodlands' in pointing to the specific nature of collective and gratuitous death by extermination. [...] That the extermination spread westwards - particularly into those countries that were otherwise relatively untouched by the war and the violence of indiscriminate warfare - reveals a specific Nazi exterminatory intent that was absolute: all Jews should be made to die and this applies everywhere."


Frankfurter Rundschau / Berliner Zeitung 15.03.2012 (Germany)

In interview with Ralf Schenk, Hungarian director Bela Tarr explains that the last thing he wanted to do with his end-of-the-world film the "Turin Horse" was depress anyone. He wanted to give people strength: "The film tells an anti-creation story. We know how this terrible world came about, but we don't know how it will end. Day after day we are caught in our routines, doing the same thing over and over again. But everyday we have less energy and eventually life disappears from us. This is something that we wanted to show clearly in our film: that day after day we lose something crucial to our lives. A coachman loses his horse, loses his work, his power to survive, his universe. We cannot deny the fact that the end exists, we must reckon with it and accept it."


Eurozine  15.03.2012 (Austria in English)

Europeans fear immigrants but not foreign money – Chinese for instance – writes Slavenka Drakulic, just back from a trip through Italy, where she saw that immigrants enrich a country's culture. However, this money is hollowing out a cultural city like Venice, where the Chinese are buying up the last normal shops in order to sell fake made-in-China Murano glass. "And while Europeans ponder future changes and whether to put up a wall around Europe (if only they knew what its boundaries were), while they contemplate measures that will contain immigrants at that same imaginary border and Europe's culture and the values that need to be preserved (...) the Chinese are freely investing, buying palaces in Venice in order to turn them into hotels, thus making even more money out of Europe's cultural treasures."


Lettre International  20.03.2012 (Germany)

European politicians and the media have the wrong idea about Greek culture and the Greek attitude to the state, writes Heinz A. Richter. During the 400 years of Ottoman rule the country developed very differently from most others in Europe. This had the effect "that the Greeks for the most part experienced the state as exploiter. While in Western Europe a self-confident middle class was forming that regarded the state as part of its own body politic, as its own civic republic, for the Greeks the state was the equivalent of foreign rule - it was important to hate it defend oneself again it. Tax evasion and sequestering state property were classic defense reactions. This attitude towards the state became a tradition which remains in place today." (Excerpt here)


More stories from the Anglophone magazines:

At the Schiparelli and Prada exhibition at the Met, the New Yorker dwells on the charms of the "jolie laide". There is nothing that cannot be bought, Michael J. Sandel discovers in the Atlantic - from prison cell upgrades to the right to kill endangered animals. There too, philosopher Patrick Stokes visits the dead on Facebook. Jonathan Steel travels to Syria for the London Review of Books. Paul Berman reviews a book on liberal Muslim thinkers for the New Republic. The TLS reads a history of rhetoric.