Thorsten Brinkmann is a passionate collector of everything that is bulky, ageing, and somewhat musty. A book now offers the first overview of the Hamburg artist?s work....
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The very last feature in our NZZ climate change series. Author George Saunders describes the strange state of the climate in post-Gore America.
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Raul Hilberg, the father of Holocaust research, died on August 5th. The sobriety of tone and relentness precision with which he exposed the administrative machine behind what he termed "The Destruction of the European Jews" contributed to the book's failure to receive recognition for decades. His portrayal of facelessness spells out a chilling lesson for the future. By Gustav Seibt
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No other obituary of Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni makes it as clear how necessary they were - and how bitterly we will miss them - as The New York Times'. By Arno Widmann
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The American thinker Richard Rorty passed away on Friday at his home in California. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas tells what makes Rorty unique among intellectuals, and what binds Rorty, orchids, and justice on earth.
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After brilliant beginnings, bodybuilding pianist Tzimon Barto's career crashed as spectacularly as it started. Now the bizarre mixture of rancher, writer and keyboard collossus is back, with a fabulous new recording of Ravel. By Kai Luehrs-Kaiser
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The Iraq War enjoyed more public support among intellectuals than any other war since 1914. Today it can safely be said to have been a disaster. Gustav Seibt asks why so many thinking people took a such supportive stance and finds the answers in a misplaced attachment to historical analogies.
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Thomas Pynchon's latest novel "Against the Day" got panned by critics in the USA. Denis Scheck sees this as evidence of rampant anti-intellectualism. He maintains that the book is a masterpiece: a swan song to anarchism, an incisive look at post 9/11 America, and a hilarious romp through literary genres.
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Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" is the story of two cops as mirror-image doppelgangers. But it is a doppelganger itself, a remake of the Hong Kong film "Infernal Affairs." While the original is a masterwork of playfulness, the remake confounds police genre and psycho junk. By Ekkehard Knörer
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On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, George Bush has become the perfect scapegoat. When attacks and threats increase, he is to blame. But the rise of international terrorism is not Bush's doing. We are not seeing a new Vietnam, but a new Chicago, an ethnic-theological Mafia and gang war. To accept, or not to accept, the law of the human bomb? That is the question facing our fledgling century. By Andre Glucksmann
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Spike Lee's most recent film "Inside Man" is a thriller set in a post 9/11 New York. In an interview with the intrepid Katja Nicodemus, Lee talks about American cluelessness, his waning rage and the beloved dachshund of his youth, "Schnitzel".
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Steven Spielberg's film "Munich" deals with the 1972 Olympic hostage taking and its bloody aftermath. The film is a provocative blend of cliches and originality, wisdom and presumptuousness, as inextricably tangled as the Middle East itself. By Tobias Kniebe
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Prospect magazine's list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals speaks tellingly about the provincialism of today's global media, but says nothing about the ideas behind today's global world. By Arno Widmann
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American author Jonathan Franzen discusses his German literary influences, American playfulness and his "moral mission". An
interview with Bernadette Conrad
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With Google Print, Google aims to realise the age-old dream of making all knowledge available at any time to anyone. But the notion that a single machine, company or algorithm is able to organise all freely available knowledge in a position of overwhelming dominance is hard to reconcile with the principles of cultural diversity. By Rüdiger Wischenbart
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On Tuesday, Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov was reported to have been assassinated by the Russian secret service. Philosopher Andre Glucksmann says "Thank you, Messrs Chirac, Bush and Schröder", on behalf of Czar Putin.
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