Neue Zürcher Zeitung 17.11.2006

"A battle to dominate popular opinion is taking place on the television screen." Global television news broadcasters are increasingly being seen as a political tool, observes media expert Miriam Meckel on the start of the English-language service of Al Jazeera. The sector is flourishing. "In 2003, against the backdrop of the most recent Iraq War, two television stations, al-Arabiya in Dubai and al-Alam in Iran, started up to make Arab countries more visible worldwide. In a counter-offensive, the USA started broadcasting al-Hurra in 2004. The following year, the governments in Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay joined forces to start up the Latin American Telesur. And in the same year, Russia Today created a 24-hour English-language programme from Moscow. Meanwhile in France, preparations are under way for a French-English news broadcaster, France 24."

A half-year after it opened its doors, Sergiusz Michalski has visited Pekka Vapaavuori's Eesti Kunstimuuseum in Tallinn, and was especially taken with the epoch from 1900 to 1960. "Despite being on the outskirts of political and artistic life, this small country managed in this time to reach a very high artistic level in several stylistic areas, for example expressive symbolism, the new objectivity (Felix Randel) and abstraction (Arnold Akberg). In addition, many figurative paintings of the 30s are on a par with the best in Europe. The threat of the late 30s and the war are reproduced in expressive cafe and interior scenes, in which a leaden feeling of fear seems to resonate throughout the room." See our feature on the KUMU, "Tallinn's art rumour."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.11.2006

Christiane Kohl is not all that enthused by the new train station in Dresden, whose renovation is almost complete. "'We have wed old and new,' says Norman Foster of his design. But so far, the bombastic train station has not really been connected with the city centre. The main entrance is hardly used by the people of Dresden. Directly in front of the arched portal, the train overpass crosses a four-lane thoroughfare – pedestrians don't really belong here. But maybe that's a good thing, because then they can hardly notice how botched the facade of the main portal is. Instead of sandstone slabs, the handworkers pasted yellow-beige plaster to the walls, as a sandstone imitation." That has tradition in Dresden according to Kohl, looking at the New Market and the copied Frauenkirche, Hotel de Saxe ("from the outside, an allegedly cute baroque building, inside a cookie-cutter Steigerberger"), Coselpalais and Residenzschloss.


Frankfurter Rundschau 17.11.2006

Philosophy professor and former Minister of State for Culture Julian Nida-Rümelin is concerned that the social sciences are going to regress 600 years as a result of the Bologna process and the initiative for excellence. "The social sciences are being re-granted the status of the artes liberales which they had in the medieval and early modern university: more propaedeutic and educational, more out front than at the centre of the universitas. At any rate, the state of American humanities is worrying, marginalised and highly ideologised with questionable standards of academic seriousness. It doesn't have to be that way, but it's more likely now."


Die Tageszeitung 17.11.2006

Martin Zeyn vaunts the oeuvre of Charles M. Schulz which is currently being compended in a complete German edition. "There have been brutal children for as long as there have been comics: in the 'Yellow Kid,' in 'Max and Moritz' or its American version 'Katzenjammer Kids.' Brutal, mean hooligans are to be found everywhere. But Charles M. Schulz's 'Peanuts' is fundamentally different... The physical violence in this strip is comparatively harmless: in all the 49 years that the comic appeared, from 1950 on, nobody got seriously hurt. But the abysmal sadism with which the children torture and humiliate each other, their psychological sophistication and perfidiousness, is shocking. Violet goes to Charlie and invites him to a party. When he says yes, a little perplexed because he never expected so much affection, she replies, 'On the other hand, maybe not.'"