Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.11.2006

Reading the last book by the poisoned ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, his compatriot, the writer Viktor Erofeyev, is reminded of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (read about Litvinenko's life and death). "The comparison of Solzhenitsyn with a poisoned agent of the secret police is only justified in so far as word equals deed in Russia today. If someone said something, he did something, and if he did something he should stand up for his act." He considers Litvinenko's death a political murder. "In the Russia today, a dissident is like a passenger who sticks his head out the window of a street car going at full speed. That's all you need to do, to get yourself killed."


Die Tageszeitung, 28.11.2006

Stefan Grissemann is captivated by Peter Sellars' homage to Mozart, "New Crowned Hope," in Vienna – complete with a gamelan musical, a dancing MAU company, an orchestra of refugees and Austrian farmers of organic tomatoes. "It is only indirectly related to Mozart. In order to do justice to the master in 2006, according to Sellars' hypothesis, one must work in the spirit of the artist and not merely reproduce his compositions. The music of the Viennese prodigy himself is hard to find during the festival; instead, the most current variations on Mozartian themes, his love of experimentation and his outgoing nature."


Die Welt, 28.11.2006

American writer Richard Powers tells Marco Stahlhut how our brains are affected by virtual reality. In pure neuro-technical terms, it clearly makes no difference whether the brain is used in a real situation or in a computer game, suggests Powers. But he says, "There are some interesting new investigations showing that kids who have grown up using computer-game control mechanisms have a cerebral cortex in which large areas are dedicated to muscular control of the thumbs. And their thumbs themselves become much more skilful for fine motor control. It's gone so far, that in operations for which a person in my generation would use the index finger – either to point to an object or push it – someone from the younger generation uses the thumb.�

Diedrich Diederichsen honours the 30-year anniversary of the Sex Pistols' first single, "Anarchy in the UK": "Punk was the antithesis of the culture of the generation ten years older, but it still had a few body parts free to deliver some enduring injuries to the even older establishment. Punk fought a war on two fronts and brought its most complex strategic manoeuvres to bear in the name of primitivism and reduction, of all things. This soon diffused and trickled down into art and the general subcultural differentiation - or degenerated into urban folklore. But before that happened, there were a few brilliant years."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28.11.2006

An ill-advised Lorenzo Fioroni, director of Verdi's "Simon Boccanegra" at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, had his protagonists intone a beguiling lament while zapping through the TV and watching "Tom and Jerry," much to the loudly articulated fury of the audience, writes Gustav Seibt. "While the dirge surged, sometimes plunging to the very verge of inaudibility, up on stage cat and mouse chased each other about with rubber ball intensity. An ironic break, yes, but it turns out that these familiar, harmless and childish cartoon characters indeed have the violent wherewithal to utterly obliterate the music. The human senses are incapable of coordinating this sort of music with this level of optical onslaught in any reasonable way, if only to appreciate an aesthetically meaningful tension, for example stark contrast. If was as if a hammer-drill was being played in the orchestra. And the audience reacted accordingly."


Berliner Zeitung, 28.11.2006

Now that the town of Guben in Brandenburg has installed a permanent exhibition of the corpses of "the plastinator" Gunther von Hagens, Andreas Winkelmann, anatomist at Berlin's Charite Hospital describes the piety with which Thai dissection institutes treat dead bodies. "In Thailand even professionals never use the word 'corpse' but always refer to the 'Great Teachers'. Every now and then you see a student greeting one of their great teachers with the wai, the Thai bow. But the greatest difference to European dissection theatres is that the name of the deceased is displayed on every table, as is their age and cause of death. Most Thai doctors remember for the rest of their lives the name of the great teacher they had the privilege to cut up in their dissection class." In Guben by contrast, corpses are used to recreate entire film scenes."