Neue Zürcher Zeitung 12.12.2006

Salvadorian author Horacio Castellanos Moya writes on the death of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet: "There's no question that Pinochet was the worst dictator in Latin America. But his case is precedent-setting, a new chapter in the history of the fight against the impunity of the subcontinent's perpetrators. Other dictators were condemned in absentia, some banned, some murdered. But no other did so much to expose the 'morality' of military dictatorships. The case of Pinochet demonstrates how closely political crime is related to corruption on the swampy ground of immunity. The image of the 'strict' dictator with the 'tough hand,' the protector of order and respectability is an illusion which falls apart as soon as a democratic society starts looking for justice."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 12.12.2006

Swantje Karich takes a look at Internet sites that are sometimes prohibited, sometimes not, to show how the Iranian regime messes with its critics. They never know exactly where they stand. "A new programme can help to get around blocks in the Internet. And unlike the programmes that preceded it, JAP for instance, Psiphon does not attempt to hide users' traces, but rather counts on a maximum number of users in liberal countries installing it on their computers. Then surfers in areas restricted by the censor can log on to these locations and use them as a bridge, enabling them to move freely in the Net." The programme was developed by the Open Society Institute of the Soros Foundation and the University of Toronto.


Frankfurter Rundschau 12.12.2006

Ina Hartwig calls on German writers to tell us of the new rich. The flatlands of middle class society are passe: "The clear-cutting aesthetic of the postwar era has clearly had a marked effect on style. But a literature that seals itself off in penurious, melancholic old Berlin apartments has lost its appeal. The rich are standing at our door, and society is forming itself anew. It's time the younger authors took up the gauntlet. (But please, don't do it the way Helmut Krausser does in his most recent work 'Eros', where a rich industrial heir spends his whole life sobbing about a proletarian girl he fell for in a war bunker. That's nothing but sexual-historical-sentimental-shlock.) Money is not inherently threatening. And if it were, all the more reason to write about it."

Eugen d'Albert's opera "Tiefland" (The Lowland) hasn't been played on the German stage for thirty years. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich welcomes it back to Frankfurt like a lost child. The work premiered at the Frankfurt Opera on Sunday. "D'Albert has the rare, polyglot – you could even say poly-stylistic – ability to skilfully blend cantabile italiano with a neo-Wagnerian flair for leitmotif and counterpoint. 'Tiefland' excels with an impressive bouquet of splendidly inspired, dignified melodies, which simultaneously allow for a cogent symphonic treatment in a glowing range of orchestral hues. The attentive listener soon realises that this is not an Alpine opera, but one rooted in the Spanish Pyrenees."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 12.12.2006

Thomas Steinfeld describes the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. The joy and dignity of the event started well in advance of the celebration, the moment he donned his tailcoat. "The suit is draped about your neck with the shirt-front fastened to a strap. The trousers are firmly attached to the shirt and shirt-front, the jacket is open and leaves you plenty of room. Even the banded collar and loosely-knotted white bow tie are less constricting than a modern collar and tie. The tailcoat is surprisingly comfortable, and gives form to every body. It is firm, upstanding and elegant – even on flabby, rolly-polly men. Your body can't slip out of this all-embracing attire, it is gently held together and given countenance by the shirt-front. Differences of age, lifestyle and social circumstance disappear when you appear in such a costume. The tailcoat is consequently social dress in the best sense of the term. Only Orhan Pamuk manages to look like a wandering question mark in his."


Die Welt 12.12.2006

Peter Dittmar finds that the exhibition currently showing in Bonn's Haus der Geschichte on East and West German perceptions of each other goes too easy on the former. "The exhibition is cutting corners when it, for instance, equates the West German Schrebergarten with the East German dacha under the rubric of petit bourgeois community. The dacha was not only a bit of nature or a free-time amusement. It was a reduit made necessary by the poor living conditions and travel restrictions. And when Reiner Kunze's 'The Wonderful Years,' which could only be printed in the West, sits on the shelf between books by East German authors like Hermann Kant and Christa Wolf, which appeared in the West as reprints, then it becomes clear that community is being asserted where in fact ideological repression ruled."