Monday 4 June, 2007

Die Tageszeitung 04.06.2007

The trial begins today in Den Haag of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who stands charged of war crimes and crimes against humanity. "And some people are already warning about a 'judicial recolonisation' of Africa. What sort of Africanism is it that presumes to stand above the law?" asks Camaroonian writer Patrice Nganang. "At the end of a long list of folly and wilful African blindness he is standing before the court of justice. The trial of Charles Taylor before the special tribunal for Sierra Leone in Den Haag can be seen as an historical event. At last a former African president has been brought before a court in a process which enforces rule of law, where he will be obliged to answer publicly for his actions! Who would have thought such a thing possible?"

For her monthly reportage, Gabriele Goettle visits translator Dr. Na Ding who lives in Munich. Na Ding looks back to 1973, when as a 17-year-old, she was teaching German in a Chinese secondary school. "When I started working there, as the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close, things were not as bad as they had been but antagonism was still in the air: we, the teachers, were stinking intellectuals, and they were the revolutionary pupils. They simply wouldn't listen to us. The school director said to us younger teachers: 'If you can remain in the classrooms for the duration of the lessons, without running away, you can consider that a major victory.' At the time, I also taught German and my pupils asked me: 'Can you tell us why we are learning German? If we learned English, we could at least read the advertising text on cans of food. But German? We won't meet a single German as long as we live.'"


Frankfurter Rundschau 04.06.2007

In an interview with Harry Nutt, Chinese sociologist Wang Hui (more here) sees a certain convergence of Chinese and Western positions: "Particularly in recent times, numerous protests have been heard from rural areas. These give cause for hope that China can become a more open, transparent society. In any event, there are indications that people are following intellectual debates more attentively than before. By contrast, one gets the impression that the Western world is increasingly orienting itself along the lines of Asian authoritarianism, and thereby compromising the accomplishments of the old democracies. The fixation with security at the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm also seems to point in that direction."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 04.06.2007

Eastern German author Ingo Schulze (more) writes an obituary for his late colleague Wolfgang Hilbig, who died on Saturday in Berlin: "Horror and beauty are always present in Hilbig's writing. Hilbig was a toolmaker and stoker, born in Meuselwitz in 1941. His father fell at Stalingrad and his grandfather was illiterate. As a worker and writer he took the GDR at its word, and whether he wanted to or not, he led it into a reductio ad absurdum. Hilbig mucks around in the dregs of his soul and of our society. To be able to bear that at all, he has to use a language that has the German Romantics and (especially) William Faulkner as a point of reference. And no one can elude its magic, if they're not hard of hearing, that is."


Die Welt 04.06.2007

Eckhard Fuhr was relieved to witness at the Berlin "Perspective Europe" forum that Imre Kertesz, Wole Soyinka, Carlos Fuentes, Andrzej Stasiuk, Ilija Trojanow and Mario Adorf were unable to agree on European identity. "Debates on European identity will never bring conclusive results. But this does not make them redundant. They shed light on Europe's Europeanness. Europe has many voices. There is no other way to picture the unity of the continent than as a perpetual thronging humming and cacophony of voices. Someone always calls out loudly for silence, for everyone to pull themselves together, to gather together around the holy fundamental values, but there will always be someone who immediately pokes fun and deflates this European pathos with a good dose of irony."


Saturday 2 June, 2007

Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.2007

The newspaper prints the speech given by Nobel Prizewinner Imre Kertesz at the start of the congress "Perspective Europe." For Kertesz, Europe must accept the legacy of the 20th century and the experience of totalitarianism if it wants to survive the 21st. "We live with an omnipresent, demoralising totalitarian history that's enough to strip us of our every last hope. In times like these, knowledge is the one dignified salvation, the only thing left to cling to. Only in the light of this knowledge may we ask ourselves if we can use our suffering to create values. To put a point on it: only by using our experience can we ascribe a value to our own life rather than forgetting it like amnesiacs, or even tossing it away like suicides. Because the radical spirit that makes scandal, ignominy and shame the genotype of human knowledge is also a liberator. It exposes the plague of nihilism not so as to abandon the field to these powers, but because in so doing its own vital powers are enriched."


Die Welt 02.06.2007

Artist Anself Kiefer explains why he is only mildly happy with the glass dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, where his solo show "Monumenta 2007" opened on Saturday. "The dome here is like the firmament. That's all well and good, but art must be protected. Art needs an aura, a threshold. That's why I've built seven buildings - like the one in the French town of Barjac, for example. It always depresses me when I see my paintings stuck together with other objects by insensitive museum curators, or in private collections beside a potted palm."