Die Welt 07.06.2007

Documenta, the mega contemporary art exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, starts in just over a week. Curators Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack talk with Uta Baier about what distinguishes their edition from its predecessors: "The message behind the last Documenta was that it had it's own idea about what was relevant. Now, however, we're in a situation where we can call ourselves lucky if other people think of us as relevant at all. For example, people in China and India, the new economic players. We can no longer say that we're integrating the non-Western world. Instead we have to make every effort just for people to take notice of us." About the artworks, the curators have this to say: "We're showing masks by Romuald Hazoume, an artist from Benin, alongside a textile by Cosima von Bonin, an abstraction in almost African colours, and one of Gerwald Rockenschaub's plexiglass works. That gives you an idea about the visual side, but what it all means will only become clear to us with time."


Berliner Zeitung 07.06.2007

Michaela Schlagenwerth joins the debate around a proposed mosque for Cologne. Answering Necla Kelek's recent contribution in the FAZ (more here), Schlagenwerth argues that Kelek contradicts herself by portraying mosques as a refuge for men, whereas in her book "Die fremde Braut" (the foreign bride) she had described them as the sole locations where foreign - or imported - brides may find solace away from their husbands. Schlagenwerth concludes: "Certainly, we have every need for competent, even uncomfortable critics. But they have to decide if they want to encourage or impede the arrival of Islam in Germany. What's beyond question is that the face of Islam in Germany is changing, and not only within the Islamic associations. Muslims are coming out of the back courtyards and becoming a visible, tangible part of German society. In places where mosques already exist the reports are similar: fears are being replaced by a feeling of neighbourliness. Schoolchildren, seniors and other groups visit them on tours, and in their brochures cities have taken to promoting themselves with a minaret on their skyline."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 07.06.2007

Barbara Villiger Heilig was in the audience for Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in Vienna's Burgtheater. Everything is "tastefully doled out," but: "Where is Shakespeare's play? Where is the island whose magical appearance bedevils, bewitches, amazes, delights and frightens? Where are the dramatic tensions, the interludes of action (murder and manslaughter are planned and at the last moment thwarted!), the play-within-a-play duplications, Shakespeare's sneakily arranged contrast baths of fiction and disenchanting alienation? Where are desire, greed, revenge, anger, these oversized emotions that only get to come out on stage? The Vienna experiment has locked them up in a concept."


Die Tageszeitung 07.06.2007

"I believe the war with Egypt was unavoidable," says Israeli historian Tom Segev in an interview about his book, "1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East." But it was inevitable "not for the diplomatic reasons that were always given; rather because Israeli society had been weakened for a year and a half before the Six-Day War. So when the crisis broke out, there was such fear that Israel did not have the strength not to start this war. If you consider the diplomatic sequences, it's clear: Here, a suggestion was made; there, one could have waited two months more; and here perhaps one could make deals. But that was impossible because the society was in panic; moreover it was a Holocaust panic, not at all manipulated but 100 percent real."