Die Welt, 22.02.2005

Hungarian author Imre Kertesz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, plans to switch his German editors. According to Manuel Brug, he will leave Suhrkamp publishing house, and take his autobiographical book "Dossier K" over to Rowohlt. After the "capital failure" of Christoph Hein's novel "In seiner frühen Kindheit ein Garten" (In his Early Childhood a Garden), and the "jejeune" work "Kirillow" by Andreas Meier, this is the third washout in a row, says Brug. "How I would love to write something positive about the developments at Suhrkamp. Especially as so many malicious words were spoken about its new director, Ursula Unseld-Berkewicz, when she took over after the death of her husband Siegfried Unseld. But unfortunately, things are just not looking up."


Die Tageszeitung, 22.02.2005

Martin Reichert announces that the murder of a German-Turkish woman in Berlin by her brothers, supposedly motivated by family honour, has at last provoked the outcry it deserves: "If people on the extreme right were to shoot a 23 year old Turkish-German girl on the street there would be waves of protest. When a 23 year old Turkish-German girl is killed on the street by her own brothers, practically nothing happens. No special reports, no torchlight parades. Right-minded citizens have lost their reflexes, because the typical picture of aggressor and victim has changed."

Also in the taz, Brigitte Werneburg talks to Christiane Fetscher about the work of the Friedrich Christian Flick Stiftung, a foundation supporting cultural youth work to combat the influence of the far right in the former East Germany. The main aim of the foundation is to make the basic living conditions more appealing to prevent the young from leaving. "If the youth scene were more varied culturally, there would not be such a pressure to conform ... Kids with talent and confidence leave, either to West Germany or to Berlin. And those that stay behind feel like losers.� In the face of diminishing state funds, the foundation has to try to respond to the needs of these youngsters. But in Saxony-Anhalt for example there are far right recruiting officers in pin-stripe suits who turn up and say, 'Hey, I look chic, I make a good impression, I go from door to door and can actually help people with things like unemployment and housing allowances.' This is highly dangerous. We look old in comparison."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 22.02.2005

Michael Tetzlaff writes on the suicide of American journalist, writer and social critic Hunter Stockton Thompson, inventor of "Gonzo journalism". Thompson explained the origins of his original mixture of facts and a subjective viewpoint in an interview with Playboy magazine: "I had fried my brains on toast, I couldn't work. So I began ripping pages from my notebook, numbering them and sending them off to my editor. I was sure that it was the last article I would write for anyone." Tetzlaff comments: "Thompson's notebooks appeared with the title "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" - and it was far from being his last article."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22.02.2005

What's going on with the opera in Berlin?" asks Peter Hagmann after a visit to Monteverdi's "Ulysses" and Janacek's "House of the Dead". He answers: nothing at all. "The budgetary and structural crises in Berlin are painfully evident, but very far from being solved. And whether the new foundation set up to bring all three opera houses under the direction of Michael Schindhelm will be able to get things moving is anybody's guess. The situation is all the more regrettable because it is wasting a great deal of time and energy - and effecting the individual performances. In the two largest houses, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden and the Deutsche Oper in Charlottenburg, the overriding feeling among the artists is one of exhaustion and resignation."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22.02.2005

Michael Carlo Klepsch reports on new documents that have appeared on a dramatic story from World War II. Peter Suhrkamp, after whom Germany's most renowned publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag is named, was arrested after the failed conspiracy to murder Hitler on the 20th of July, 1944. Suhrkamp was charged with treason and imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin. Suhrkamp publishers was known as a bastion of intellectual resistance to Hitler, and had the highest number of "undesirable authors" during the Nazi era. After the failed assassination attempt, Goebbels called the firm the "publishing house of the 20th of July". But mysteriously, after months of torture and while awaiting execution, Peter Suhrkamp was released in early 1945 and spent the rest of the war in hospital. Newly discovered documents written by Suhrkamp reveal that his release was largely due to the sculptor Arno Breker, who worked closely with Hitler and Albert Speer, the architect responsible for much of Berlin's national socialist landscape. Suhrkamp writes: "I owe my life to Arno Breker. I was not executed because Breker went to the highest levels of the party, to Himmler and Kaltenbrunner themselves, and never tired of criticising each phase of the case against me."

Konrad Schuller examines a historical conundrum. Why, so long after turning their backs on their communist past, are Poles suddenly storming into the "Institute of National Remembrance" to find out whether they were being informed on before 1989? On one hand, this results from the Internet publishing of the "Wildstein List" of former informers (albeit only those "who were asked"). On the other hand, Schuller sees in this new interest a cry of despair directed at the ruling elite. "The arrangements we reached after the end of the Cold War are exhausted, it is time for a second wave of democracy. This bug has travelled from Serbia via Georgia and into the Ukraine. Everywhere the people wanted rid of the oligarchic sleaze of functionaries grown fat once again. Now it's Poland's turn to announce a second wave."