Monday 9 May, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 09.05.2005

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which will be inaugurated in Berlin tomorrow, will never be the sublime monument it was destined to be, writes Gerhard Matzig. Instead, it will be the centrepiece in a war of signs, and the battle has already begun. "The swastika is as big as a man's hand. It was evidently scribbled hastily in blue chalk about six feet up on the eastern side of one of the taller square columns that make up the monument. If you start from the longer, south-west corner of the trapezoid-shaped area between Ebert Strasse and Hannah-Arendt Strasse, the concrete slab is in the 19th row to the east, and the 22nd row to the north."

"A grandiose evening!" Reinhard J. Brembeck is ecstatic about Jossi Wiehler's staging of the opera "Doktor Faust" by musical visionary Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) at the Staatsoper in Stuttgart. "The music tells a story, and about one thing only: the character Faust. Not Goethe's Faust, but the Faust of a puppet theatre. Busoni has taken over the character in his own, somewhat pompous sounding German libretto, and Gerd Grochowski is perfect for the piece, both for his voice and his talents as a performer. Director Jossi Wieler and dramatic advisor Sergio Marabito have staged the play in today's world. Faust is a disaster in artistic terms, an ageing good-time-boy, living in his run-down studio."


Der Tagesspiegel, 09.05.2005

Today is the Friedrich Schiller bicentennial. Christina Tilman asks what the poet and dramatist would have said about Heinrich Breloer's film "Speer and Hitler: The Devil's Architect"? Breloer is one of Germany's foremost documentary filmmakers. His three-part film made for TV about Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect and later armaments minister, will be shown tonight, Wednesday and Thursday. Tilman ties together the two hottest topics of the day. "How do you deal with negative heroes? Hitler as a person, Goebbels as an aesthete, Speer as a loving father – is this possible? And what does it achieve? Schiller led the way with his characters: Fiesco is a devious schemer and conspirator, a man who allowed himself to be corrupted by power; Posa, the idealist, is prepared to sacrifice a friendship, a world for his ideals; Wallenstein is a renegade commander. Or take the despot Phillipp II, weak and weeping in 'Don Carlos'.
See our feature article "Say it loud - it's Schiller and it's proud", the inaugural speech given by George Steiner at the big Schiller exhibition in Marbach.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 09.05.2005

Friedrich Schiller is "a thousand times more dead than Hitler", concludes literary academic Manfred Schneider from the memorial day competition of past months. Idealism is hugely unfashionable these days. "Hitler is known as the man who buried idealism, who mercilessly destroyed the good will and the belief of an entire culture. This is why history lovers are so obsessed by him. He brought us to our senses, and this rationality now looks out at us through the eyes of company directory and funds managers. Unfortunately it is our take on the world that give us these goose pimples. Schiller's treatise "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" (1795) expressed the idea that man is only truly himself when at play, that it the good old homo ludens who expresses so-called humanity, the artist in particular. Our rational interpretation however says that the global player is the future prototype of humankind."


Die Welt, 09.05.2005

Die Welt asked a number of actors and directors why plays by Friedrich Schiller are no longer performed in German theatres. They all gleefully passed on the blame. According to film and theatre actor Ulrich Mühe, "Actors would be quite happy to play Schiller. But no directors are interested." Director Peter Stein however complained, "For years I have been offering to direct 'Wallenstein' but no one wants to touch it. It's as popular as flat beer. The problem remains that there are no Schiller actors out there any more."


Saturday 7 May, 2005

Die Tageszeitung, 07.05.2005

The taz dedicates a large dossier to May 8, the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In an essay, American sociologist Norman Birnbaum foresees the end of the epoch of American hegemony: "Sixty years after 1945, will the world remain dominated by American culture, economic and political power? Those for whom the superiority of the USA is a question of faith may be fooled by appearances. With no consensus on national culture and an imperfect democracy, the divided America can no longer maintain the role it claims for itself in the world. Even if the Europeans, especially the West Europeans, do not claim their independence and their right to equality vis-à-vis the US, this does not automatically mean that the States will come out victorious in the end."


Die Welt, 07.05.2005

Everything is revolving around poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller. In the literature section, Uwe Wittstock talks with philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, author of biographies of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and most recently Schiller, about power and morals in the works of Schiller and his successors. "Intellectuals have a typical latent guilty conscience because they 'only' work with words. Often that leads them to secretly prostrate themselves before men of action. That explains, incidentally, why intellectuals were consistently open to seduction – and not only by the forces that had power over them, but also the powers they felt compelled to bring into play in the name of a better society. They believed that for moral reasons they had to be in league with the big actors of the liberation they assumed was just around the corner."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 07.05.2005

In post-Soviet Russia, Dostoyevsky is undergoing a surprising renaissance, reports Felix Philipp Ingold. He is being used by establishment thinkers as the "classic patriotic" to carve out a new state ideology. The writer is a source of ideas for every party. "Dostoyevsky's literary works, and particularly the great novels of the late period ('The Posessed', 'Raw Youth', 'The Brothers Karamazov') gave equal weight to a number of controversial voices – voices that only partly correspond to Dostoyevsky's own militant slavophile convictions. And his 'western-influenced' 'nihilistic' 'socialistic', 'materialistic' 'aesthetic' opponents have just as much a say."