Berliner Zeitung, 26.05.2005

Manfred Schwarz has visited an exhibition in the Belgian city of Tervuren on Belgium's colonial past in Congo. Around ten million Congolese lost their lives in the early years of Belgian rule, which started in 1885 with the establishment of the "Free State of Congo", and ended in 1960. "In Belgium, which suffered for centuries under enemy armies, conquests and plundering, it is hard to accept the role of the perpetrator. The history of Belgian colonial relationships with the Congo is ultimately one of guilt and crime. The exhibition in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, so to speak an act of state, is an explosive undertaking." Yet Schwarz is not satisfied with the result. "The exhibition... is no more than a faint-hearted beginning, homoeopathy instead of drastic cure. The officious Belgian writing of history attempts to counter the accusations of genocide and unrestrained exploitation with nuances. And ultimately the exhibition does the same. It tells a lot about the commerce and administration, the missionary schools and work done in the homes. But little is said about the dark side of colonialism."


Die Welt, 26.05.2005

A conference on the "Culture of Memory" in Spain and Germany, featuring a star cast including Nobel Prize winning authors Günter Grass and Imre Kertész, begins today in Madrid. British historian Paul Preston talks about the Franco dictatorship, which he describes as a "Spanish Holocaust", in an interview with Nikolaus Nowak. "You can always argue about historical comparisons. But under Franco there was a systematic extermination of certain social groups which has not received worldwide attention, firstly because of the horrors of the Second World War, and secondly because Franco not only got rid of his victims physically, he also systematically expunged all memory of them. But whereas the Nazi murders were racially motivated, the Franco murders of Republicans defeated in the Civil War were of a political nature. And proportionally, more political opponents were killed under Franco than under Hitler."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26.05.2005

The writer Richard Wagner summarises the recent history of Catholicism in Eastern Europe and demands its reform. "In communist isolation, the Church missed out on some of the impulses of European modernity in the last decades. Even today, there are several cases in which the mentality and the societal notions of the interwar period of the 20th century come to light." The difference between Poland and its neighbours, for instance, can be seen in "a political militant Catholicism which is responsible for the most repressive abortion laws in Europe, among others. One must recall that religious freedom and individual freedom do not automatically mean the same thing. The difference was erased by communist repression. The myth that has been ascribed to the Church through its discursive presence in communist society, proves to be hardly helpful in the post-communist era, given the failure to modernise the institution."


Die Tageszeitung, 26.05.2005

The director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Lars Henrik Gass, criticises the current film subsidy practices in Germany. There are three kinds of film sponsor left: the Europe sponsor, the sponsor of "beacons" and the managerial sponsor – and all, in Gass' view, damage the quality of the product. Take for example European sponsorship: "There are subsidised films and projects that look like the regulations according to which they were selected. Huge amounts of time and discussion are invested in the drafting of contracts. Probably 20-30 percent of project support goes into their administration, which actually should not be subsidised at all. The provincialism evident in this understanding of Europe, the disappearance of individualism, is also a result of an anti-Americanism that nobody admits to. This is making Europe a cultural bulwark, one that defines itself inwardly. Is the Europe that we wanted truly so one-dimensional?"