Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10.07.2010

Fifteen years after the massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serbian militias in Srebrenica the Germanist Jürgen Brokoff asks whether, in line with recent critical consensus, it really is possible to separate poetry and politics in the work of Peter Handke. Absolutely not, Brokoff believes, for a string of pertinent reasons: "To criticise Handke on the basis of his so-called naïve political opinions is whitewashing. The author's real fall from grace is not in the political but in the literary field. His highly strategic literary deployment of the language of Serbian nationalism, his anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian insinuations on the symbolic level and his mockery of the Muslim victims of the Bosnian war make this a clear case."


Frankfurter Rundschau 10.07.2010

Arno Widmann talked to the publisher Klaus Wagenbach on the eve of his 80th birthday and was let in on the secret of his company's success: "The so-called herzklausel or clause of the heart. Our publishing programme is run on consensus. All our editors have to agree on every book. But we also have the heart clause. If one of the editors is determined that a particular book should be published and the others don't agree, he or she will be asked if his heart is set on it. If the answer is yes, we go with it. If the book then flops, the editor in question will not get off lightly."


Die Welt 11.07.2010

The pianist Evgeny Kissin wrote a letter to the BBC to complain about what he considered to be their partisan reporting on Israel. In an interview with Manuel Brug, he explains his reasoning. "The 20th century had its fair share of artists who supported evil regimes out of political naivete – Ezra Pound for example or Knut Hamsun in WWII, or the countless western artists who spoke out in favour of the Soviet Union. But one man stands out for me and that is Mstislav Rostropovich. He rallied to the side of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the moment the Soviets started tightening the screws."

A 15-year-old Kissin plays Chopin's Mazurka in C-minor




Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.07.2010

Kerstin Holm reports on the closely watched Moscow trial in which the two curators of the "Forbidden Art" exhibition Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Yerofeyev were pronounced guilty as charged, but "only" received fines and not prison sentences. The accused plan to file for appeal and clear their names and the name of art. "The supposed leniency of the sentence is a clear message from the Russian state that the sphere of prohibition can be extended at any time. And for the first time in a while, forbidden art is now officially back in Russia." And Sonja Zekri in the Süddeutsche Zeitung comments: "The sentence is not drastic enough to provoke a storm of international solidarity, but it is a guilty verdict that makes it very clear that any further artistic attempt to challenge orthodoxy could well end behind bars."

Wolfgang Schrieber and Betting Ehrhardt talk to the composer Wolfgang Rihm about his new Nietzsche-inspired opera "Dionysos" which is set to open this year's Salzburg Festival. Will the audience still understand the story against such a complicated background? Rihm, lightly irked, replies: "You don't have to explain anything. I don't want to explain anything. As soon as you start explaining things, it  becomes so headmasterly, with all that pointing and knowing better. I make art, I don't know any better (...) And this not-knowing is what I do best. This not-knowing is not a cross I have to bear, this ability not to know is a gift."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 15.07.2010

The philosophy professor Otfried Höffe explains that will not be speaking at World Philosophy Day in Tehran, because President Ahmadinejad has selected a number of highly problematic figures for the executive board, among them a certain philosophy professor Haddad Adel: "Adel is not just an academic philosopher, he is so intimately involved in the machinations of the regime that it is impossible to blend out the politics that have been at work since Ahmedinejad took office. Only weeks ago Adel threatened dissidents with a repeat of 'Kahrisak' – which basically means locking up scores of people in a freight container, systematically raping youths and grown men and burning the corpses of torture victims."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 15.07.2010

Alex Rühle visited Duisburg-Marxloh, an area of the Ruhr that was once in the running for Germany's top ghetto. But thanks to an astonishingly successful intercultural project (based in the Medienbunker) started by a group of young German-Turks calling themselves "city therapists", this is all safely in the past. "Istanbul's board of trade recently launched a campaign under the slogan 'Duisburg: the gateway to the Western European market'. In a restaurant on the Weseler Straße sit forty representatives of the Dutch city archive who have travelled from Arnheim to see for themselves how this city has pulled itself out of the gutter... Inside, one of the Arnheimers slurps gleefully from his glass of ayran and declares: 'If you can pull off the miracle of Marxloh, we can do the same for Arnheim."


Frankfurter Rundschau 16.07.2010

The funeral in Berlin of Fritz Teufel, co-founder of the famous Berlin Kommune 1 who described himself as a spass guerilla or fun-guerilla, was a predominantly silver-haired affair, Arno Widmann reports. "There were representatives from all factions of the armed struggle, some in wheel chairs or pushing zimmer frames. (...) A few months ago, a friend told me that she had recently chaperoned Fritz Teufel. Despite being critically ill and very shaky, he was constantly cracking jokes. As she was leaving, though, he looked her directly in the eye, summoned all his strength and said: 'I don't know you very well. If you are delicate, the flu will probably do the job, but if you really want to feel something, try Parkinson's."