Orhan Pamuk accused of defaming his Turkish homeland

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk is faced with a trial set for December 16, accused of defaming his Turkish homeland (see yesterday's "In Today's Feuilletons"). Writing in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Istanbul-based writer Günter Seufert sees an intrigue by anti-Europe forces in the Turkish state apparatus: "This kind of legal action reveals the deep political rifts in the Turkish state, in the bureaucracy, the military and the judiciary. Liberal currents in the judiciary are opposed to the old, staunchly Kemalist cadres. And in the military the pro-EU chief of staff Hilmi Öskök has to take into account the anti-European sentiment of the middle echelons. The various secret services are also split along political lines. Five in number, they have until now avoided being grouped under a central body."

In Die Welt, Boris Kalnoky reports on the lawsuit in the following terms: "The key question in the case against Pamuk is whether it is the brainchild of an overzealous conservative state prosecutor acting on his own to neutralise Turkey's foremost intellectual ambassador – or if politicians are pulling the strings behind the scene." A second unsigned commentary in the paper seeks to reassure us: "The prosecutor who filed charges against Pamuk for 'defamation of Turkey's national character' is simply a nationalist opponent of Turkey's EU bid, who's now pulled off an admirable media coup." See our feature "The Turkish trauma", an interview with Orhan Pamuk.


Die Welt, 02.08.2005

Historian Manfred Kittel – author of a book on the subject – contrasts how Japan and Germany have come to terms with the legacy of World War II. "Under no circumstances could one argue that Germany has perfectly 'processed its past' – but it has failed significantly less than Japan. This is largely due to the Nuremberg Trials, but also to the tens of thousands of court cases brought during the fifties and sixties." In Japan, by contrast "after the end of the US occupation in 1952, precisely zero point zero war crimes were brought to the courts. Despite this, or perhaps as a direct result, the war crimes of the Imperial Army were never an issue of the student protests in 1968, not even with the hard Left."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 02.09.2005

"Is Google good or evil?", S.B. asks on the media page. Until now, he writes, there was nothing to indicate that the company was abusing its power, even if it now operates as e-mail provider, multimedia archive, geographical information system, software advertisement and car-sharing agency, telephone company and marriage institute. "Good intentions and a lack of active evil-doing are not enough. As a media company, Google will have to comply with the legal and ethical codes of the media. Where Google contributes to the distribution of hard porn and racist slander, it cannot wash its hands simply by saying it does not produce the content itself. Where Google earns money from advertising, it must take responsibility for the contents. Where Google News performs what more or less constitutes editorial intervention, it cannot shake off journalistic responsibility by arguing that algorithms rather than people do the work."


Die Tageszeitung, 02.09.2005

Tobias Rapp marvels at the "Cold War atomic jive and paranoia pop" on the "fantastic Atomic Platters box" with five CDs and one DVD. The box documents the atomic threat in the 50s and 60s with jingles and pop songs by a host of stars. "The experience of paranoia arising from the continual threat of a nuclear attack (from the outside) combined with the order of subversive communists (from within), was probably just as important a factor in the development of the counter-culture of the 60s as the Vietnam War, the pill and LSD. Let's wait and see what long-term cultural effects the War On Terror, Springsteen's 'The Rising', TV rainbow alert levels plus the threat of monster waves and storms-of-the-century will have."