Monday 5 September, 2005

Die Welt, 05.09.2005

Despite the charges being brought against writer Orhan Pamuk, the crime fiction writer and lawyer Esmahan Aykol, who lives in Berlin, is not overly negative about the situation in Turkey. Above all, the anti-intellectual mood that had mobs marauding into the nineties is over now, Aykol believes. "Today the Turkish premier invites intellectuals who once had to fight their cases in court to debate the Kurdish question with him. The situation of Orhan Pamuk in 2005 is incomparable with that of Aziz Nesin and Yasar Kemal in the nineties. Pamuk's defence of the Kurdish and the Armenian question has been widely reported in the Turkish media. As a result, innumerable political taboos have been publicly broken. The recent charges brought against Pamuk are the work of forces keen to reverse the democractic process. But their once totalitarian power has receded. They are in the defensive."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 05.09.2005

"This was one of the least natural natural catastrophes in the history of America", says urban theorist Mike Davis in an interview on the flooding of New Orleans. The late reaction of the relief workers was no coincidence. "It is like a Russian doll. In the first place stands the neglect of the states by the federal government. Bush was voted in by the suburbs and edge cities; the big cities have become a taboo in US politics. No money has been invested in their social and physical infrastructure for a generation. Secondly, New Orleans has the highest percentage black population of all major American cities – and it's one of the poorest. Thirdly, the Bush administration is refusing to pay for desperately needed public facilities while spending billions on so-called homeland protection."


Der Tagesspiegel, 05.09.2005

Director Michael Thalheimer has been a rising star on the German theatre scene since his directing debut in 1997. His first production at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, one of Germany's leading theatres, was in 2001. This season he has joined the theatre's team of artistic directors. He talks with Peter Laudenbach und Rüdiger Schaper about his staging of Goethe's "Faust", and the Berlin theatre landscape: "What I don't like is the aggressiveness in the city, and the testiness between theatres. For me that's provincial. I don't get any better by badmouthing other people. I wish Armin Petras all the success in the world when he takes over the Maxim Gorki Theater in a year's time. I think a successful Gorki Theatre will also bring more people to the Deutches Theater, the Berliner Ensemble, the Volksbühne and the Schaubühne. I don't like these little games where people put themselves up on a pedestal and think: 'I'll show them all'." See our feature "Fighting in the sandbox" for more on theatre in Berlin.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 05.09.2005

Silke Hohmann watched Friday's premiere of the Pet Shop Boys' live soundtrack to Sergej Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" in Frankfurt's Alte Oper. The pop duo has stylised the film about the 1905 unrest in St. Petersburg into a "romantic revolution", writes Hohmann. "The Battleship Potemkin aims its guns on the opera house of Odessa and Neil Tennant sings 'Heaven is possible, after all.' It's one of the most artistically interesting decisions of the Pet Shop Boys' new soundtrack, accompanied by the Dresden Symphony Orchestra. After all, it's a scene full of drama and dynamism, pressure and counter-pressure, death and blackout ... Here of all places, not to have hectic music, or dramatic drum roll but utopian ballad is one of the really good moments of the soundtrack."


Saturday 3 September, 2005

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 03.09.2005

Bora Cosic, one of Serbia's foremost contemporary authors, reports on his first visit to his homeland since emigrating to Germany in 1992: "As I travel through the beautiful but troubled Bosnia, I wonder what could have provoked the people who burned and levelled this country. What egged them on to make a wasteland of the place that inspired the paintings of Jovan Bijelic, and to tread it into the dust? In the brain of every evildoer, in the conscience of every monster ready to burn and destroy, there is always an impulse, a negative provocation, pushing them to do all these horrible things. Generally what does it is a twinkling flash of beauty or harmony that they absolutely have to ruin and raze to the ground."


Die Welt, 03.09.2005

In the wake of Michel Houellebecq's most recent novel "The Possibility of an Island", which came out last week to much hullabaloo in France and Germany, Matthias Horx asks where cloning gets its horrifying reputation: "In nature, clones are all over the place, and yet the universe doesn't fall apart (I know single-egg twins who play with their cloned existence in a refined way). Yet the clone also has something laughable about it. As renowned evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr once said, 'If a generation of cloned Einsteins were created, things would only end in chaos'. 100 Hitlers wouldn't have meant Nazi domination of the world, but a planetary farce. So what are we so afraid of?"

Hannes Stein recommends French philosopher Andre Glucksmann's book "Le discours de la haine", (the discourse of hatred) which has just appeared in a German translation: "Perhaps this is his most important book since "La force du vertige" (the force of vertigo). In any case it's the angriest. The leading representative of the "nouveau-philosophes' – the French leftist radicals who read Solzhenitsyn then said goodbye to totalitarian utopias – is saying something very simple: Hate exists. And the attempt to explain it away (for example by rationalising it, explaining it as a perhaps exaggerated but in the end justified reaction to a slight, and playing it down) come up against the blunt truth: hate exists."