Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06.09.2005

Patrick Bahners writes on Sunday's televised duel between current chancellor Gerhard Schröder (SPD) and challenger Angela Merkel (CDU): "Schröder had a delicate role problem: how to contradict and argue with a woman? He solved it by coming across like a teacher. The schoolgirl has a right to be rebuked. The very best moments in this comedy of pedagogical eros were the silent ones. Schröder kept a poker face while listening to Merkel, and this only gave more effect to the times when he did pull a face – when he awoke from his fossilisation as if it would have taken an inhuman effort to maintain his stoic dignity at all costs."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 06.09.2005

In a series of interviews beginning today on what is at stake in the upcoming German federal elections slated for September 18, sociologist Sighard Neckel talks about the social questions, or more specifically whether "CDU chancellor candidate Angela Merkel's projected labour market and social policies could possibly be a late revenge by, or against, former East German leader Erich Honecker." Neckel writes, "It is not surprising that the campaign creates the impression that the crisis in Germany could be solved by the ballot. Politicians need this illusion to gain from the electorate the free hand they have forfeited many times. The parties then tout solutions like 'social justice', a 'right of way for jobs' or 'more growth' all the more emphatically, to signal differences they themselves have eroded.... For that reason more modest alternatives are now at stake, perhaps just those about deciding on alternatives with political means at all."
See our feature article "Sighing, sweating, screeching", an overview of the major protagonists in the upcoming German federal elections.


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 06.09.2005

Gottfried Knapp considers the "depth of the colour grey" in the work of Gerhard Richter. "The mixed tone grey can change in any direction on the colour wheel, as Richter shows with his many different grey-shaded pictures; when all colours are mixed, the result is a muted grey. The entire colour spectrum of a pulsing painting can be found in a monochromatic grey picture, all painting styles of the past and the present unite in this mixed tone. In the colour spectrum, grey stands for condensation and for a purity that can contain everything and doesn't have to mean anything."


Die Welt, 06.09.2005

Author Thea Dorn is perplexed by her female colleagues, like Eva Menasse and Katja Kullmann, who are going to bat for the SPD. "For the first time, 90 percent of the writers, actors and musicians who are hanging out the windows of their ivory towers in the election campaign are women. Women whose greatest fear is that Angela Merkel will become chancellor.... I wonder whether it ever occurred to any of my women-worried female colleagues that the fact that they are now leading the debates in the political feuilletons could be one of the first results of Angela Merkel's candidacy for the chancellorship?"


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 06.09.2005

Nick Liebmann reports on European highs and American lows at the 31st jazz festival in Swiss Willisau, which lead him to conclude that "the most important impulses for innovation in this fascinating music seem to be coming almost exclusively from Europe". Lowest marks go to "The Three Tenors" who had to make do without their third, Michael Brecker, who was ill: "Dave Liebman and Joe Lovano played as though they were in a late puberty cutting session, as though their motto was 'faster, longer, higher'. Standards were tootled endlessly, cliches were exahausted, all that resulted was pure boredom." The only Americans to be spared decimation by Liebmann were clarinettist Don Byron and his trio and the hot young pianist Jason Moran. At the top of Liebmann's list were, perhaps not surprisingly, the Swiss. "The radically free improvising trio Koch-Schütz-Studer were accompanied by guest soloists Phil Minton (vocal acrobatics) and Joey Baron (drums). Bruno Amstad's One Man-Show with voice and electronics is getting ever more perfect. And the attempt of the Genevan electro-rock-trio Young Gods to put live music to the legendary Woodstock film was at least interesting."


Der Tagesspiegel, 06.09.2005

Caroline Fetscher reports on films featured as part of the "Zajedno" festival of Serbian and Montenegran culture. "One day a man appears in a publisher's office in Belgrade. He has manuscripts for sale, he grumbles, rare ones. Some of them are already bound. The publisher is suspicious. He's had enough of people coming in and offering him their half-baked tripe. Who's the author, he asks. The author? The man laughs. 'You are!' 'Me?'" Fetscher explains: "What happens now in the film Profesionalac is told by Serbian director Dusan Kovacevic in a tragicomic mix of action and slapstick, flashbacks and the present day. The man turns out to be an ex-secret service agent whose job under Milosevic included observing the 'problematic' publisher. He wants to settle scores, with the publisher and with himself. The books document taped discussions, reports and secret observations, and they give a more exact biography of the publisher than he could have written himself."