Monday 12 September, 2005

Berliner Zeitung, 12.09.2005

Sabine Vogel interviews "Japan's Günter Grass", Nobel Prize winning author Kenzaburo Oe, about Japanese politics, and his latest novel. Asked whether nationalism and extreme right wing ideology plague today's Japan, Oe answers: "Such groups certainly do exist, even within the governing party, for example the current chancellor, who is widely seen as successor to Prime Minister Koizumi. But the real threat comes from the nationalistic atmosphere in Japanese society. It's even more dangerous than a clearly formulated right-wing political tendency. One example currently preoccupies me: The islands around Okinawa were seized by the American army toward the end of World War II. When the Japanese defenders saw that they couldn't win, they forced around 700 inhabitants of these islands to commit suicide. That's a fact. Thirty years ago I wrote a book about it. Now the family of the commander who gave the order is suing me and my publisher for libel. A right-wing group around Yoshinori Kobayashi (more here), a very popular manga artist, says the suicide – of women and children – was justified! The trial will start right after I get back to Japan."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12.09.2005

Sonja Zekri observes growing alienation between Germans and people of non-German origin living in Germany. "Nowadays, Muslims and Eastern Europeans, Turks and Poles, Indians and Vietnamese have all become equally suspect. Today however – and this is new – many of the 7.3 million non-Germans living in Germany no longer care whether they are accepted. And this self-isolation also has its roots in economic frustration and an increasingly acrimonious battle for distributive justice. Certainly, Turkish filmmakers win prizes at festivals, football players from immigrant families make it to the top of the German league tables. But one in every four non-Germans in Germany is living below the poverty line (seven years ago it was one in five). Twenty percent are unemployed, and almost half of them have no professional training. Prosperous countries of immigration owe their success to the fact that they allow migrants to get ahead in society. In Germany, however, a blooming garden of bureaucracy, it's even hard for ethnic Germans to get ahead."

Franziska Augstein interviews Dan Diner, writer and director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig, about his book "Versiegelte Zeit" and how Karl Marx can help Western intellectuals to understand Islam. "One thing is increasingly getting on my nerves since Edward Said published his unfortunately very influential book 'Orientalism'. An unholy alliance has sprung up between the pre-modern conditions in the Near East and postmodern interpretations in the West. This alliance so to speak robs the people in the region of their present – and so of modernity. I'm against this culturalistic burden, and in this respect Marx is still very helpful. 19th century thought, Marx's thought, is very applicable to a society that has yet to come as far as the 19th century."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 12.09.2005

Daniel Kothenschulte left the Mostra film festival in Venice satisfied at least that the "the festival's only masterpiece" Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain" won the Golden Lion. "'Brokeback Mountain' is a small production with very few characters, very little dialogue and hardly any outward action – and yet the film seems to grow in size with every minute. Lee has always understood how to smuggle his Confucian relationship to the landscape into his productions of bourgeois social dramas. (...) The value he places on the landscape turns this gay love story into a real latter day Western – and one of the few new films which you really need to see on the big screen."


Saturday 10 September, 2005

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.09.2005

Travelling through Bosnia, author Thomas Hettche recognises what is not right in the German novel: it flees the present. "Certainly, in Germany there are family novels, historical novels, pop novels and grandchildren's novels of all stripes. But the very fact that these novels are grouped like this shows that the novel shuns the very central discourse it once stood for, and for which it was created. A possible answer to the question of why this might be is that we ourselves avoid the present – as part of reflex that has continued for a generation. And we still do, with that inherited shame of fascists' children – even though we had nothing to do with it. It's high time we finally occupied this empty centre. With our novels, and ourselves."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 10.09.2005

In an interview, American philosopher, writer and the director of the Einstein Forum, Susan Neiman, was most complimentary about Germany. "Germany has become far more cosmopolitan and the world has reacted positively in return. Germany's new openness to foreign cultures – and what is perceived to be genuine remorse for the crimes it committed against other cultures – has borne fruit. This can be observed not only in growing tourism but also in the interest of foreign firms to do business here. Of course there's still plenty of room for improvement. But what is important in the eyes of the world is that the German political stance on foreign cultures, or rather its politics of remembrance (as well as its exemplary environmental politics), is part of the establishment, not just the wish of some oppositional protest movement."


Die Tageszeitung, 10.09.2005

As part of the taz' series of articles on "What is Left today?", Aram Lintzel talked to Roger M. Buergel the curator of documenta 12 (due for 2007) about politics and art. Buergel is against an oversimplified politicisation of art. "I want to think about formats through which things can be communicated without producing identities or inclusions. The moment of undecidedness – is this knowledge or not? - is very important, so that the audience can decide for itself whether it's prepared to grant something the status of knowledge. Without this space for decision-making the political element is missing. Then all you have is a horde of idiots that you have to guide through the exhibition and who might or might not learn something on the way. But there's no participation, no 'mass intellectuality'." His concluding remark: "I think Felix Guattari once put it like this: Left is processual and Right is fixation."