Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

01/03/2005

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Die Tageszeitung, 01.03.2005

Is the name of Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic head of the German student protests in the 1960s, synonymous for violence? The Tageszeitung (known to Germans as 'taz'), still the favourite paper of the 68ers, begins a series on the state of the movement almost 40 years on. The first article, by sociologist and former activist of the "extra-parliamentary opposition" Klaus Meschkat, examines a recent publication by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in which Wolfgang Kraushaar calls Dutschke a "potential terrorist". For Meschkat, this statement discredts Kraushaar as a historian of the movement. The problem today, in Meschkat's view, is that "the crimes of terrorist groups serve the current regime in Washington as a pretence to continue the tradition of full-scale military intervention established during the Vietnam War. If millions of peaceful demonstrators across Europe cannot stop a war that contravenes international law, shouldn't we take a sympathetic view of the attempts of Rudi Dutschke and his friends to stop the US war machine?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 01.03.2005

On May 10 the Monument for the Murdered Jews of Europe will be inaugurated. Three other monuments to the victims of the Nazi era exist in Berlin: the German Resistance Memorial and Topography of Terror on the former site of the Nazi headquarters in central Berlin, and the House of the Wannsee Conference, where the "Final Solution" was reached in 1942. Until now, these three monuments have been financed and maintained by the Berlin municipality. Christina Weiss, Federal Commissioner for Cultural and Media Affairs, now plans to group them together in federal foundation. Historian Götz Aly agrees with the plan. "The memorial landscape in Berlin leaves all the crucial questions unanswered. Terror, the persecution of the Jews and the resistance movement are all grouped haphazardly together. Contradictions that appear in individual biographies are masked over or filed away. Of course, a general like Erich Hoeppner is depicted in the German Resistance Memorial as a martyr of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. But it should also be mentioned that he missed no opportunity to order the murder of 'Bolshevik Jews' in the occupied Soviet territories. The Berlin memorial sites blend out the larger historical picture in a cowardly way. They avoid everything that is not crystal clear, and thus serve to de-contextualise the history." This leads "to an 'culture of hors d'oeuvres' that encourages people to turn any and every issue into an ideological club sandwich."

The SZ also features an article by Thierry Chervel, co-founder of Perlentaucher, on the new English language website signandsight.com. In this opening manifesto, Chervel makes a plea for widespread use of English as a European lingua franca. Click here to read the text.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 01.03.2005

Alexander Kluy reminisces about "one of the cleverest, wittiest, most brilliant and eccentric authors that England has produced in the last 125 years", Lytton Strachey. "In things practical, he was magnificently impractical. He was homosexual, albeit a little bisexual around the edges, and best friends with Virginia Woolf (he retracted a marriage proposal he made to her by return of post). And he had a voice that began in a bass and ended in a furious squeak at the end, or sometimes in the middle of his flowing sentences."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 01.03.2005

The paper features the lovely first paragraph of a new story by Elsa Morante (unfortunately not online). "I was a kid, 13 years old, at high school. Of all my rather undistinguished classmates, one was stunning. He was too defiant and too lazy to be the top of the class; but everyone knew that if he'd tried, he would have been. None of us shared his clear and auspicious intelligence. In fact I was the top of the class: I was a poetic creature and when I thought of him, I called him involuntarily archangel..." Morante's stories are to be published soon by Wagenbach publishers.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 01.03.2005

According to Michael Althen, the Oscar ceremony may have been a victory for Methusala, but it wasn't a conspiracy against the younger generation. Althen quotes Clint Eastwood: "There are a bunch of young people running around here, but the financiers were told: 'Don't forget the older generation!' The seniors here are always ready to give their best shot." Althen has high praise for Eastwood. "The award, while not necessary, does confirm what should be clear to all: that Clint Eastwood is one of the greatest directors of American cinema and now belongs with other greats - Wilder, Lean and Spielberg - who won the award for best director more than once." (here a list of all Oscar prize-winners)

Eleonore Büning went to Kent Nagano and Peter Mussbach's production of "Salome" in the Dresden Semperoper which opened the Richard Strauss festival. "The singers in the Dresden 'Salome' premiere - Herlitzius, Titus and Schmidt - have vocal chords on a Wagnerian scale. They actually sing better than in Bayreuth. Alan Titus' Jachanaan is man in his peak years who wears a romper suit and hangs out on the steps of a swimming pool – better than being stuck in a well. Titus delivers Jochanaan's prophecies over a chorus of droning trombones with Wotan-like severity, then is caught in the spell of the daughter of the house - seductive if a bit juvenile in her pink petticoats - who throws herself in his arms. This is love at first sight."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not sure that Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class.
read more