Monday 9 January, 2006

Die Welt, 09.01.2006

Israeli historian Tom Segev bids farewell to the "last Titan" Ariel Sharon. On the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, he writes: "While in the military, more than once Sharon was forced to evacuate one or another unsustainable position in order to stabilise some other front. The evacuation of Gaza was unilateral, unsanctioned, and no heed was paid to the Palestinians, it was as if they didn't exist. It was all about securing the West Bank. No one knew where Sharon would have taken the conflict after the elections. There are no reasons to assume that he knew a way of reaching a compromise with the Palestinians. But whatever his motivations were, Sharon showed the Israelis that the settlements could be cleared – without the sky falling on their heads."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09.01.2006

Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider discusses the moral dialectic that made Ariel Sharon the most-hated Israeli: "He was the country's alter ego, someone the moralists of the world could project their various ideas onto. He was their opposite. While the Israeli peace doves washed their hands in innocence, the 'fanatic' Sharon had been doing their dirty work for them since 1948. Few states are so indebted to international morality for their existence as Israel. The condemnation of the Holocaust and its underlying anti-Semitism owes its force to a revolution in global morality. Over and above the Zionist attempts of the Jews to define themselves as a nation, the Jewish nation has acquired international legitimacy through this worldwide condemnation. The fact that Israeli's legitimacy as a state is based in the global morality of anti-anti-Semitism implies that it is measured against higher moral standards than other states. And that is the basis of anti-Sharonism."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 09.01.2006

Contributing to the debate on whether torture can be used in democracies in certain proscribed circumstances (see "In Today's Feuilletons" of December 23), Peter Fuchs takes a detailed look at what would happen if torture were to be allowed and thus become a public phenomenon in Germany. He concludes that it could never work in a democracy. "How could the media hype be avoided, or even channelled? Are takeaway restaurants permitted in the vicinity of the torture building? Is merchandising allowed? Can church bells ring while torture is taking place? Is product-placement permitted in the location itself? Or related advertisements? For refreshments, painkillers, garlic pills, hygiene products? We assume torture would have to stop during the commercial breaks. Perhaps you could get the viewers involved, with cash prizes for the right answers."


Saturday 7 January, 2006

Die Welt, 07.01.2006

The case of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who stands trial in his home country for calling the Turkish genocide of the Armenians by its name, has prompted historian Daniel Goldhagen to pen an open letter to the Turkish government. Ten years after the publication of his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" he now recommends Turkey look to the Germans as a successful example of a country dealing with a terrible past. "It is no easy thing to start public discussion, to deal truthfully with the historical crimes of one's own people and to perform reparation duties, but it does create respect for the nation and its people in the long run. Could it honestly be argued that Germany, this leading European nation, welcome member of the European and international community and role model has suffered for its truthfulness? Have Germany's relations with other countries been adversely affected by its readiness to recognise its historical crimes? Has the German economy been weakened? Does German culture no longer flourish?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 07.01.2006

In the weekend edition, Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk writes about the Western world that is making its way East: "And so the world moved in here. Atoms of unfamiliar, unimaginable bodies circled in and evoked far off places and people. Paris – London – New York. Housewifely creatures from the Kurfürstendamm; spaces which until recently were the exclusive realm of sprightly, chocolate-coloured girls from Nice; wool and tweed, permeated into all eternity with the humid aroma of the Thames; pockets containing crumbs of God only knows what – someone tucked something away in Belgium or Holland and not removed it since. And so they made it here, where the sky almost collides with the Carpathians."


Die Tageszeitung, 07.01.2006

Markus Metz and Georg Seeßlen tell a tale of migration stories in German cinema – from Fassbinder's "Katzelmacher" until the end - which seems like it might have been reached. "Maybe all migration stories have been told. Perhaps though, the perception of the subject has become too precise for cinematic fable. Moreover, in the polymigrational society of neo-liberalism, the story of migration can no longer be told in a linear narrative, any more than a story of discovery can be told from the perspective of the stranger: us and them, mainstream and migration, this code and that code, this sort of thing only works now in a mass of tangled threads. Whatever one looks at, questions or even throws accusations at, it always answers back in the same way: sorry, I'm a stranger here myself."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 07.01.2006

2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising. Laszlo Földenyi opens the year with a very engaging essay on the curious Hungarian way of commemorating by forgetting: "Amnesia as an elixir. Not-remembering as the peculiar, Hungarian variant of remembrance. A foreign visitor to Hungary very soon gets the impression that, although on the one hand everyone is caught up with the past and the wounds of the past, on the other hand they seem to shy away from looking the past in the eye – as if deeply troubled by what they were absorbed with on a day to day basis."