Monday 6 February, 2006

Die Tageszeitung, 06.02.2006

The taz brings two opposing voices in the caricature debate. The writer Dilek Zaptcioglu has this to say: "This war is being deliberately and impertinently stirred up in words and drawings. Because those who are really feeling hardest hit by the Danish offensive are the moderate Muslims, who have been living a 'Westernized' life for generations and who stand by peace and the ideals of the French Revolution."

TV journalist Sonia Mikich digs in her heels: "I am insulted. Fanatics blow up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, those wonderful cultural monuments. But art for me is an expression of universal beauty and innocence, it is a thing of value which makes the world better and more peaceful. This is the tradition in which I have grown up. I therefore demand that Hamas, the spokesman of the French Muslims and the director of the Al-Azhar university apologise to me. Otherwise I will sadly never visit the Taj Mahal on holiday, I will call for a boycott of Palestinian fruit and I will set fire to the embassies of Tunisia, Qatar and Bangladesh."


Berliner Zeitung, 06.02.2006

Even if the dialogues in Hungarian director George Tabori's production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" in the Berliner Ensemble rarely get beyond clumsy, the nonagenarian director can do no wrong in the eyes of Ulrich Seidler. "Left of the stage, next to the prompter, who later works the snow machine, the 91-year old director, George Tabori, in his red velvet armchair refuses to provide a clue to any questions one might have. His hands remain neatly folded, except when he takes a sip from the stately contents of his teapot, observing all the while the actors at their work as if for the first time. And the audience – watching the director watching the play – imagines seeing it through Tabori's eyes. Only the best directors can have eyes this naive, free from all previous knowledge and experience."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 06.02.2006

Orhan Pamuk yesterday gave the Berliners a lesson on the meaning of "Hüzün" – an Arabic-Turkish term for melancholy which in Istanbul, among other things, feeds on the loss of the Ottoman empire. The SZ publishes the speech in full. "Hüzün is in Istanbul a central component of the musical sensibility, a fundamental element of poetry, of the general view of life, of the make-up of the soul. In a nutshell, it is the expression of everything which makes Istanbul what it is. And because Hüzün unites all these characteristics, Istanbul is proud of its melancholy, or at least it gives that impression. And this in turn lends Hüzün positive aspects."


Saturday 4 February, 2006

Die Welt, 04.02.2006

In a highly informative article on Istvan Szabo's activities writing reports on his fellow students for the Hungarian secret police, Jörg Taszman describes a press conference with Szabo, Zsolt Kezdi Kovacs and other former classmates of Szabo's during the Hungarian Film Week. "In one cleverly staged event where journalists were not given the opportunity of asking questions, those present once more laid out that Szabo and Kezdi Kovacs did not harm anyone, and that everyone in the class went on to become well-established directors." No one criticised Szabo openly, Taszman writes. "A climate of fear still reigns in the film industry, and in Hungary in general. A battle is raging over who has sway in the film community, who gets what, and how existential needs are met. Anyone who attacks Szabo will face an entire generation of 'oldies' who still have the say in Hungary. Unlike in the Czech Republic or Poland, younger filmmakers have hardly gained a foothold in Hungary since the end of communism."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 04.02.2006

All of the feuilletons review Lars Brandt's book "Andenken" (In remembrance) about his father, the former chancellor Willy Brandt. Ina Hartwig writes: "Lars' parents spoke Norwegian at home. Lars comments that even when he spoke German his father never lost the Oslo singsong melody – while the children, for their part, spoke Berlin dialect. Willy Brandt was quick to take the cue from American politicians, and took to showing his family in public. Little Lars was driven around Berlin with Robert Kennedy's children to show them the Cold War front city, even if the little Kennedys never looked up from their comics. On another occasion Willy Brandt asked Lars, then a sociology student in Bonn, to entertain Nicu Ceausescu, the son of the Romanian dictator. Ceausescu junior wanted to know: 'I shot twelve bears last year, and you?'"