Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26.05.2006

Berlin's new Hauptbahnhof station will be inaugurated today. The architect, Meinhard von Gerkan, is suing the Deutsche Bahn rail company for shortening the roof and adulterating the ceiling on the lower level (see our feature "Bodily harm to a train station"). The SZ prints the speech he was not allowed to deliver: "All of my efforts to mobilise high-level politicians to stop this monstrosity in its tracks failed. Ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder said: 'Come on Gerkan, the sausage is long enough, I see it every day.' Two years later at his farewell party he admitted: 'the sausage's been bitten off – at both ends'." In a second article Gerhard Matzig celebrates the station despite all the controversy as a "serendipitous memory of train stations' once great iron architecture," wishing von Gerkan success in his lawsuit.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26.05.2006

After the German government admitted last week that its foreign intelligence agency, the BND, had spied on some of the country's best-known investigative journalists (news story here), "ras" tells the German media not to get so roiled: "This week Der Spiegel magazine presented the facts in an article of epic proportions. Yet all the outrage at the government's spying activities seems rather whiny." For "ras", a greater danger to freedom of the press comes from other quarters: "In view of the subtle and sustained efforts of a number of political bodies to influence the press, this whole scandal about the spying activities seems very displaced. A lot of money is changing hands between government bodies and the media. The transactions are disguised as production benefits or freely provided background information material. As the latter is professionally presented, it is often disseminated as is. Numerous media enterprises are short of cash, and so all too happy to get material free of charge."


Die Welt, 26.05.2006

Reporting from Cannes, Hanns-Georg Rodek is unperturbed that Sofia Coppola's film "Marie Antoinette", which was booed by the crowds, shuns historical accuracy. Because Coppola herself is a neo-royal, Rodek writes: "It's a party film, with lots of dancing, celebration, fireworks. And perhaps only someone like Sofia Coppola can shoot such an light-hearted, untroubled film as this. Coppola was born into (cinema) royalty. Her father is Francis Ford, but that's not all: Jason Schwartzman (who plays Louis XVI in the film) and Nicolas Cage are cousins. Talia Shira is her aunt, film whiz-kid Spike Jonze is her ex and Quentin Tarantino her new bosom-buddy. When Marie Antoinette finally gives birth to her long-awaited child, the baby is presented to the entire court. When Sofia was just a few months old, her father presented her to the world in 'The Godfather'."


Der Tagesspiegel, 26.05.2006

Talking to Andreas Schäfer, theatre, film and opera director Peter Brook was unable to dish out any formulas for theatrical magic moments. "The mysterious emerges through concretion. There's no better analogy for this process than cookery. How does a good recipe come about? There is no answer to this, at best you can fall back on tangible things. Did you make the right selection at the market? Was the sauce stirred properly? Is the fire too hot? We must live with the fact that we don't know how this moment comes into being. It is there, mostly we cannot find it, but when it occurs (claps his hands), we recognise it."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 26.05.2006

Raoul Ruiz' bare-faced chutzpah is not in evidence for the first time in his extremely willful filming of "Klimt": it is the very creative principle of this Chilean director, raves Michael Kohler. "According to legend, Ruiz' career has been an ongoing bet with himself. At seventeen, he set out to write a hundred dramas and dramolettes within five years, as a director he soon set himself a similar goal, and as the end was in sight, he decided he had to make more films than all other Chiliean film-makers put together. And individually, his films often seem like self-imposed 'unsolvable' tasks, whose failure is nevertheless more interesting than any well-tempered solution. The idea of mastering Proust's 'Le Temps Retrouve' in less than three hours is a screeching affront to literary heaven which is faintly but clearly echoed in 'Klimt'."