Die Tageszeitung, 20.09.2006

In an interview the Tunisian-born French poet and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb ("The Malady of Islam") talks about his criticism of the militant and official Islam: "The real danger is not militant and violent Islam, that's only a minority thing. Much more dangerous is the diffuse Islamism which is spreading through society as a whole. This became very clear to me during my visit to Cairo shortly after the Luxor shootings in 1997. I was not surprised by them. They were a radical expression of the general mood in the country. Every journalist, intellectual and theologian I met said Egyptians couldn't have been behind the killings, that it must have been foreign enemies. Fleeing responsibility again! I argued with everyone at the time: you're crazy! These people only put your anti-western and xenophobic rhetoric into action. And the representatives of traditional and official Islam also contributed to this climate."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20.09.2006

After the local elections in Germany last Sunday where, in the state of Mecklenburg-West Pommerania, the right-wing German National Party (NPD) won 6 seats in the local parliament, with votes up 6.5% to 7.3%, Frank Schirrmacher looks at demographic reasons for this development. "In countless villages young unemployed men live together with old people, not only with no hope of getting work, but also with no chance of finding a partner. Since Klaus Theweleit analysed 'male fantasies' of the volunteer corps in the Weimar Republic, we have known how the attractiveness of these male-bonding life forms rise, with the absence of a partner, or the possibility of finding one."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 20.09.2006

The Hungarian author György Dalos writes that although the Hungarians do have grounds for dissatisfaction, he finds the current riots in Budapest inappropriate. Comparisons drawn by many observers with the Uprising 50 years ago do show "striking similarities," he writes. "Yet for all the similarities, it's the differences that really count. In October 1956 the masses went out onto the streets against the dictatorship because they had no effective means to express their demands. Today, by contrast, it should be possible to solve even the most sensitive issues within a democratic framework. For society to bring its own experience to bear in differentiating between truth and lies, what it needs above all is inner peace."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20.09.2006

In a beautiful, very personal essay published by the paper in the context of the focus on India at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, London-born writer - and prospective successor to Kofi Annan as the head of the UN - Shashi Tharoor explains why he writes in English. "Indians like me," he writes, "Indians who even as children made friends in English, quarrelled in English and – later of course – wooed in English... all share an urban education and an international view of the Indian reality. I think this view is no less authentically 'Indian' than the views of writers who publish in other Indian languages. Why should the farmer in his village or the small-town teacher with a mark on his brow be more Indian than the quick-witted student or the Bombay socialite? India is a gigantic and extremely complex country. There are very many, very different Indias. I write about an India with many truths and many realities, an India that is more than the sum of its parts. This diversity is easier to express in English than in any other Indian language, because English isn't rooted in any particular region of the country."


Berliner Zeitung, 20.09.2006

Jens Balzer interviews Edgar Froese, founder of the German rock band Tangerine Dream, which kicks off its 40-year jubilee tour tomorrow night as part of Berlin's Popkomm music festival and trade fair. Froese looks back on highlights from the past, among them a concert in 1980 in the East-German Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), the first by musicians from West Germany. "It was insane: all the international TV crews you can think of, and 80 percent of the tickets had been sold to party cadres. The real fans were all outside and couldn't get in. They pressed against the doors and that huge glass window, shouting: 'We want in! We want in!' Then all the journalists ran outside, everyone was running everywhere, actually it was all a bit menacing. I said to the organisers: either we stop playing right here and now, or you let the people in. Which they finally did, after a lot of dithering. In the end the place was just packed, even the stairs were full. They would've really liked just to chuck us all in jail, but the general excitement was too much for them."


Die Welt, 20.09.2006

"Form bands!" cries Michael Pilz. Times might be bad for the music industry, but not for musicians. Because today distribution is no longer dependent on the once feared A&R (Artist and Repertoire) manager, but on Myspace and Youtube or ambitious net stations like Pandora or Last.FM. "Or the countless musicblogs, which are not only run by crazies hungry for recognition, but - in the case of Motel de Moka or Moistworks - by trustworthy music lovers. Mainly, though, the better blogs present themselves as collections of the best musical gems. Despite all the precautions they take to protect themselves, they basically provide MP3s and naturally the record companies could sue. But there's no way they will. Because there's no point taking action against opinion leaders."