Frankfuter Allgemeine Zeitung 10.10.2006

Kerstin Holm reports on the state of investigations into the murder of Anna Politkovskaya. At first it seemed that the journalist's last article, on torture in contemporary Chechnya, had been lost, because the investigative police had taken her computer with them. "Last Thursday, on the 30th birthday of Ramsan Kadyrov, the Moscow-faithful Chechen premier, Anna Politkovskaya reported on Radio Liberty on the victims of Kadyrov's special commandos. The moderator, referring to the building boom in Grosny and the increasing political stability in the Caucasus republic, asked whether it wouldn't be more appropriate to talk about certain minor setbacks. To which Politkovskaya responded that the number of human rights violations had increased since last year. The journalist believed in presenting specific cases, she had collected photographs of torture victims that were supposed to be published in the Novaya Gazeta."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 10.10.2006

In the series "What is a good religion?" the Indian religious studies expert Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad questions the question itself. He's wary of its Western secular bent. "Even the most thought-through and nuanced understanding of 'good' is, in the final analysis, irrelevant. Religion does not mean keeping the good and banning evil; religion as lived reality is an entirety and if we can argue about religion, then the attempt to rationalise it is a product of the modern fantasy that everything can be 'managed'. But religion doesn't allow itself to be judged according to the economic criteria of 'best practice.'" Every understanding of "good religion" is in the end "hegemonic," Ram-Prasad writes.


Süddeutsche Zeitung 10.10.2006

In an interview with Renate Nimtz-Köster, Peter Jacobi explains his Romanian Holocaust memorial. "The core of my design is a raw cement building, 16 metres long, 7 metres high and 10 metres wide, that can be walked through. Light enters through the cracks in the roof, creating an inner life. The visitor enters a cross-hatch of light and feels the passage of time that is no longer there, that has been interrupted. A text explains what has happened; there are grave stones from Odessa, beyond that a sculpture of the star of David, which the light casts in different forms on ground, and a wagon wheel as a symbol of the murdered gypsies. And its is situated in the 'heart of Budapest,' in front of the Interior Ministry, where Antonescu planned the Holocaust."


Der Tagesspiegel 10.10.2006

In an interview with Jörg Plath, Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertesz discusses fiction, auto-fiction and "Dossier K.", his autobiographical discussion with himself (more in our featue here): "If you want to survive in a concentration camp, you have to follow its logic. This collaboration, whether willing or unwilling, is the biggest shame of those who survived. They cannot own up to it. But the writer can. Because literature possesses a special candour. These are simply good sentences, you see. In this case, good sentences are far more important than my own shame. My 'Fateless' isn't a cheerful novel. Yet it gave me a lot of joy when I wrote it. And you can only write when you're free, when you take pleasure in it. That's a deadly paradox, but I love it."


Die Tageszeitung 10.10.2006

After visiting the second ArtBeijing trade fair this year, Susanne Messmer sees a slowdown in the thriving Chinese art trade: "Walking around the halls at ArtBeijing, you almost get the feeling it wouldn't be so bad if the Chinese art market cooled down a bit. Because nowadays it seems as if things have got out of control. There are hardly any photographs, sculptures or even video works here. Instead there are many paintings, mainly the kind that correspond to Western expectations. Present here is the art establishment that's been successfully reproducing 'political pop' and 'cynical realism' since the 1990s, with bright pictures full of Coke cans and red stars. Only seldom do you see something new. For example at the stands of the long-established Beijing galleries like Alexander Ochs' White Space Beijing and Brian Wallace's Red Gate Gallery, which once more shine with good sales figures and terrific moods. Otherwise: Everywhere you look you see Yue Minjun's familiar men's faces contorted with smiles, or Wang Guanying's agitprop posters."