Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

10/05/2005

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Die Tageszeitung, 10.05.2005

The Holocaust memorial in Berlin opens today. For Stefan Reinecke it is the "sign that this republic has integrated the memory of the German crime into its image of itself." He continues: "If you look at this grid of concrete stelae from the outside and then enter, you make a surprising discovery. Peter Eisenmann's memorial is interesting, almost pleasing. There is nothing precipitous about it (unless you suffer from claustrophobia), nothing repellent, rather something playful, open. Eisenmann has built a forest of stelae that is soothing, undulating. The allure and the horror at the size of the thing (19,000 square meters, 2,711 stelae) have been eclipsed. The size is absorbed by the form. This grey forest has no entrance, no message, certainly not one that is unequivocal. It invites the visitor to linger, to look around, to try out different perspectives (and perhaps children to play hide and seek). It functions like a city park, a place of refuge. More precisely: it offers a possibility. If you feel lost, you can be lost here. No one is forced to do anything (...) This grid is an open field of experience for city dwellers, something between alienation and reflection. It is a piece of urban architecture that makes no attempt to mimic the event it was designed to remind people of using overwhelming aesthetics. Nor does it, as some supporters of the project insist, either convey unsettling, dizzy-making sensations, or employ milder, aesthetically educational means to let the forlornness of the victims be heard."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.05.05


The first part of the 3-part "Speer and Hitler - the Devil's Architect", was shown on German TV last night. Frank Schirrmacher and Nils Minkmar had an epic conversation with Albert Speer junior and Heinrich Breloer, the director of the film, which mixes staged scenes with documentary material and interviews. Breloer describes Speer senior as a figure of the subservient bourgeoisie, which Hitler was so dependent upon: "Hitler was a man who couldn't do much. Thomas Mann's polemical essay "Bruder Hitler" sums this up perfectly. He couldn't drive a car, he couldn't ride a horse, he couldn't even father a child. He couldn't do any of the things that men do. Alright, he could draw buildings, but they would have all collapsed. He wouldn't have been able to actually build anything. In order to draw everybody into his plans, he needed access to all the knowledge that had accumulated in the middle classes. He needed the generals, the industrialists, the architects." In a leading article on the first page of the newspaper, FAZ editor Frank Schirrmacher describes the film as principally a film about the generation of the war children: "The bewilderment that breaks out in Albert Speer junior every time he talks about his father is symbolic for an entire generation."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10.05.2005

A documentation film entitled "Nachspiel – Die Täuschung" (sequel – the deception) was shot by filmmaker Heinrich Breloer to accompany his three part series "Speer and Hitler – The Devil's Architect", which is being broadcast this week on German television. Historian Susanne Willems is one of many in the film who establish Speer's guilt in the Nazi war crimes. Sonja Zekri reports that after the shooting, Willems came across three documents in Auschwitz that add to the incriminations against the "supposedly dreamy aristocratic Nazi". In the Nurnberg trials and after his release from prison 20 years later, Speer himself always maintained he had not known of the scale of atrocities committed in Auschwitz and elsewhere. Yet Willems has found an authorisation by Speer from 1942, for the "enlargement of the Auschwitz barracks camp." Under his aegis, the camp was provided with facilities to turn it "permanently into an extermination camp". The third document shows that the construction programme was known in the SS as "Professor Speer's special programme". "For Willems, if the public is to say farewell to its 'favourite Nazi', then it should say farewell to the right one: 'To a man who shied away from no crime to achieve his political goals, who forced through the disenfranchisement and deportation of the Jews, and who knew that their journey would end in Auschwitz, and exactly in what way."


Der Tagesspiegel, 10.05.2005


Christina Tilmann reports on the nominations for the German Film Prize, which were made public yesterday. The awards ceremony for the prize, the German equivalent of the Oscars, will take place on July 8. This year, for the first time, the nominees have been selected by the German Film Academy, which was founded in 2003 and now includes 648 members. "The arrangement – the nominations come from expert committees while the prizewinners are all chosen by members – brings with it unavoidable double functions. Stefan Arndt, producer of X-Filme and academy president, was visibly embarrassed that two X productions were preselected for best film: Dany Levy's "Alles auf Zucker" (with ten nominations in 15 categories the clear favourite) and Oskar Roehler's controversial family film "Agnes und seine Brüder". Otherwise, the topic of bias hardly came up. Other films nominated for best film were Marc Rothemund's "Sophie Scholl", Hans Weingartner's "The Edukators", as well as Maren Ade's remarkable debut "The Forest for the Trees".


For eight years, Ingo Metzmacher, one of Germany's most sought after conductors, has brought the music of the 20th century to the people of Hamburg. And they've listened! For his departure concert, however – Metzmacher is leaving to take up the post of chief conductor of the Nederlandese Opera – he chose Mozart's "La clemenza di Tito" (The Clemency of Titus), directed by Peter Konwitschny. Christine Lemke-Matwey was there. "Things start getting hot right at the start. As soon as the overture gets into swing, the stage manager calls out 'Lights!' from the wings. The lights flicker, then the hall is plunged into darkness. 'I think the best thing is to start over from the beginning', murmurs Ingo Metzmacher from his stand. And that's just what happens. Isolated bursts of laughter. 'Conditions like in ancient Rome' is written in golden letters against a marble white background on the curtain. Mozart's late dramma serio per musica 'La clemza di Tito' is supposed to be both funny and slightly daffy - and this was no exception. So it's understandable that in their last joint work for the Hamburg Staatsoper, Peter Konwitschny and Ingo Metzmacher played a small hoax. Opera is dead, long live opera. And anyone who – for Mozart? against Mozart? - still wants to believe in broken hearts, in any kind of political dimension to the abysses dealt with here tonight, in conflicts and melancholies, has understood nothing and is basically an idiot. Fine, but it hurts nonetheless."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not sure that Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class.
read more