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

15/07/2005

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.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15.07.2005

Urs Schoettli calls for European renewal in the spirit of the Italian "risorgimento" or resurgence, the movement that led to Italy's unification in 1870: "Europe must again become a question of the heart. Instead of eternally balancing out agrarian interests, budget payments and harmonisation, a new epoch of European 'Sturm und Drang' (the early romantic notion of 'storm and stress') has to evolve. Above all, this means the process of unification until now must be examined without party-political or national blinkers. We need the courage to radically reverse obvious aberrations." A change of generations would not do any harm at all, says Schoettli, afterall "the Italian risorgimento was not spearheaded by 70 or 80-year-olds."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15.07.2005

Europe must decide if it wants freedom or unity, says German-British sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf in his Werner Heisenberg lecture, which is reprinted by the SZ. He himself has clear priorities: "Ultimately, Europe only has meaning insofar as it contributes to the development and spread of the liberal order. It can only do that if it is open in a double sense: open to everyone else in the world, starting with its neighbours, and open in the character of its policies, from service sector guidelines to agrarian policy, from its treatment of asylum seekers to support for innovation... But why should Europe not strive for a more stable union and openness at the same time, both internally and externally? Was that not the dream of all great Europeans? My conclusion, however, is that this combination is only good for Sunday sermons. In practice you have to take a decision. The constitutional treaty served the purposes of unity, not openness. It is a good thing that we have been spared it. The expansion is evidence of openness, even if it does not necessarily further unity. We should dauntlessly pursue expansion, and in so doing bring hope to the inchoate states of the western Balkans. At the same time we would strengthen the open society in Turkey, Ukraine and our European neighbours."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 15.07.2005

In the run-up to anticipated elections in the fall in which the conservative Christian Democratic Union led by Angela Merkel is expected to triumph, the FR runs a series asking selected individuals: "Are You Conservative?" Today writer Felicitas Hoppe speaks with Ina Hartwig, and takes a sceptical view of the current trend towards conservatism and Catholicism in Germany today. "The fusion of the allegedly political and the allegedly religious to reawaken alleged values involves faulty thinking that both amuses and irritates me. It's as if someone tried to jump over a grave but their legs were too short. You know, I was brought up a Catholic. Things in this world are familiar and near to me, but not as something that has to be conserved, rather like an enduring presence in a world that constantly alters its form. The new Catholicism fad we're seeing is typical for people who haven't had anything to do with religion for a long time now." Hoppe sees the artificially cultivated conservatism of some of her writer colleagues as silly. "It seems to me to be a panic reaction. Things do change form! But the interesting thing is to be present in the here and now and to watch these transformations. If you want to preserve something, I believe you have just one option, and that is to accept that things change. It's like making jam: the thing itself disappears as it blends into something else, and I find that fantastic."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15.07.2005

The theoretical biologist Manfred Laubichler is critical of Viennese Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's article in the New York Times which argues that the scholarliness of evolutionary theory is dependant on whether God is accommodated into the equation. Laubichler suspects there are political motives behind the article. "Is it pure coincidence that a statement in America by a Viennese Cardinal with a blatantly anti-scientific message is launched at precisely the time when the seats in the Supreme Court are vacant?"


Die Tageszeitung, 15.07.2005

Uh-Young Kim hails Missy Elliott's new record "The Cookbook" as pure pop, but spots some mildly reactionary tendencies. "Missy Elliot might be the only female star in the penis-controlled world of hiphop, but she submissively worships her lover's 'magic stick' in a number of songs. And if anybody tries to ask her about women's rights or black power, she reacts like her producer Timbaland when somebody says he draws on drum 'n' bass for inspiration: she shrugs her shoulders and climbs into one of her ten Lamborghinis."

Christoph Huber staunchly defends the new three-part film by Austrian director Götz Spielmann "Antares" (2004). The film, Huber says, has suffered from being unfairly pigeon-holed as classic "Austro-Depro". "The cliche about Austrian cinema, commonly referred to as 'Austro-Depro basically translates as: unhappiness and alienation, sex and violence in suburban housing estates and middle-class flats, in swinger clubs and village discos. Accusations of social pessimism are readily - and often rightly - at hand." Huber concludes, that "despite its typically triste atmosphere, 'Antares' is a very un-Austrian utopian film about love. The final image shows the grey light of a new day over the housing estates on the outskirts of the city."

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