Die Zeit, 04.08.2005

In an interview with Bernadette Conrad, American writer Jonathan Franzen talks about his most recent book "Strong Motion", his time in Germany – where he studied at Berlin's Free University on a Fulbright scholarship - and what he got out of it. "An addiction to cigarettes, increased tolerance for alcohol, scepticism about America and the certainty that I prefer to live in America than in Europe. I came back home cured of my desire to live in the old world."

The historian Heinrich August Winkler explains in enormous detail why the successful recipe for democratising Germany after 1945 is not working in Iraq. "Germany could only be liberated from the outside in 1945. West Germany was able to follow the path from liberation to freedom because it could latch onto liberated, constitutional and democratic traditions that could be resuscitated. ... If there is anything to be learned from the democratisation of Germany in the context of Iraq or other countries, it's that the decisive impulse must come from the country itself."


Die Tageszeitung, 04.08.2005

Navid Kermani (more) visited Israel and the Palestinian territories and returned furious and deeply depressed. The Palestinians, he reports, are so desperate that "a religious dogmatism is spreading among them, which is even more extreme than what I witnessed in Iran." Kermani asks why the Israelis cannot treat the Palestinians like people? "I write this as if it were a generalisation, but I can cite dozens of examples from this five day visit and my previous trip, of how the Palestinians are humiliated on a daily basis, their dignity battered, they are treated like criminals, locked up in cages, driven on by loaded machine guns. This is daily life for almost all Palestinians. Whenever they want to go from A to B they have to run past loaded guns which are pointed at them. The checkpoint in Gaza looks like Germany's East-West crossings, except that the Palestinians are not sitting in cars, but sent running through the barriers like pigs. At the checkpoint one Israeli soldier asked me what I was doing there, was I a vet?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 04.08.2005

Berlin's Museum Island (3D model) dominates the first page of the SZ feuilleton. There are five museums on the island in the centre of the city, all built between 1830 and 1930: the Alte Museum built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Neue Museum by Friedrich August Stüler which has been a ruin since 1954, the Alte Nationalgalerie which reopened in 2002, the Bodemuseum and Alfred Messel's Pergamon Museum. All five are being renovated, partily extended and connected by a system of underground "archaeological promenades". The renovations are due for completion in 2009. This week, the Society for Historical Berlin criticised the modernisation plans of British architect David Chipperfield who is in charge of the reconstruction of the Neue Museum and has designed a new central entrance hall. The "Society" however wants a complete reconstruction of the Neue Museum. In an interview, Chipperfield defends his concept. "We researched all possibilities and decided on a conserving restoration. We are keeping all the rooms, the structures, the walls of the Neue Museum, we are replacing the missing section of the building, but with a huge amount of care. Are we supposed to reinvent the lost decorative elements? This is not a solution. The Neue Museum is a memorial of the highest calibre. It's important to take a great deal of care not to make a synthetic copy. That would destroy the original. ... Which history should be reconstructed here anyway? Should we re-erect the original Stüler building? What would we do with all the alterations that were undertaken in the 1920s? I suspect the Society is interested in the Prussian period more than anything else. It is polemically pursuing a particular idea of history."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 04.08.2005

The FRplus features an interview with London-based writer Nadeem Aslam, about his new book "Maps for Lost Lovers" and the period following the bomb attacks. "When I stood in front of the house of the suicide bomber Shehzad Tanweer, I saw the flowers in the garden and the car that desperately needed a wash. And it made me think that his mother must have planted the flowers six or eight weeks ago, before she had any idea that her son would be responsible for a mass murder and that I would end up standing in her garden. It made me think about the saying that evil is banal and about what hides behind facades. Mothers have a precarious role in Muslim society. They do not have equal rights as women, and yet they are responsible for making sure that nothing changes by raising their sons as chauvinists. And of course the understanding of roles which is passed down also has to do with economical and political conditions."


On Bayreuth and Christoph Schlingensief

Reporting from the Bayreuth Festival for the Frankfurter Rundschau, Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich tries to explain why Christoph Schlingensief's "Parsifal" is still enjoying cult status in its second year. "The professional virtuosity is still astonishing. Schlingensief makes a perfect synaesthetic connection between the crappily refined carefully dosed kinetic elements which are united on the one hand with abstract lighting techniques (light plays a much more effective role here than in Marthaler's Tristan – see Jungheinrich's review here) and on the other hand, the tropical African atmosphere, which is so fundamental to Schingensief's syncretic convergence."

Schlingensief's own statements are a little easier to understand. He writes in Die Zeit that he finds Angela Merkel "super cute" and that he's had enough of Gerhard Schröder. "For me, he's a 68er who wanted to show off his huge balls again. I can't take it any more. If everyone finds the CDU so great, then as far as I'm concerned, they should singe their arses on the hot seat for the next four years."