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GoetheInstitute

09/01/2006

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.

Monday 9 January, 2006

Die Welt, 09.01.2006

Israeli historian Tom Segev bids farewell to the "last Titan" Ariel Sharon. On the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, he writes: "While in the military, more than once Sharon was forced to evacuate one or another unsustainable position in order to stabilise some other front. The evacuation of Gaza was unilateral, unsanctioned, and no heed was paid to the Palestinians, it was as if they didn't exist. It was all about securing the West Bank. No one knew where Sharon would have taken the conflict after the elections. There are no reasons to assume that he knew a way of reaching a compromise with the Palestinians. But whatever his motivations were, Sharon showed the Israelis that the settlements could be cleared – without the sky falling on their heads."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09.01.2006

Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider discusses the moral dialectic that made Ariel Sharon the most-hated Israeli: "He was the country's alter ego, someone the moralists of the world could project their various ideas onto. He was their opposite. While the Israeli peace doves washed their hands in innocence, the 'fanatic' Sharon had been doing their dirty work for them since 1948. Few states are so indebted to international morality for their existence as Israel. The condemnation of the Holocaust and its underlying anti-Semitism owes its force to a revolution in global morality. Over and above the Zionist attempts of the Jews to define themselves as a nation, the Jewish nation has acquired international legitimacy through this worldwide condemnation. The fact that Israeli's legitimacy as a state is based in the global morality of anti-anti-Semitism implies that it is measured against higher moral standards than other states. And that is the basis of anti-Sharonism."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 09.01.2006


Contributing to the debate on whether torture can be used in democracies in certain proscribed circumstances (see "In Today's Feuilletons" of December 23), Peter Fuchs takes a detailed look at what would happen if torture were to be allowed and thus become a public phenomenon in Germany. He concludes that it could never work in a democracy. "How could the media hype be avoided, or even channelled? Are takeaway restaurants permitted in the vicinity of the torture building? Is merchandising allowed? Can church bells ring while torture is taking place? Is product-placement permitted in the location itself? Or related advertisements? For refreshments, painkillers, garlic pills, hygiene products? We assume torture would have to stop during the commercial breaks. Perhaps you could get the viewers involved, with cash prizes for the right answers."


Saturday 7 January, 2006

Die Welt, 07.01.2006


The case of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, who stands trial in his home country for calling the Turkish genocide of the Armenians by its name, has prompted historian Daniel Goldhagen to pen an open letter to the Turkish government. Ten years after the publication of his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" he now recommends Turkey look to the Germans as a successful example of a country dealing with a terrible past. "It is no easy thing to start public discussion, to deal truthfully with the historical crimes of one's own people and to perform reparation duties, but it does create respect for the nation and its people in the long run. Could it honestly be argued that Germany, this leading European nation, welcome member of the European and international community and role model has suffered for its truthfulness? Have Germany's relations with other countries been adversely affected by its readiness to recognise its historical crimes? Has the German economy been weakened? Does German culture no longer flourish?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 07.01.2006

In the weekend edition, Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk writes about the Western world that is making its way East: "And so the world moved in here. Atoms of unfamiliar, unimaginable bodies circled in and evoked far off places and people. Paris – London – New York. Housewifely creatures from the Kurfürstendamm; spaces which until recently were the exclusive realm of sprightly, chocolate-coloured girls from Nice; wool and tweed, permeated into all eternity with the humid aroma of the Thames; pockets containing crumbs of God only knows what – someone tucked something away in Belgium or Holland and not removed it since. And so they made it here, where the sky almost collides with the Carpathians."


Die Tageszeitung, 07.01.2006

Markus Metz and Georg Seeßlen tell a tale of migration stories in German cinema – from Fassbinder's "Katzelmacher" until the end - which seems like it might have been reached. "Maybe all migration stories have been told. Perhaps though, the perception of the subject has become too precise for cinematic fable. Moreover, in the polymigrational society of neo-liberalism, the story of migration can no longer be told in a linear narrative, any more than a story of discovery can be told from the perspective of the stranger: us and them, mainstream and migration, this code and that code, this sort of thing only works now in a mass of tangled threads. Whatever one looks at, questions or even throws accusations at, it always answers back in the same way: sorry, I'm a stranger here myself."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 07.01.2006


2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising. Laszlo Földenyi opens the year with a very engaging essay on the curious Hungarian way of commemorating by forgetting: "Amnesia as an elixir. Not-remembering as the peculiar, Hungarian variant of remembrance. A foreign visitor to Hungary very soon gets the impression that, although on the one hand everyone is caught up with the past and the wounds of the past, on the other hand they seem to shy away from looking the past in the eye – as if deeply troubled by what they were absorbed with on a day to day basis."

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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