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

04/04/2006

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.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04.04.2006

The FAZ prints Andrzej Stasiuk's bitter summary of the happenings in Minsk. "Democratic Belarus has lost. Anyone who has the slightest clue of what's going on in the east of this continent will not be surprised." Stasiuk is deeply disappointed by Western Europeans' lack of interest in Eastern Europeans' aspirations to the EU. "Being European means committing to and being willing to fight for European values. Risking your life for them. If other criteria are now supposed to define being European, we can forget the old continent. You have to be really blind, deaf and clueless not to notice that Europe is constantly getting weaker and less significant, that its military, economic, innovative and demographic potential is on the wane..." (see our feature "The sweet taste of underground" by Andrzej Stasiuk)


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 04.04.2006


Hans-Joachim Müller gushes about the large exhibition of the work of Hans Holbein the Younger in the Kunstmuseum Basel. "There is a modernity to the work that makes the painter seem much closer and more contemporary today. Never before has a Holbein exhibition succeeded in making so fascinatingly clear the brilliance with which this artist transformed his visual impressions, his mastery of the grammar of particular techniques, his ability to respond to local customs and cater to the taste of the times. Holbein flatters the Lady with a secretive smile, a decent investment of power through the subtle means of iconography."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 04.04.2006

The paper interviews Georgian-German author Giwi Margwelaschwili and German-Iranian author Said, two winners of this year's Goethe Medal for promoting German culture abroad. For Said, Iranians know much more about European authors than vice-versa. "Almost everything by Ignazio Silone has appeared in Iran, and it's still hugely influential today. His attitude towards fascism under Mussolini has so many analogies that Iranian readers identify easily with the protagonist. They read the way people used to in the GDR, between the lines. And like in the Soview Union, paper is in the hands of the state. That's still the best means of censorship. For years Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita' was the novel par excellence in Tehran, by the way. Everyone read it.... Bulgakov's target was the structure of brain-washing. And that's just as acute today as it was in the past. You can simply take out Stalin's name, for example, and put in Khomeini. That's the advantage of literature. It retains its immediacy through the distance in space and time. And it creates a global space for reflection."

Last week, during a heated discussion at the Literarische Colloquium in Berlin of Volker Weidermann's recent anthology of German literature "Lichtjahre", literature critic Hubert Winkel got called "an asshole". This appellation has prompted a debate in the feuilletons over the basis of literary criticism in which two identifiable camps have emerged. The "emphatics" are driven by emotional impulse while the "gnostics" try to apply more objective standards. Aligning herself with the latter, Ina Hartwig sees "Lichtjahre" less as a history of literature and more as "authors' biographical kitsch." "Discretion, appropriateness- these are the categories that tend to get ignored in this approach that is calling itself 'passionate', that is looking to be 'excited'. Instead, assumptions are made, praise is spouted, as in the following paragraph about Gottfried Benn: 'His poems really shone. They sounded like nothing else. Nobody else could or can do that. So clear, lonely, strong, light, wonderfully optimistic, wise, knowledgeable, questioning and simply very, very nice.' Such a statement seems to presume that others will undertake to think about literary works, to explain their structure, to identifiy the criteria that inform their judgement. Weidermann, literature editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung, has made passion programmatic. Me and the famous writer at the Italian restaurant! But what is a passion that constantly has to attest to itself? A boring passion."


Die Welt, 04.04.2006


Kai Luehrs-Kaiser praises Kirill Petrenko, first conductor and musical director at Berlin's Komische Oper, calling him a major exception among maestros: "With Petrenko, the maestro has learned humility. Petrenko has all the self-doubt of Woody Allen, and the charisma of a ginseng root." But: "Wherever he's performed in the last year and a half – including the Berlin Philharmoniker -, his aplomb, his authoritative manner and his musical depth have made a huge impression. 'I'm as slow as I can be, I'm working on an anti-career,' he says, putting a damper on booking agents' expectations. Petrenko hates the pressure put on conductors to keep improving, and is continually a half-hour's preparation short of happiness. But since 2002 the orchestra at the Komische Oper has been sounding smoother, more wilful, more weighty than ever."


Berliner Zeitung, 04.04.2006

In an interview with Johannes Wetzel, French historian Max Gallo puts his faith in the national pride of the French as an answer to the current crisis: "It's time we rediscovered the strength and modernity of patriotism. France is the oldest nation in Europe, and that's why we resist globalisation, and the way European unification is taking place, more than other countries. There will be no solution to the national crisis in France that does not – as historian Fernand Braudel says – allow for the 'central problematic' of the nation. To that problematic belongs the fact that the state and the nation that created it are tightly aligned. To it belongs the need for equality – exactly what is behind the unrest. And to it, thirdly, belongs the relationship of the citizen to the state, which is increasingly threatened by group identities. Citizens no longer feel represented by their politicians, or by the state. And if you measure a democracy by its efficiency at renewing the ranks of its elites, things don't look good for France."


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