In 2012, the new Berlin airport Berlin-Brandenburg will be opened in Schönefeld. The city is looking for new uses for the old airports Tempelhof and Tegel. ...
more
Megacity Cairo. For author Belal Fadl, it is the stage for the struggle between the rich and poor. At the same time, it's a continual source of inspiration. Deutsche Welle ...
RSS
This year's theatre festival in Bregrenz hosted the world premiere of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's Auschwitz opera "The Passenger" from 1968. His biographer David Fanning introduces the life and music of this incredibly prolific composer, whose work somehow failed to emerge from the shadows of the Iron Curtain.
The Hungarian magazines are thrilled to be able to read Herta Müller's "Everything I Own I Carry With Me". In the Blätter, Jürgen Habermas calls for an extension of human rights into the social sphere. In La regle du jeu, big name European intellectuals defend their Croatian colleague Predrag Matvejevitch, who faces imprisonment for describing an ultra-nationalist Croatian poet as the "Catholic Taliban". Slate wants to know whether Nabokov's poem "Pale Fire" was meant seriously or not. The TLS meets radical feminists with fabulous names - like the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre. Przekroj looks at the two types of Turkish cinema. And in the NYT, Jay Rosen explains why the Internet is eroding America's most beautiful ideal.
Former East-German novelist Christa Wolf has spent a lifetime writing against forgetting and the repression of guilt. But the will to remember, it seems, has not been enough to prevent her from doing exactly that. Her biographer Jörg Magenau reviews her new autobiographical novel "Stadt der Engel", which ends in Death Valley. Perhaps 'dead end' would have been more to the point. Photo:©Susanne Schleyer
Robert Schumann was born 200 years ago on June 8. The conductor and composer Heinz Holliger, who has devoted his life to the study of Romantic master, talks to Claus Spahn about the his labyrinthine imagination, erudition and incredible modernity. He also dispels a string of clichees that have consigned so much of the Schumann's work to musical oblivion.
Joachim Gauck was a leading oppositional figure in the GDR. After the fall of the Wall he became the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files. He is now director of the "Against Forgetting – For Democracy" association in Berlin and has just been nominated as a candidate for the next German president. He talks to Joachim Günther about Ossis and Wessis, opposition, conformism, and the long-term psychological effects of a dictatorial regime.
Olivier Roy is one of Europe's leading experts on Islam. His new book "Holy Ignorance" is due to be published this autumn. Eren Güvercin talks to him about issues central to the debate about Islam in Europe, from revolutionary milleniarism to Muslim Luthenarianism.
The Austrian writer Josef Haslinger talks about his sexual encounters with paedophile priests as a boy in a Catholic boarding school. Instead of joining the chorus of moral outrage, he acknowledges the full spectrum of feelings that these episodes provoked, and argues that simple criminalisation is not the way forward.
Since its publication in January, Helene Hegemann's novel "Axolotl Roadkill" has been at the centre of a debate whose vagaries of terminology have allowed the seriousness of the case to be downplayed. Philipp Theisohn wishes the literary establishment would drop all its talk of intertextuality in favour of a more democratic category: plagiarism.
The Dutch polder model is under threat. The PVV party of Dutch Islam critic Geert Wilders stands a good chance of victory in the next elections, which have been been brought forward to June. In the election campaign the Dutch elite will be hard pushed to steer political debate or discuss key issues in any nuanced way. By Hans Maarten van den Brink
Thirty years of superficial reporting by the Western press neglected the build up to the current turmoil in Tehran. Iranians are not risking their lives because of an alleged election fraud last June, but because they have endured thirty years of brutality, humiliation and frustration. By Haideh Daragahi
As rector of the Albert Ludwig University in the winter of 1933/34, Martin Heidegger gave a seminar which was said to contain decisive evidence of the total identification of his teachings with the principles of Hitlerism. Now, thanks to his son Hermann Heidegger, the secret transcripts of this seminar "On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State" have been published for the first time. By Alexander Kissler 
The new novel by Nobel laureate Herta Müller tells of a harrowing experience which will leave an indelible stamp on its survivor for the rest of his life. Her book stems from interviews with the poet Oskar Pastior and other Gulag survivors. An excerpt in English.