Among contemporary German authors, one stands out who for years has been able to operate in various forms of expression and does not fit into any category: Thomas Kapielski....
more
The New York Review of Books | Prospect | Le point | L'Espresso | Gazeta Wyborcza | Elet es Irodalom | The Times Literary Supplement | Folio | Al Ahram Weekly | Rue89 | The Nation
The New York Review of Books 25.09.2008 (USA)
Putin's invasion of Georgia has not altered the balance of power in the Caucasus, writes George Friedman, this happened long ago. "Far more importantly, Putin's invasion revealed an open secret. While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts, and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. In July, the Czech government signed an agreement with the United States to set up a ballistic missile defense installation in the Czech Republic, and in August, days after the conflict in Georgia began, the Polish government announced that it has agreed to allow the Americans to build an anti-missile base in Poland. (...) The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk."
Prospect 01.09.2008 (UK)
The best way to gauge Russia's desire to feel like a superpower is to look at its politics of memory. And nowhere are these better illustrated than in a new history book for Russian schoolchildren that was a pet project of Putin's, as Arkady Ostrovsky reports in the cover story."'The Soviet Union,' the new textbook explains, 'was not a democracy, but it was an example for millions of people around the world of the best and fairest society.' Furthermore, over the past 70 years, the USSR, 'a gigantic superpower which managed a social revolution and won the most cruel of wars,' effectively put pressure on western countries to give due regard to human rights. In the early part of the 21st century, continues the textbook, the west has been hostile to Russia and pursued a policy of double standards." None of this is coincidental, Ostrovsky concludes. There is no trace of liberal society in Russia today; instead Stalin is defended, if not celebrated outright.
Le point 28.08.2008 (France)
Having reaped heavy criticism both for his report from the war zone in Georgia and his article for Liberation written in conjunction with Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy lists the conclusions he feels should be drawn from "this summer's aggressions", and firmly positions himself on the side of the Georgians. What outrages him most about the Russian government is "the unimaginable cheek of these people. Take their use of Kosovo as a precedent. As if you could lump together the case of a Serbian province that was martyred, destroyed and beset by appalling ethic cleansing, with the situation of Ossetia as the victim of a 'genocide' which according to the latest reports (Human Rights Watch) claimed 47 lives... The Olympic gold medal goes to Monsieur Putin for cynicism and distortion of the facts!"
L'Espresso 28.08.2008 (Italy)
The fire under the melting pot of New York has long flickered out, writes Indian author Suketu Mehta. Today's immigrants live in self-sufficient communities. "Immigrants no longer feel the need to adopt an American Way of Life, however imaginary and idealised such a thing might be; they can live in America more or less as they did before moving there. If, on a cold January morning, you walk under the bridge of Manhattan, you might come across hundreds of young Mexicans running around brandishing pictures of Jesus, wearing T-shirts featuring the saint of their hometown Puebla. This is a ritual procession called Antocha, and originally it was the pilgrimage from Mexico City to Puebla in honour of the saint, except that these young people are running from the centre of Manhattan to a church in Brooklyn."
Gazeta Wyborcza 30.08.2008 (Poland)
Alina Kilian remembers the fate of the Polish Danzigers. Before 1945 they were discriminated against and publicly persecuted by the Nazis, and after the war they were despised by many Polish new arrivals as "Volksdeutsche" which prompted many of them to flee – to Germany. "Printed reports of their experiences were seldom paid any heed in Poland. Most of today's knowledge about pre-war Gdansk stems from Günther Grass's books. In his works about the city, however, Grass never left his petty bourgeois milieu, and he has never mentioned the Polish population in an interview. The 'Danzigers' have been erased from memory."
Elet es Irodalom 29.08.2008 (Hungary)
According to the Dutch cultural attache and organiser of the Dutch LOW cultural festival in Hungary, Jan Kennis, the Hungarian cultural scene is not a patch on its Dutch counterpart. This is mainly because Hungarian culture is stewing in its own juices and it lacks the proper networks for innovative initiatives. What Hungary needs is an "Operation Paprika", something akin to the "Action Tomato" of 1969, where students in Amsterdam protested for a complete rehaul of the theatre establishment. "Compared with the musty atmosphere in the Netherlands at the end of the 60s, Budapest is much better off. But the city must open its doors to the international cultural elite. It should be standard policy for Hungarian institutions to work with foreign institutions... As a foreigner, I would be interested in finding out how this situation came about. It is the result of conscious policy. Pure disinterest? Or is it down to a lack of networks?"
The Times Literary Supplement 29.08.2008 (UK)
"Imagine Balanchine watching a bunch of cheerleaders and you've got this book in a flash," writes Clive James in his review of Joseph Hororwitz's research into the impact of exiled European artists on American culture, "Artists in Exile". Schönberg, who played ping-pong with his neighbour Gershwin is a classic example: "He actually had to concentrate quite hard to stay unpopular, cursing himself whenever he lapsed from the atonal back into something that a non-expert audience might have liked. Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. Korngold's success might have seemed silly and Weill's meretricious, but the possibilities were there: more possibilities than most of them could handle."
Folio 01.09.2008 (Switzerland)
In a fond farewell to the holiday season, the editors have dedicated this week's magazine to dream journeys. Peter Haffner portrays the New York Explorers Club whose 3000 members worldwide have to have more under their belts than a subscription to the Club Med newsletter. "One vitrine, which is dedicated to the recently deceased Himalayas conqueror and honorary president of the club, Edmund Hillary, explains that every British expedition since 1933 was equipped with Ovomaltine. The next displays a collection of skulls and books with titles such as 'Six Came Back'. Over the door of the auditorium hang the skis of the North Pole expedition undertaken by Matthew Henson and Robert Peary in 1909 – other club members from an era that formed the epilogue to the age of discovery. In those days there were still places that were untouched by human feet. But the club had plenty of members to fix that – Peary in the North Pole, Roald Amundsen ain the South Pole, Edmund Hillary on Everest, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh at the Mariana Trench, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on the moon."
Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov, who has spent more time in orbit than any other human being, talks to Ulrich Schmid about the smell of the universe. "Incomparable. It smells like nothing on Earth. I hope you understand, I am not talking about the smell of the capsule, or the spacesuit. I am talking about the universe. I know this is impossible. You can't smell the vacuum of space. But strangely all cosmonauts say the same thing. We all long for this peculiar metallic smell. It's hard to explain. Perhaps it's particular gases, or particular ions that change their structure in the vacuum. It's fascinating."
Al Ahram Weekly 28.08.2008 (Egypt)
Egypt has been trying for some time now to encourage its citizens to read. Opinions diverge as to the success of the initiative, as Dina Ezzat reports: "Official estimates of the number of readers who make use of public reading facilities also vary. Some officials suggest that close to 20 million people - including those who visit the libraries to read and borrow books and those who buy subsidized copies - benefit from the wide network of public libraries and the 'Reading for All' campaign every year, while others suggest that this number does not exceed a mere three million. On state radio and TV reading is extensively promoted. In promotion spots appearing on television, for example, Mrs Suzanne Mubarak calls on every family member to join the campaign. Film and sports stars also appear in the advertisements. Nevertheless, for the most part the public libraries, especially the Mubarak Libraries - the larger libraries that will soon number 12 across Egypt - and the culture centres still serve more as places to learn foreign languages and to do summer activities than they do to engage in serious reading."
Rue89 27.08.2008 (France)
Rue89 features a small dossier on the final report by the Mucyo Commission (here as pdf) published at the start of August, which examines the French role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Gabriel Peries and David Servenay introduce excepts from the report. An official statement on the report has yet to be released in France, although there has been some talk of "unacceptable allegations" at the French Foreign Ministry.
In a follow-up article the two writers examine the extent to which, between 1990 and 1994, France conducted a secret war in thr form of an indirect strategy based on the doctrine of revolutionary war that was used by French officers in Indochina in 1953. "You might ask what all this has to do with Rwanda? The parallels are so numerous that they stretch beyond harmless coincidence... The French soldiers never lost their knowledge. In spite of the ban on teaching this doctrine in the French motherland, which was decreed by de Gaulle after the putsch des generaux (1961 in Algeria), in spite of political alternatives, the special forces (troops from the marines, the legion and the police) held fast to this achievement, particularly in Africa."
The Nation 15.09.2008 (USA)
New Orleans is in a bad way, and this has nothing to do with hurricane Gustav. Lizzy Ratner reports on the attempts by the wealthy and the white, particularly wealthy whites, to redraw the colour line. "Barely two months into the recovery, St. Bernard's governing council passed a twelve-month ban on 'the re-establishment and development' of multifamily dwellings, stalling the reconstruction of affordable housing complexes. But the council truly distinguished itself in September 2006 when it passed an ordinance that, critics said, danced about as close to legalized segregation as perhaps any law since 1972, the year Louisiana finally deleted its Jim Crow laws. Known as the 'blood relative ordinance,' this law prohibited homeowners from renting their properties to anyone who was not a bona fide blood relation without first obtaining a permit - a loaded concept anywhere, but particularly in St. Bernard, where the white majority owned 93 percent of the pre-storm housing." The website also features a letter from Michael Moore to God about Gustav.
RSS
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.
Mediapart decries the connivances of French politics and media. In the Nation, Colin Robinson picks a fight with Amazon. Osteuropa rolls out the red carpet for the composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. The London Review remembers the media feeding frenzy around Tolstoy's deathbed. In Opendemocracy, the poet Tatiana Shcherbina feels the evil creeping back into Russia.
The Swiss Magazin looks at the lawyers and doctors who are producing stewardesses and farmers. Caffe Europa shares Ulrich Beck's optimism about the religious mix of the future. The Boston Globe looks at the powerlessness of facts in the face of false convictions. In Le Monde, Michel Onfray trembles before the language of empire. The New Statesmen evaluates the new young supertaskers. The TLS reads a book about 19th anarchists. Outlook India and the NYT tackle terror in India, Pakistan and Yemen.
The New Yorker wonders which is better equipped to determine the authenticity of a Leonardo da Vinci: the connoisseur or the forensic scientist. Polityka picks through the remains of the Fourth Republic. In The Observer, Claire Denis talks about shame and humiliation. In La regle du jeu, Roberto Saviano does not like what he sees in the eyes of his admirers. MicroMega has witnessed the birth of a political monster: illiberal democracy. The London Review of Books is looking for aliens to take care of our nuclear waste.
The New Yorker profiles Saad Mohseni, Afghanistan's first media mogul. La vie des idees and the Guardian recommend Gilbert Achcar's book "The Arabs and the Holocaust". The children in Hungary are eating their revolution, fears Elet es Irodalom. Magyar Narancs and Rue89 fear for independence of the press. In Open Democracy, Lisbet Rausing worries about the future of the library. In the NYRB, Tim Parks warns non-English writing authors against liberal international readers.
The Walrus strolls through Johannesburg with the flaneurs. In Telerama, Olivier Bomsel defines the digital as script.The London Review is peeved that Christopher Hitchens is having so much fun. In Osteuropa, Hungarian writers and nihilists weave away at the deadly void. The New Statesman reads Vasili Grossman's "Everything Flows" and meets the great man's daughter. Al Ahram warns European Muslims about the perils of Salafism. Salon asks why Adrian Lamo turned in the alleged whistle-blower Bradley Manning and what Wired's Kevin Poulsen had to do with it.
The big stories of our time are being told in reportage rather than fiction, says novelist Geoff Dyer in the Guardian. Lettre International meets the marginalised in Rome and Rotterdam. In Espresso, Umberto Eco fantasises about 6 billion encyclopaedias. The Nation finds many ways to erase Israel from the map without being anti-Semitic. The Spectator speculates about the counter-cultural concentration camp that Glastonbury has become. The Atlantic waves farewell to men.
Prospect chucks contemporary art into the dustbin of history. Where it will join Polish book culture, if Res Publica Nowa is to be believed. And iTunes to boot, according to the New Yorker. In El Pais Semanal, the physicist Michio Kaku sees the internet everywhere. Young people however, claims the LRB, are proving remarkably resilient to its influences. In the NYRB, Timothy Snyder reviews Christopher R. Browning's new book "Remembering Survival" about the ghetto in Wierzbnik. Le Monde puts three Chinese dissidents on a pedestal.
The New Yorker escorts us into the extraordinary paranoid world of Wikileak founder Julian Assange. In Merkur, Udo di Fabio praises the egalitarian properties of money. The Economist discusses the latest mass import in Africa: homophobia. In Micromega, Paolo Flores d'Arcais cannot understand why Saviano needs defrocking. Paris is partying in celebration of the collapse of the Anglo-American system, das Magazin reports. n+1 delves into the Berlin Roman. The New York Times charts the success of Dutch politician Job Cohen.
The NYRB takes on the privatisation of the net by Steven P. Jobs. The NYT is already bored of life in the suburban Applecrest Estates. In Eurozine, Sven Egil Omdal delivers a comprehensive report on the crisis in the Norwegian newspaper industry. The Walrus learns how to become an expert from the unrepentant whore Jamie Lee Hamilton. In Elet and Irodalom, we learn how Hungarian nationalism foments Slovak nationalism, And Umberto Eco explains in Espresso, why he would never boycott Gianni Vattimo.
The Nation reads Jonathan Israel's history of radical Enlightenment. In Elet es Irodalom, György Konrad tells the Hungarians to stand up for freedom or kiss it goodbye. English is a Dalit goddess, standing on a computer, Tehelka says, and there's nothing you can do about it. In the Atlantic, Google's Eric Schmidt loses himself in his creepily colourful vision of the future. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg gives publishers the answer one would have expected from Google. Slate asks why Paul Berman is not being discussed by Arab intellectuals. Tygodnik Powszechny thinks about Polish-Russian reconcilation. Prospect explains why, in the future, you will be arrested for over-frequent visits to the toilet when flying.
The NYRB solves the Cuba dilemma. In Eurozine, Martina Simecka and Laszlo Rajk talk about their fathers, prominent communists who were persecuted by communists. Julian Barnes reads Eugene Delacroix's diary for the TLS. Odra asks why Bogdan Wojdowski has been forgotten. In Le point, BHL explains why he supports JCall's "Call for Reason". The New Yorker portrays Andrei Ternowski, the 17-year-old Chatroulette inventor. Wired calls on programmers to create a new Facebook, where privacy is respected.
The New York Times dives into the data streams of the self-trackers. N+1 assesses "The Intellectual Situation". In the Onfray vs. Freud debate, BHL defends the psychoanalyst against fatuous platitudes. Peter Nadas tells Magyar Narancs that capitalism will be to blame if Hungary goes to the dogs. For Tony Judt, re-education is the only way to combat authoritarianism. And in Salon, Miroslav Kusy explains that, in Slovakia, "the people" have been replaced by "human beings", but "citizens" have yet to be invited into the political arena.
In Eurozine, Kenan Malik asks what makes a real Muslim. For Osteuropa, Serhij Zadan travels though Ukraine's death valley. Wired visits old hackers. The most pig-headed of them, Richard Stallman, explains in the Boston Review, why cloud computing means thinking like a sucker. Frontline crosses the digital divide to where linux has transformed the lives of children in rural Bengal. The NYRB looks at why, after receiving 26 billion dollars in aid, Ethiopians are still hungry. In Magazin, the psychoanalyst Jürg Atlin warns about over-enthusiasm for cleansing in the wake of the paedophile scandals. Magyar Naracs observes a sacralisation of the state in Poland.