Neue Zürcher Zeitung 07.03.2009

Next week, historian Karl Schlögel will receive the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding. Joachim Güntner talks in depth with Schlögel about his last book, "Terror und Traum" (Terror and Dream). Schlögel explains how he makes Stalinism comprehensible for his students. "As postwar children, my students are just as clueless as I am. They don't know what violence, hunger, and adversity mean. In order to generate at least some awareness of the problem, we undertake a few imaginary endeavors. For example, I read them reports from the Gulag by Varlam Shalamov. I want to give them an idea of what it means to work at minus 40 degrees without being able to recuperate. How one survives for a certain time, even if only for a month. And then I formulate the rule: 'Please, no discussions about Stalinism without the cold'."


Die Tageszeitung 10.03.2009

The founding of a state is always an act of violence, says Klaus Bittermann. So why reprimand the Israelis of all people? "Of course it would have been fairer to the Palestinians if, for example, Bavaria had been made available to the Jews for the founding of Israel, but it's no use mourning this missed opportunity. The decisive question is: How does Israel treat its minorities? Certainly not to the satisfaction of the minorities, but better than any other state that sees itself threatened by rebels or perhaps even by an imaginary danger. This is the usual justification for repressing and murdering ethnic minorities in countless countries in Africa, Latin America, and Asia - and on a much greater scale than in Israel. And yet it's Israel that gets condemned again and again, in 25 percent of all UN resolutions. As if a territory the size of Hessen were home to 25 percent of global injustice."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 10.03.2009

Sybille Lewitscharoff has just won the Leipzig Book Fair Award for her novel "Apostoloff". Paul Jandl obviously derived much pleasure from the book's "healthy anger" which never makes the "lazy compromise of irony": "How dull are the modulations of love compared with those of hate? What are words of infatuation against those of disillusionment? Enough novels chart the beautiful sentiments of a posterity trembling after the dead, but Sybille Lewitscharoff goes for full-blown heresy. Hate is the driving force behind this breathless reckoning of a daughter with her father. And it masks all her affection. From the back seat of the Daihatsu in which two sisters are driven through Bulgaria, we hear a relentless monologue. 'Hatred of the father and hatred of the homeland are melded into one and kept simmering away defiantly. Bulgaria? Father? One snap-action mechanism.' The journey leads through the desolate cities of Veliko Tarnovo, Arbanassi, Varna and Plovdiv. And on into a father-daughter story which is also an exercise in self-knowledge. 'I must have been a dreadfully humourless child,' intones the voice in the back of the car."


Frankfurter Rundschau 12.03.2009

"Dispossess the dispossessors," cries literary academic Roland Reuß, outraged by the lethargic authors and publishing houses who aren't blocking GoogleBooks: "What's this all about? It's about the forcible attempt at transforming the right of disposal, which was won over the course of a long trial, into a mere right of veto via simple proceedings and thereby settle the collateral damage with riduculous financial payments. Google goes about this more and more brazenly and is collectively depriving the European book production of its spiritual and material basis. And I'm not just referring to the case of finding a volume of letters from our Kleist edition (Letters Vol. 1, 1793-1801), completely scanned and treated with OCR software, on the server of GoogleBooks a few months ago. Here, one could still assume - as is particular to this mindless breed of piracy - that the title was taken for the date of publication. But I also glimpsed a Klett-Cotta volume of Goethe as a so-called full text with 1693 as the date of publication!"


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 13.03.2009

Paul Jandl visited Christoph Schlingensief, who is at Vienna's Burgtheater rehearsing the second part of his autobiographical trilogy, "Mea Culpa", which he began last year after being diagnosed with cancer. "Schlingensief is at least hoping to land in good company when he reaches the afterlife. 'I'd love to meet Bunuel in heaven, because of the obvious affection with which he describes his characters. Bunuel greatly enjoyed looking at women's legs but he also wanted to show the dissolution of humanity. The people in his films are always deeply alone. I feel a close connection with his work.' On this note, Schlingensief's actors have all been given a 'licence to suffer'. Seldom is this new soft approach broken by impatience. 'Please think ahead a little,' his words are directed at the stage where Irm Herrmann, Fritzi Haberland, Mira Partecke und Joachim Meyerhoff are standing. 'Beuys said: Praise more than reprimand! At the moment I want to give out less less criticism and have to swallow less as well.'"

Peter Handke's affection for Serbia is undiminshed, but he has become more thoughtful and nostalgic. Kosovar writer Beqe Cufaj read Handke's new book about his visit last spring to the Serbian enclave in Kosovo "Die Kuckucke von Velika Hoca" (the cuckoo of Velika Hoca). "The book will satisfy those readers who are interested in Handke but not the Balkans. I'm not one of them. For readers who love the Balkans, who have been blessed or cursed by the Balkans, who feel a connection to them, they will sense something missing. Postwar countries are postwar countries because they have people in them who took to the barricades or lay in the trenches. War and peace, this travel book tells us, once the spring comes everything can breathe again. These are the words of a postwar writer."


Die Welt 13.03.2009

Hanns-Georg Rodek looks at the connection between school shootings and pop culture. The Boomtown Rats song 'I Don't Like Mondays' refers to 16-year old girl who shot her fellow pupils in 1979. "Perhaps it's not primarily computer games and violent films which condition the school killers of today and tomorrow. It could also have something to do with the drift into the virtual world. The mouse-click is increasingly replacing personal experience. Investment bankers also destroyed thousands of lives with a click, but these destinies remain abstract – and killing has become similarly abstract for classroom killers. The crime contains a combination of the two: the virtual drill which lowers barriers – and the urge to try things out in the real world."