Never before have there been so many private collectors making extensive acquisitions of contemporary art. Are they the real key figures of a global art business?...
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Artur Domoslawksi's biography "Ryszard Kapuscinski non-fiction" sparked controversy even before it was published. Not only does it show the legendary reporter warts and all, it also shows where the reportage ends and fiction begins. Polityka's Daniel Passent meets the author who, in spite of it all, still regards Kapuscinski as his friend and master.
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The idea that 1989 came out of thin air speaks volumes about historical insensitivities and limited horizons. The fall of the Berlin Wall was preceded by years of erosion and attrition. Historian Karl Schlögel looks at the molecular movements on the margins of history that are much more powerful than any deeds of "great men".
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"Fear" is the punchy title of book about Polish anti-Semitism whose recent publication in Poland has sparked an emotional debate. Very few people have come to the defence of its author, Jan Tomasz Gross, who has taken on the difficult task of making uncomfortable facts known to a wider audience and removing blind spots in Polish history. By Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz
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Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
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European democracy exists largely within nation-states, and not in the continental dimension. Even the ponderous TV channel "Euro-News" has not succeeded in creating a European public sphere. But without a European consciousness there will be no European federation. For this to happen interpreters are needed, to explain the motives of one side to the other. By Adam Krzeminski
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Despite a serious blow to the Kaczynski twins' lustration law by Poland' s Constitutional Court this May, the country will continue to x-ray its past. Ryszard Kapuscinski, prize-crowned author and reporter who died this year, is the latest of a string of intellectuals to have their secret police past uncovered. By Thomas Urban (Photo: Irmi Long)
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"Strike" – Volker Schlöndorff's most recent film, on the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, is a Gdansk symphony. And Fritz Göttler speculates that it could only have been made by a German.
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Tadeusz Borowski survived Auschwitz, became a Communist, and committed suicide in 1951. A new edition of his stories was published in German this year: morally questionable, but a milestone in Holocaust literature nonetheless. Even Dante's "Inferno" pales by comparison. By Arno Lustiger
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"This year I was struck by the number of articles saying you should do absolutely nothing on your holidays. We Poles have fully embraced the credo 'time is money,' and become a nation of workaholics." Taking the experts at their word, Edwin Bendyk searches for perfect idleness in post-communist Poland.
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Zamosc, the "Padua of the North," planned as an ideal city in the 16th century, is a remote town in the Polish provinces. Until the international art scene came to stay, that is. Now Sabrina van der Ley and Markus Richter have enticed a group of artists to come create works on the theme "Ideal City - Invisible Cities." By Birgit Rieger (Image: Jaroslaw Flicinski, Up, up and away, 2006)
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Adam Krzeminski is outraged by Luciano Canfora's highly selective "Democracy in Europe" which puts Stalinism on a pedestal. He congratulates a German publishing house for refusing to print it and believes European scholarship has shamefully neglected Polish history.
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An interview with Gdansk author Pawel Huelle on the new Polish
government, anti-Semitism in Poland and Kaczynski's "moral revolution". By Gerhard Gnauck
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"Some find smearing the Solidarity revolution and its heroes by means of the secret police archives heroic. Others think it is more like throwing a hand grenade into a cesspool:
some get killed, some injured, and everyone is left soiled and smelly.
This is how we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the August
revolution: bruised, smeared and frustrated. Can't we learn to speak
sensibly about the things we have had the courage to achieve?"
By Adam Michnik
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Polish cinemas are full of films by the younger generation of German filmmakers. Their common theme seems to be rebellion. Or, as Adam Krzeminski sees it, rebellion lite.
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The youngest generation of Polish writers has avidly taken up the political reality of unemployment, the suburban wasteland and consumption terror in a new spirit of anti-capitalism. But the scene's real superstar, Dorota Maslowska (born 1982), is convincing above all aesthetically. In her works, social misery becomes a virtuoso language game. Her second book, a rap poem, has just been presented at the Warsaw Book Fair. By Ina Hartwig
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