Why do teenagers find SchülerVZ, flickr or YouTube so fantastic? What are they finding in the communities on the internet that doesn't exist in real life, and what exactly are they doing with it? The JFF- Institut für Medienpädagogik (Institute for Media Education) looks into these questions and learns from a 15 year-old "I think the future will just be one big Second Life."...
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Last week the 1945 Rechnitz massacre hit the headlines after British journalist David Litchfield maintained that Countess Margit von Batthyany, partial heir to the Thyssen industrial family, had taken part in the atrocity. But such speculations belong to the boulevard press. The real issue is the scandalous role of the German postwar criminal justice system in letting the perpetrators escape Germany unharmed. By Stefan Klemp
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A great theatre pair – director Luk Perceval and actor Thomas Thieme talk about fear, fury and self-hatred on the occasion of their five-hour Moliere marathon which just premiered at the Salzburg Festival. And about being a potato. By Peter Michalzik
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Dada is back. Erwin Wurm is the great grandson of the Surrealists. The hilarity and hidden meanings of his stagings and sculptures unsettle and get under your skin. To coincide with a major retrospective in Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, Werner Spies visited the artist in his studio in Vienna.
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In a major interview given a few years before his death, the irascible Austrian author Thomas Bernhard talks about the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men, the corruption of German writers, the twistedness of mankind, the similarities between Christianity and Nazism, the incurability of stupidity and what it means to be branded "Thomas Bernhard" for life. By Werner Wögerbauer (Photo © Andrej Reiser / Suhrkamp Verlag)
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This year's Salzburg Festival of opera, music and dance features an iconoclastic "Marriage of Figaro" that clairvoyantly cuts with the opera buffa tradition. For conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and director Claus Guth the piece is an exploration of the human soul. By Reinhard J. Brembeck
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Austrian author and playwright Peter Handke's political stance on Serbia has not been easy for Western intellectuals to swallow. With the recent scandal of the Heinrich Heine Prize - which was awarded to Handke and then retracted - the writer's views are back in the spotlight. In an in-depth interview with Martin Meyer and Andreas Breitenstein, Handke tries to clarify his understanding of what happened in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
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At the end of May, Austrian author Peter Handke was informed he had been selected as winner of this year's Heinrich Heine Prize awarded by the city of Dusseldorf. A controversy then flared up over Handke's support for Slobodan Milosevic, whereupon the prize was revoked. We've compiled the major voices from the ensuing debate in the German-language press.
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Were it not for Sigmund Freud, the couch would be a normal piece of
furniture. But what's normal anyway? 150 years after his birth, the man who
discovered the unconscious has been re-discovered, or maybe buried for
good. By Daniel Binswanger
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You had to be there. Oliver Fuchs tries to explain the joys of Austrian apres-ski. It's all about joining in the singing and guzzling yourself into a pineapple absinthe coma.
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Viennese physicist Anton Zeilinger thinks about things that are impossible to imagine and so random even God wouldn't understand. His is the world of quantum teleportation. An interview by Mathias Plüss and Regina Hügli (Photo: Jacqueline Godany)
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In Michael Haneke's new film "Cache", a Parisian citizen is confronted with a dark episode from his childhood – and suddenly France's colonial history comes rushing to the surface. The Austrian director talked to Dominik Kamalzadeh about guilt, guilty consciences and the legacy of the Algerian war.
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250 years after his birth, 2006 is Mozart Year. To perform Mozart you need maturity without having lost a youthful touch. A new generation of young talents has put out a selection of recordings, from the sluggish to the sublime. By Wolfram Goertz
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Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker has written a new book of prose, "And I shook a darling", haunted by the ghost of her life-long companion Ernst Jandl, who died in 2000. By Christina Weiss
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Today's theatre is losing its pull. Why? "Maybe we don't cook so well these days. No one goes to a restaurant if it doesn't serve good food. We put ourselves 60 centimetres over other people. If we don't have anything to say, we shouldn't put ourselves there in the first place", says director Andrea Breth. An interview with Stefan Keim and Reinhard Wengierek (Image: © Bernd Uhlig)
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Festival critics rarely agree on anything, but this time it's pretty much unanimous: Willy Decker's staging of "La Traviata" at the Salzburg Festival is a mega-hit. Thanks largely to the stupendous soprano Anna Netrebko. By Jürg Stenzl
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