Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen.
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Signandsight.com bids farewell after seven exciting and engaging years. Editors Thierry Chervel and Anja Seeliger express their thanks and say a personal good-bye to our readers - while remaining committed to the idea of a public forum dedicated to the motto "Let's Talk European".
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Western museums are opening their halls for huge state exhibitions in collaboration with non-democratic regimes. The British Museum is currently hosting an exhibition on the Hajj which is funded by Saudi Arabia and reflects the royal family's position on the ritual. Should an institution dedicated to secular learning accommodate such religiously doctrinaire exhibitions? Yes, says Malise Ruthven in the New York Review of Books blog, who evidently believes in the conciliatory effects of such cultural politics. Tagesspiegel author Nicola Kuhn sees the new "Roads of Arabia" exhibition in Berlin's Pergamon Museum more critically. Image © National Museum, Riyadh
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Frankfurt's Städelmuseum has just opened its new subterranean contemporary art extension, the culmination of a radical overhaul of the building and its collections. Hans-Joachim Müller ventures down below the surreal domed lawn and is left to meander through a refreshingly idiosyncratic retrospective that turns its back on received ideas about the progress of art. (Image:exterior view of Städel extension by Norbert Miguletz)
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Who actually owns "intellectual property"? The German media that defend the concept of intellectual property as "real" property are the first to appropriate such rights, and they are using this idea as a defensive weapon. With lawmakers extending copyright laws and new structures emerging on the internet, intellectual property poses a serious challenge to the public domain. A survey of the German media landscape by Thierry Chervel
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This year's Berlinale Retrospective "The Red Dream Factory" rediscovers the legendary German-Russian Mezhrabpom-Film (1922-1936). It tells of incredible film successes, ideological misunderstandings and astonishing blindness. By Oksana Bulgakova
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Turkish-born author, actor and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar was recently awarded the Alice Salomon Prize for Poetics. Coming to West Berlin in 1965, Özdamar first learned German at the age of 19. After stage school she went on to become the directorial assistant to Benno Besson and Matthias Langhoff at the Volksbühne in East Berlin while still living in West Berlin. Harald Jähner warmly lauds the author's uniquely visual sense of her acquired language and her ability to overcome the seemingly insurmountable dividing line through the city.
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Filmmaker and theatre director Andres Veiel disagrees with the parallels currently being drawn between left-wing and right-wing violence in Germany. The RAF is the wrong model for the Zwickau neo-Nazi group, the so-called "Brown Army Faction" responsible for a series of murders of Turkish small business owners. Unlike the RAF, this group never publicly claimed responsibility for their crimes. Veiel is emphatic - you have to look at the biographies of the perpetrators. An interview with Heike Karen Runge.
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This year is the 200th anniversary of the death of German writer Heinrich von Kleist. The author Gertrud Leutenegger has a very Kleistian afternoon on Elba, when she encounters the Marquise von O in the waiting room of a very strange eye doctor.
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Germany has been rocked by the disclosures surrounding the series of neo-Nazi murders of Turkish citizens. In the wake of these events, Former GDR dissident Freya Klier calls for an honest look at the xenophobia cultivated by the policies of the former East Germany, where the core of the so-called "Brown Army Faction" was based. And demands that East Germans finally confront a long-denied past. (Photo: © Nadja Klier)
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Read the first English excerpt from historian Goetz Aly's new book "Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred 1800 - 1933". In response to this question that has been hanging in the air since the end of WWII, Goetz Aly points to the lack of education and fear of progress in so many German Christians at the turn of the century - and to the contrasting readiness of the Jewish population to embrace the new opportunities and education as the ticket to social mobility. Shamed by their shortcomings, the Germans soon turned to racial theory to conceal their envy and resentment.
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Andrea Breth has just directed Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" at the Staatsoper in Berlin, to substantial critical acclaim. Mid-rehearsal, she makes time to talk to Niklaus Hablützel about Büchner's word compositions, why only singing beautifully can ruin everything, and the power of curtains.
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In 2007 the rap duo Kinderzimmer Productions disbanded with rapper Henrik von Holtum, alias MC Textor, publishing a ranting manifesto against the rap scene in the Tageszeitung. But Kinderzimmer Productions is back with a new live recording of their old songs - with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Nina Apin from the taz talks with MC Textor about rap, classical music and the question of aging gracefully.
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If geniuses still exist in Germany, then Friedrich Kittler, who died at the age of 68 on 18 October, was one of them. The literary scholar and media theorist wrote as much about drugs as he did about weapons, and he was as interested in war as he was in love. One of his PhD students is a Eurofighter pilot in Afghanistan. Andreas Rosenfelder talked with him in his Berlin apartment at the beginning of the year.
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The Chaos Computer Club's sensational find of a German government trojan has shed light on an extreme case of state surveillance. Spokespersons of the club, Constanze Kurz and Frank Rieger suggest that this is not an isolated case of enforcement overstepping the limits of the law. In an interview with Joachim Güntner they talk about the promise of efficiency, the antagonism of freedom and security, and the society of digital control.
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In their book "Lügendes Licht" (lying light) Thomas Worm and Claudia Karstedt explore the darker side of the EU ban on incandescent bulbs. From disposal issues to energy efficiency, the low-energy bulb is not necessarily a beacon of a greener future. By Brigitte Werneburg
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