Süddeutsche Zeitung 25.10.2006

The literature section prints part of Peter Nadas' unsettling memories of the Hungarian Uprising from his novel "Parallel Stories," which will be published in German in 2008 (more here). "There was no more milk to be had in the city. It happened in broad daylight, sallow sunshine filtered through the autumn haze. The woman ran toward us from the other direction. Some of us were waiting for a moment when we could run too. When her bucket was hit she stopped in amazement, as if she couldn't believe it. The milk gushed out of the bucket in two streams. But that let us know there was still milk somewhere, that milk was still being dispensed somewhere. The milk streaming out of her bucket seemed to be the most important thing of all. The woman didn't even duck, she just fell to her knees and smashed the bucket angrily against the ground. Three times, four times, without letting go of the handle. The others screamed, several people all at once, but their screams came too late."

Annette Lettau reviews the return of the coloured museum wall. At the forefront of the movement is Munich's Lenbachhaus, where four rooms of paintings have been re-designed by contemporary artists. In an interview, director Helmut Friedel defends Thomas Demand's controversial ivy wallpaper. "He has consciously concentrated his black and white ivy pattern on August Macke's prismatic forms. After all ivy is also a black crepe, which reflects Macke's premature and tragic death. But the critics will no doubt have plenty to say about Katharina Grosse's grafitti which starts at a Jawlensky painting and gushes across the wall to the floor."


Die Welt 25.10.2006

The writer Zsuzsa Bank, whose parents managed to flee to Germany after the Revolution in Hungary, describes what 1956 means to her: "At the very latest I discovered that the entire world was looking toward Hungary and its Uprising when I left our kitchen table and entered my classroom. I was bemused to hear that my parents were already a part of the history that I was supposed to discuss, that they were now between book covers. They sang slogans, carried banners, demanded freedom, tore down red Soviet stars, climbed up on top of tanks, and then, on a cold November day, they jumped onto a train without suitcases or bags and fled across the border. I could have said something like, this is about us, that's us. But one unanswerable question hammered and gnawed at me: why didn't anyone listen to the cry for help sent out by the Hungarian radio to the United Nations and the entire world?"


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 25.10.2006

Forty years ago saw the start of the Cultural Revolution in China, Mark Siemons remembers, and it has never been so taboo. "The media were already instructed back in the spring not to breathe a word about the anniversary year. No events are permitted." To explain this silence, Siemons quotes the intellectual historian Wang Hui of Beijing's Tsinghua University. "Any criticism of the present can be denounced as a backslide to the Cultural Revolution and therefore as completely irrational, writes Wang in his book 'China's New Order'. In particular the despotic control mechanisms and the antisocial excrescences of the market use these methods as validation." (Here an exerpt from Wang Hui's book)


Die Tageszeitung 25.10.2006

At a Rebecca Horn retrospective in Berlin's Martin Gropius Bau, Katrin Bettina-Müller walked through four decades of the Berlin artist's career, and watched as "poetics and mechanics increasingly dried up into esoterica, bombast and pathos". "The waning enthusiasm for Rebecca Horn's work can most certainly be explained by the fact that later artists have now gone further along similar paths. Sculpture and film are for example similarly linked in Matthew Barney's work. Both artists work with objects which have a double life as props in films and as autonomous sculptures outside, that allow themselves to be clamped into narrative and mythological connections only to free themselves again. In both, the idea of restraint hampers art in its becoming. And in both the urge to complicate the creation of art turns into an independent story.... This all means that the impatience one feels at the repetitions in Rebecca Horn's work feels a bit like matricide."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 25.10.2006

Swiss author Michel Mettler describes how people react when they find out he lives in the Canton of Aargau outside Zurich. "'In Aargau?' His face is full of pity, the question rhetorical. He heard me fine, he's just trying to buy time. He casts about for an answer that wouldn't inflict unnecessary pain on my vulnerable suburban soul. Because perhaps, he thinks, for all his rational appearance, this person has actually chosen to live there, in self-determined isolation among test reactors and petrol station shops. Maybe he's an asphalt hermit, a humble agglomeration dervish, who's gone in search of the Tao of the arterial roads and the anti-charm of the DIY centres. Not very likely, but it can't be ruled out altogether. But really, I read in the incredulous, smiling face, there's only one legitimate reason for living in Aargau, and that's because you still haven't found an affordable place in Zurich."