Die Welt 02.11.2006

Miriam Lau criticises the Green Party for demanding freedom of expression for their party colleague Ekin Deligöz but refusing to support her call to Muslim women to remove their headscarves. "It would have been nice if the Green fraction had positioned itself behind Mrs. Deligöz: take off the headscarf! It's a symbol of demarcation from German society, in many cases of contempt. Take it off and enter the present! Instead we constantly hear the same phrases and excuses, like mantras: as long as the scarf is being worn voluntarily, it's up to the individual to decide."

Manuel Brug is not entirely convinced by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Sir Simon Rattle: "Today the orchestra sounds somewhat more garish, abrasive, rough. Abbado often left the musicians unclear in rehearsals, before using minimal gestures in the performance to bring things to a spiritual climax in an almost guru-like way. Those who were there will never forget the silent, intense emotion of Abbado's rendition of the wistful German Requiem on the 100th anniversary of Brahms' death in the Vienna Musikverein in 1997. Rattle, on the other hand, goes at the work with the same musicians in an almost casual way. He doggedly pursues his own idiosyncratic visions for short moments, before letting things go again for long spells. Yet he can never bring himself to make a real statement. He tries things out in an almost improvisational way before a sometimes astonished, sometimes unsure audience that bears witness to a creative process which neither can nor is meant to come to a finished result." See our feature "Rattle's downward roll" by Manuel Brug.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 02.11.2006

Jan-Werner Müller feels that in his book "Murder in Amsterdam," Ian Buruma uses the examples of Pim Fortuyn, Theo von Gogh, Ayaa Hirsi Ali and others to demonstrate the failure of multiculturalism in the Netherlands. "Buruma wants to show principally one thing: how particularly Dutch the personalities and the general character of the 'drama' are – and how people who seem at first glance to be fundamentally opposite in fact share common perspectives, which can only be understood in the Dutch context. It is, for example, a kind of dwindling Calvinism which still holds a strict ethical attitude for the only respectable position... Thus far this heritage has been propagated by an elite that hardly distinguishes itself from the good citizens that Frans Hals once portrayed: responsible, self-confident but also self-satisfied."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.11.2006

"This is an oasis, a refuge for forbidden paintings," writes Sonja Zekri in astonishment about the sensational collection of disfavoured modern Soviet art, gathered by the artist and inspired museum founder Igor Savitzky in Nukus, Uzbekistan. "It's hard to say which happy circumstances were the most decisive: that Savitzky came to Central Asia with an archaeological expedition in the middle of the 50s; that he – like so many Russian artists – fell in love with the powerful Central Asian sky; or that he moved from the Arbat in Moscow to this out of the way Uzbek province and convinced the potentates in Nukus that what their backwater needed most was a museum. Savitzky got one, and yet it would never have become a secret tip among Soviet intellectuals if he hadn't developed a potentially fatal quirk. He began collecting works of the avant-garde, ostracised art from the 20s and 30s which in the heyday of Soviet Realism with its healthy peasant women and smiling metal workers was about as welcome as a love letter from Leon Trotzky."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.11.2006

Kestin Holm wanders through the Millionaire's Fair in Moscow where one can roll gold leaf cigarettes for a hundred dollars apiece. The target group includes the "Chechen prime minister with presidential aspirations Ramsan Kadyrov, who charged the recently murdered journalist Anna Politkowskaya (more) with being a criminal sadist and who trailed through the fair with a large entourage on the weekend."