Neue Zürcher Zeitung 03.11.2006

Marc Zitzmann takes a look back at the history of Jean Paul Gautier, whose house of fashion has just celebrated its 30th birthday. "Anyone who says 'Gautier', means firstly 'sex'. The views afforded by the transparent material or gaps appear conventionally sexy. Racier is the penchant for conical cups, corsets and screened 'cage skirts.' But what seemed absolutely scandalous in the 1980s were Gautier's borrowings from sex shops: in the departments 'SM' (piercings, chains, plastic and rubber) and 'gay' (sailor's shirts, cowboy chaps, blouses for leather men or macho police and various winks at the world of the gay cartoonist Tom of Finland)."

On the media page, "set" reports that Microsoft has basically won the battle for the living room. In several European countries, Telekom is starting its interactive digital television with wide cable (IPTV) with the set top box from Microsoft. "The danger of the dependence on one producer is not to be underestimated, when it's not just about one software steering a little box for selecting TV programmes. In addition to the interactive television functions, the set top box offers applications like games, chats, email and Internet. In addition, there are the significant functions like the encoding of data and digital rights management (DRM) for music and videos."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 03.11.2006

Jörg Häntzschel reports that almost half a century after he designed it, Le Corbusier's model city Firminy Vert has finally been completed. "Beside the stadium where for decades a bunker-like shape has been falling apart with the rest of the area, light, fresh cement is now gleaming. An atomic energy plant? A rocket silo? It's the Saint Pierre church, which now, 45 years after Le Corbusier designed his ideal city Firminy Vert, has finally been built. One can still sneak along the 23 meter high tower but not find the 45 years. It's rare that even modern architecture look so unusual and new."


Berliner Zeitung 03.11.2006

Georg Klein has read the memoirs of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, and found nothing but "stonewalling". "All Schröder had to do was make it believable that he had actually experienced events, and didn't just see himself on television. But in the book he never manages to lose the speaker's mask which he held up to cameras and microphones for decades on end. With the exception of a few sentences, his thinking and way of narrating remains caught up in the same jargon shared by the political castes and many representatives of political journalism. This is the water-tight language of avoidance, in which official statements, the medial account of the statements, and even supposed criticism of the statements all sound astonishingly similar."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 03.11.2006

Dirk Schümer sketches a page-long portrait of Naples, which has now come under the spotlight for daily Mafia killings. Schümer presents the author Roberto Saviano (more) who has had to go into hiding because his bestseller "Gomorra" (excerpts in Italian) reveals the newest tendencies among the Mafiosi. These include the Chinese connection: "Officially it's 20 percent, but in truth as much as 70 percent of China's textile imports to Europe go through the harbour at Naples. China's largest shipping company has long controlled the lion's share of harbour traffic, because here, transport documents, warehousing and delivery to customers in Germany or Scandinavia by camorrist accountants and shippers are all transacted with far more discretion than in Rotterdam or Hamburg."


Die Tageszeitung 03.11.2006

In an interview, the Norwegian dramatist Jan Fosse reveals the secret of his unrecognisable sounds to Sabine Leucht. "Sometimes I use empty little sounds to create a musical, repetitive structure, words like 'yes' and 'no'... Language is used as often to hide as to show something. And literature can do that: expose how little language hides by putting the spoken or the silenced in relation to what others say or keep quiet. For me, what's not said is more important."