Kölner Stadtanzeiger 08.11.2006

Jürgen Habermas has given a fiery speech in the town of Petersberg near Bonn on the lagging process of European integration, printed by the Kölner Stadtanzeiger. "The topic of Europe has been devalued, people would rather deal with their own national agenda. Here in Germany, grandfathers hug grandchildren, overwhelmed by the new feel-good patriotism. The assurance given by our salutary national roots is supposed to make our effete welfare-state population 'fit' for global competition. This rhetoric suits the current state of social-Darwinist world politics." More on the occasion for the speech here.


Frankfurter Rundschau 09.11.2006

"This is not an ordinary commemoration of someone's death. It is a commemoration of a crime, and therefore not the happiest occasion for an award ceremony," said the poet Durs Grünbein a week ago in Rome on receiving the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Pier Paolo Pasolini. "The major question posed by Pasolini is: what does it mean to be a poet in a post-humanist world? That question is still pressing today, and eats away at every individual. What should we do, forty years later, with a sentence like: 'That's why I believe the only viable reaction to the injustice and vulgarity of the world is despair – but only an individual, non-codified despair.' Non-codified can only mean a despair that cannot be discharged through religious worship, therapy or – least of all – a political convention. On the contrary, this despair can only grow in these locations that are intended to discharge it."


Die Zeit 09.11.2006

Bartholomäus Grill visits one of Africa's leading international artists in his home in Benin. Like most of his fellow African artists, Romuald Hazoume (more here and here) sells exclusively to collectors from abroad. "Africa's rich and corrupt elites prefer to waste their plundered money on western luxury goods. There is no art market between Dakar and Dar es Salaam, no art scene, no art criticism and since there are no galleries, museums or exhibitions spaces, the work of artists who live there remains invisible. Even when we first met in 1999, Hazoume was talking about his vision of founding a real museum. The problem was finding a patron to finance a project like this. 'Clinics, Aids programmes, hunger aid, you get money for everything except art.' At the time Benin was graced with around 3,000 humanitarian organisations: people need bread, they can't eat pictures, was their credo."


Die Welt 09.11.2006

The synagogue at the new Jewish Centre in Munich opens today. The buildings designed by Wandel Höfer Lorch architects are abstract and unapproachable, writes Roland Pawlitschko. "The Jewish Museum is a monolithic block of stone, while the 'Ohel Jakob' (Jacob's tent) Synagogue is two stacked cubes. The craggy rock base and the filigree steel construction on top are meant to evoke the oldest Jewish buildings of temple and tent. The skin of bronze netting makes the tent glow mystically in the sun by day and mysteriously by night. And it is designed to break up the falling sunlight, bathing the Lebanese cedar interior of the synagogue in a warm light."

The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports from the inaugural celebrations where Salomon Korn the vice chairman of the Central Consistory of Jews in Germany, himself an architect, described the new building as "a convincing constructional metaphor and a fitting way to preserve hope for a future Jewish life in Germany in all its contradictions."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 09.11.2006

Three years after his fall, Saddam Hussein is gaining sympathy again, reports the Iraqi writer Najem Wali. "No matter how far one looks in the history of this country, it's almost impossible to find anything that approaches the barbarous rage of today. Or was there a time in the past when children's heads were drilled through with percussion drills and their corpses thrown to the cats and other animals at the dump? The Iraqis have now reached such levels of desperation that they believe neither their new politicians nor the weekly address of the US president to the nation. It should therefore come as no surprise that some Iraqis take flight into an illusion which they thought they had put behind them for good."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 09.11.2006

Helmut Böttiger is in China with authors Ingo Schulze, Ilija Trojanow, Jakob Hein and Juli Zeh, where they hope to make contemporary German literature better known. Shortly before their visit Jiao Er had dedicated an edition of his influential Beijing magazine World Literature to "young German literature after 89." "This was the year that electrified the Chinese. Because 1989 was also a fateful year in China, the year of the Tienanmen massacre. Hardly anyone spoke of it openly, preferring to evoke it indirectly: '89, that's also a very sensitive subject for Chinese – I think you know what I mean.' There is a time before, and a time after 1989. And the latter is above all characterised by what is officially called the 'Open Policy' and state-propagated capitalism, a specifically Chinese variant of 'Get rich!' There is much talk among the delegation members of a new generation that influenced literature post-1989, a 'post-Utopian' literature, so there are distinct parallels with China. Discussing Ingo Schulze's 'Simple Stories,' about the time of the fall of the Wall in the East-German town of Altenburg, Germanist Huang Liaoyu saw distinct similarities to the Chinsese experience in the 90s. 'As a Chinese, I welcome globalisation. As a reader of Marx, I have my doubts!'"