Die Tageszeitung 10.11.2006

In an essay on the "two bodies" of Saddam Hussein, Isolde Charim argues against the hanging sentence. "But now the sentence 'hung by the neck until dead' has brought Saddam back into the limelight, and with him the problem: how to be rid of him? His natural body can be disposed of easily, but what about the remains of his sublime body, his leadership aura? An execution seems the worst conceivable means. The noose cannot touch the sublime body. But it's in this irredeemable remains that the problem lies. It has a terrible echo in this land of fanatic suicidal believers. They carry out a ghastly continuation of the sublime body in what you could call a 'negative embodiment.' A host of living dead try to transform their bodies into the sublime body - in the moment when they blow themselves up. In a strange reversal, their tattered bodes 'embody' the fiction of an ideal society - by destroying the real community."


Die Tageszeitung 10.11.2006

Markus Wolf, former head of the GDR foreign intelligence division, has died. "Later I discovered I couldn't hate all of them, I felt the same as the singer/songwriter Wolf Biermann in this respect, but I could despise them. It was easy to despise Walter Ulbricht and Erich Mielke, but with the fatherly Wilhelm Pieck and the broken Otto Grotewohl it wasn't so easy after a while. How should I feel about Markus Wolf?" asks civil-rights activist Wolfgang Templin, who in 1988 was imprisoned for "treasonous spying activities" and deported to West Germany. "The western secret services certainly have plenty to answer for and the later collegial fraternising of their members with Markus Wolf always made me feel sick. Yet there are important differences. The East German General Reconnaissance Administration (HVA) was at never a 'normal' espionage agency. Aside from the murder and terror commandos, the countless abductions and other crimes that the HVA was involved in, its main mission was to prepare the 'Operation area' Bundesrepublik for an agressive takeover."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 10.11.2006

"Who puts out the magazine with the highest circulation in the world, at 22 million copies? The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). The association publishes its 80 to 140 page AARP - The Magazine on a bimonthly basis. The publication is one of 400 such titles for seniors – the fastest growing population group in industrial countries," report Reto Eugster and Manfred Weise. Of course Switzerland also has a number of magazine for its silver citizens. Most of them, however, "try not to hurt anyone... One looks in vain for critical subjects like 'discrimination against the elderly', 'why female presenters over 50 are disappearing from the tube' and 'seniors in developing countries'." Yet the older generation are "media consumers par excellence. Of all demographics, they are the ones who not only watch the most television and listen to the most radio, they are also the group best reached by the newspapers."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 10.11.2006

Fritz Göttler reports on a retrospective of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin which is currently running in Berlin, Bremen, Hamburg, Munich, Basel and Zürich. "For years Guy Maddin has been an esoteric insider tip, but now his films seem to be finding a larger audience.... The idea behind one of his latest masterpieces would certainly have appealed to Luis Bunuel, who Maddin much admires. "The Saddest Music in the World", which will even be showing in German cinemas as of December, features a woman with two artificial glass legs full of sparkling beer. Isabella Rossellini plays Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the brewery queen from Winnipeg. Lady Helen lost her legs in a horrible accident, and now one of her admirers has given her the replacements... She invites the world to a huge melancholy competition in this Canadian backwater. All nations are there to sing the most woeful song, Spaniards and Africans, Scotsmen and Americans, and of course Canadians – who complicate things with catastrophically mixed-up love and family relations."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 10.11.2006

Hans-Joachim Müller talks to the artist Gustav Metzger (more here and here), born 1926, whose work has only recently been celebrated in major exhibitions. In 1956 he penned his manifesto for "Autodestructive Art" declaring that art "should contain an element that within no more than twenty years automatically leads to its destruction." For the Documenta 1972 he planned to siphon the exhaust from four cars into a plastic cube – a project which curator Harald Szeeman decided was too dangerous. This is how Meztger describes the work: "The plastic cube would have needed holes drilled into it at regular intervals which would have made the air extremely toxic and one would have been able to watch what happened inside and outside of the cube. The redirection of the exhaust might have caused the cars to break down. And if they didn't, they would have had to be blown up at the end of the show."