Die Zeit, 14.04.2005

Orhan Pamuk is certainly the most renowned Turkish author. His last novel, "Snow", was celebrated in the USA and in Germany. The book deals with political disruption in Turkey, which today is a European Union membership candidate. Within Turkey the book caused fierce reactions, which increased in force when Pamuk named the Armenian genocide by name in an interview with the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. Die Zeit describes scenes of "sheer hatred" and book burning. In an interview with Jörg Lau, Pamuk explains why even after its publication, his book has caused such vehement debates. "Some of my secular readers were furious that I showed so much empathy towards a young girl who wears the scarf of her own free will. I can understand that, especially when it comes from women. Women are the most hard hit by political Islam. My detailed descriptions of the cruelties of a military coup did not please some nationalists. And some did not like my understanding for the Kurds." For Pamuk, the question of Turkey's entry in the EU has changed the country's political landscape. "The possibility of the EU entry mixed up the cards. In every camp - the left, the right, the Islamists and the Kemalists - stereotyped thinking has been abandoned. Now pro-European Islamists are ruling Turkey. At one point they understood you can win elections with pro-European politics, because voters feel that will improve their living standards." But politics is only part of life... "Literature is my reaction to too much politics. I try to turn the game around and bring a certain humour to things, a certain distance. I want to tell my readers: Don't take things so damned seriously. Isn't life beautiful? Pay attention to life's details! The most important thing in life is happiness, and the possibility to survive in this intolerant society we've made for ourselves."

On the 30th anniversary of the death of German poet Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, two CDs have come out documenting his special brand of "spoken word poetry". "The Last One" documents a reading the young poet gave from "Westwärts 1 & 2" (Westwards 1 & 2) at Cambridge University in 1975 shortly before the volume was published. The second is a rudimentary recording made in an apartment in Cologne: "Wörter Sex Schnitt" (Words sex montage). Thomas Gross comments: "No German writer has so consistently focused his work on the idea that not all cultural power emanates from the written word. The focus on sound, the replacement of meaning by sensuality, the exploration of superficial thrills and stimuli, and last but not least, his penchant for self-stylisation. Practically everything that later made it big under the label 'pop literature' is already present in Brinkmann's work. What is entirely missing from his approach is any cheeriness. His entire literary legacy is a humour-free zone. The business of liberation is gone at with German thoroughness, and the result is correspondingly uptight."
"The Last One" and "Wörter Sex Schnitt", Intermedium Records, catalogue numbers 022 and 023.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 14. 04. 2005

Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" is premiering at the Paris Bastille Opera. Directed by Peter Sellars, conducted by Eka-Pekka Salonen with stage design by Bill Viola it sounds promising, but fails "insipidly", writes Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich. Salonen delivers a "skillful but syrupy flow of music", without a hint of drama. And then there's the set! - Viola's video installation. "The worst part, and here the expression kitsch orgy is unavoidable, was the illustration of Isolde's tragic death. The backwards (in other words upwards) flowing waterfall seemed at first to be a nicely fitting metaphor. But it was completely destroyed by the image of a ghost which rises quivering from her bed. Presumably it should appear 'weightless' but it is more reminiscent of a hanged corpse being hauled upwards. Scary!"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 14. 04. 2005

Tobias Kniebe describes Florian Schwarz's film "Katze im Sack" (Cat in the bag), which won the German 'First Steps Award' for new talent, as an "astonishing" debut. For Kniebe "the greatest moment in this film is just a few seconds long - blink and you've missed it. A young drifter with a mysterious past (Christoph Bach) makes a bet with an otherwise prim barmaid (Jule Böwe) in her karaoke bar. The two are meant for each another, but they skirt around the subject laconically. The bet is basically a daft idea: the drifter has to take home any one of the other girls in the bar if he wants to have breakfast with the barmaid the following morning. Christoph Bach looks around for a girl to hit on, but before he turns away, the two protagonists exchange looks and a simple gesture and this exchange is one of the most enthralling moments in German cinema today. It says a lot for the young director Florian Schwarz that he avoids milking it."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14.04.2005

Although now Catholic in its majority, the Republic of Geneva remains strongly influenced by Calvinism. Jürg Altwegg reports from the city, whose government sent a dry, twelve line letter of condolence to the Vatican after Pope John-Paul II's death. "No other religion is so influenced by the Enlightenment as Calvinism, in which the very secular ideas of freedom and tolerance, as Rousseau and Voltaire developed them, are strongly reflected. 'Post Tenebras Lux' (after darkness, light) is the inscription on the Reformers' Wall in Geneva." In April, a museum for the Reformation will open in the city. Its director, Isabelle Graessle, is also the first female head of the Compagnie des pasteurs, founded by Calvin to ensure the conformity of church doctrine. In her words: "West European Protestantism will be doomed if a movement comparable to the Reformation of the 16th century does not develop soon."

Last Tuesday, a huge Rainer Werner Fassbinder retrospective opened in the Centre Pompidou, with an exhibition, catalogue, DVD and screening of all his films. The French turned up en masse and there was not enough space to accommodate them all in the two cinemas. In 1997 the Museum of Modern Art in New York staged a Fassbinder retrospective of similar size and popularity. Twenty three years after the filmmaker's death, when Fassbinder's films are more or less forgotten in Germany and certainly never play in the cinemas, Verena Lueken assesses his appeal in France and the US. "For the French, Fassbinder's films are steeped in historical cinematic references, studded with quotes from the great days of the auteurs in French and American film, and represent a fabulous cinematic patchwork and a vividly bubbling fountain of the seventh art. But they are wrong to believe he was a torch-bearer of post-existentialist philosophy, a thinker and theorist like Jean-Luc Godard. The Americans on the other hand, who care less for philosophy, find in his films answers to their questions about living under the weight of German history, what it means to be a German after the war, what an impact history has on emotions and what happens to people adrift in the wasteland of a country devasted both internally and externally."