Monday 4 December, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 04.12.2006

Jochen Jung, long-time head of the Austrian Residenz-Verlag and now director of Jung und Jung publishers, complains that despite the dynamism of the German publishing scene, the major houses look increasingly similar: "Does the Suhrkamp author James Joyce have a different aura than the Diogenes author William Faulkner? One tends to assume that the major publishers all have an individual profile, bearing in mind that Suhrkamp is widely seen as the strict, quasi-religious order, S. Fisher as the house with a solid past, Rowohlt as the company with an international mix of authors, and Hanser as the home of critics' favourites and Nobel Prize winners. Far from it. Not only do all these companies compete for the same titles in New York, London and Zurich. Young German authors, too, seem to fit without difficulty into the programme of any one. Clearly these publishers' identities are based more in the past than in the present."


Frankfurt Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 03.12.2006

Kerstin Holm collects voices on the recent attacks against Russian critics and dissidents. Business journalist and crime writer Julia Latynina doesn't believe Vladimir Putin is behind the recent murders. "The crimes bear the signature of an aggressive faction within the security police, whose goal it is to stop Putin's integration efforts vis-a-vis the West. Russia could turn into a rogue state in the wake of Litvinenko's death. Political regimes are no longer distinguished according to whether they are presidential or parliamentary. Instead, we now distinguish between those that can poison their enemies with Polonium 210, and those that can't." Poet Alina Vituchnovskaya, who was incarcerated several times between 1994 and 1998, sees things even more darkly: "I believe that President Putin, under whose leadership these foul deeds have occurred, deserves special thanks. Because there is a renaissance in Russian literature now that it has regained the right to heroism, prison sentences and death."


Saturday 2 December, 2006

Die Welt 04.12.2006

Mario Vargas Llosa was astounded by the UN report "Beyond scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis", which he says should be compulsory reading despite its bureaucratic prose. "When you read the report, the first thing that strikes you is that the flagship of civilisation and progress is not the book, the telephone, the Internet or the atom bomb, but the toilet. Where the human being empties his bowels and bladder, determines whether he has fallen into the barbarity of underdevelopment or is in the ascent. The personal consequences of this simple, transcendental fact are awe-inspiring. One third of the global population – around 2.6 billion people – has no knowledge of toilets, latrines and cesspits and answers nature's call under trees, by streams and springs or in plastic bags and tin cans. And a further billion uses for drinking, cooking and washing, water that is contaminated by human and animal faeces."


Berliner Zeitung 02.12.2006

Arno Widmann talks with American physicist (and Nobel Prize candidate) Lisa Randall about her theory of gravitation, which can be better explained if you assume the existence of a fifth dimension. However she warns against trying to scale these icy heights with the powers of the human imagination: "We mustn't look. We must think and calculate. In elementary particle physics, as in the physics of the universe, a word, an equation, says more than a thousand images. When the object of our investigation is very small or very large, our imagination leads us into error. The same is even true in our familiar, three-dimensional world. Our imagination doesn't tell us that the earth moves. It says: the sun goes down. I don't know what the extra dimensions are. I don't know what they look like."


Frankfurter Rundschau 02.12.2006

If the ceasefire between the Israelis and Palestinians actually holds, "it could put us on the road to a new start," author Amos Oz writes hopefully, and finally get a comprehensive bilateral agreement on the table. "What measures would such an agreement entail? Herein lies the hope. Because both the Israelis and the Palestinians know, deep in their hearts, what this agreement would look like and what it would not look like. Even their enemies on both sides basically know what would be written in this agreement and what not. Even those on both sides who would view such an agreement as a catastrophic betrayal know that on the cards are two separate states, Israel and Palestine, divided by the pre-1967 boundary, with a few changes that would have to be agreed on. And there would be two capitals in Jerusalem. And there would be no "right to return" for the Palestinians, and the majority of Israeli settlements would also have to be cleared."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.12.2006

Weischer 307,200. Weischer 441,600. When Matthias Weischer cropped up in the conversation recently there was no indication that he was a young painter, and one of the most interesting of his generation. It sounded as if Weischer was a stock market company which had just patented a drug against short-sightedness," writes Niklas Maak. "Times have changed. Now the middle-class art collectors in Miami are playing out what they consider to be the 'art lifestyle', drinking the night away, talking, and dancing, while the artists they so adore are living the disciplined and orderely office hours of the classical middle-class citizen. It's impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that between the elated art investor world in New York and Miami and the concentrated, introverted artists in Leipzig's old Baumwollspinnerei."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.12.2006

What remains of the myth of the Bauhaus school? asks Gerhard Matzig on the 80th anniversary of the group's move to the city of Dessau. "What Walter Gropius' successor, Hannes Meyer understood as a philanthropic, socially involved formula, (putting the needs of the people before the need for luxury'), mutated either into expensive 'modern classics' or tacky cheapness. It is telling that there is a major DIY chain called Bauhaus. The dictum 'less is more' is particularly appealing to building companies who like to cut out anything that would make a space a space in order to declare the inane result 'modern'. One can say of the legacy of Bauhaus, which was closed by the Dessau city government under the orders of the Nazis in 1932, what they say about concrete in advertising: it's what's you make of it."