Neue Zürcher Zeitung 08.12.2006

On the media and IT page, Mona Sarkis looks at the situation of the media in Lebanon and concludes that it, like the country as a whole, is strongly polarised. Shortly after the war with Israel, a new newspaper, the Al-Akhbar, went into business. "The newspaper, which started up in the middle of August, is pulling all out the stops – from its modern, puristic layout, to short articles – to attract the young and particularly the educated among them. According to editor in chief Joseph Samaha, it is working. Most of the sales of the 20,000 copy-strong editions take place in front of the universities. Withing three months, the paper is hot on the heels of the county's main daily, the An-Nahar (39,500 copies). But this will not be enough to sustain the newspaper which was launched with a major injection of capital. And so rumours are flying that cash is flowing in from Iran, Syria, at least from a source close to Hizbullah. When asked about money, Samaha's resonse is ambiguous. Why shouldn't it be? In Lebanon, where no newspaper can survive on sales and advertising alone and where the Hariri family takes care to provide almost all the important media with 'donations', it is hardly surprising if the other side digs deep into its pockets as well."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.12.2006

Sonja Zekri has paid a visit to Georgian author Aka Morchiladze, whose book "Santa Esperanza" has just appeared in German. Zekri calls it "probably the boldest and the craziest publishing effort this season." The book is "the fictive chronicle of a fictive group of islands in the Black Sea. But in fact, says Morchiladze, it's really about Georgia. More exactly, about a utopian Georgia that was never annexed by Russia and never bore the Soviet yoke. Georgians, Turks, Jews and Britons live on the island. Yes, Britons. In 1919, the Ottoman pasha Sari Beg leased the group of islands to the British colonel Rollston. The archipelago is due to be given back 145 years later, and Morchiladze's story, which takes place in 2002, is focussed on this event. 'It's a Hong Kong story,' he says. But without a happy end."

Marcus Jauer visited Prince Bernhard of Baden (the chap on the left) at his family estate, Schloss Salem, where the prince grew up. The building costs the family roughly one million euros per year in maintenance. To meet these costs, he recently hit upon the idea of selling off medieval manuscripts which had been in the keeping of the Baden State Library. The plan backfired, however, and provoked a wave of public protest. "The family ruled Baden for 800 years. Then the monarchy became a republic, and state and family were separated. Since then both have tried to clarify what belongs to whom. In many other regions this was cleared up, but not here... The manuscripts are valued at over 250 million euros. In the settlement worked out between Prince Bernhard and the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, the prince renounced ownership of all the contentious art objects. In return he wanted 70 million euros to pay off his family's debts and start up a foundation for the preservation of the castle. The manuscripts were supposed to bring in this sum... The castle was closer to him than the books, but the public saw things differently, and opposed their sale."


Frankfurter Allgemeing Zeitung 09.12.2006

Regina Mönch managed to find her way to a newly opened museum, hidden away in a shabby back courtyard in the centre of the shiny new Berlin Mitte district. The museum is a former workshop for the blind which was run by Otto Weidt, who during the Nazi era employed blind and deaf Jews, "the weakest of the threatened." "When Otto Weidt fetched back his workers a final time from the deportation collection point in the Große Hamburger Straße in January 1942, he is said to have walked at the head of the line of blind brush-binders, leading them round the corner into his workshop, for all to see. This is the story people told of this astounding man who was himself blind. And what, for writer Inge Deutschkron, made the brush-manufacturer from the Berlin back courtyard a hero, a man to whom she, and many others, owes her life. He employed her with false papers and hid other people at night in a back room whose door he blocked with a cupboard."


Die Welt 08.12.2006

The Berlin rapper Sido, whose name is Paul Würdig when he takes off his silver skull mask, has recently turned his attention to social realism a la Berlin Reinickendorf, relates Michael Pilz with a certain satisfaction. '"I am a street kid, not a gangster,' is the main statement on the new record. Not that his fans had not suspected as much. But Sido has now well and truly distanced himself from the boring and outrageous worlds of German HipHop. Not to mention the older rappers from the rows of semidetached houses in the provincial suburbs. And now Sido is also leaving his brawling neighbours to stand around stupidly in their problem neighbourhoods. Migration and a precarious financial situation alone do not make a ghetto ganster."