Monday 8 January, 2007

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 08.01.2007

Old Europe is so old that no one's interested in it any more, declares Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk in an interview. Far more interesting are the countries new to the EU, Romania for example: "One of the most beautiful countries in Europe. I've always said it, Romania, is like Poland, only more wonderful. It's got a highly complex identity: a Romance language and a direct successor to classical Latin, perched between barbarian Slavic dialects and the wild steppe tongue of the Magyars. The Eastern Romance line is also the only one to embrace the Orthodox faith. For centuries it was prey to Turkey, Hungary and Russia. Like Poland it was an 'outpost of Christianity,' meaning: subject to a continual barrage of fire and horses. At the same time it has wonderful scenery and architecture. The Carpathian villages in the Maramures are like a Sagrada Familia of wood, and the Danube delta is a wonder of nature, a European tropical oasis. The catfish are as big as sharks, and flocks of pelicans fly like pterodactyls over the archaic landscape. Oh! Romania is worth the Netherlands and Belgium put together."


Frankfurter Rundschau 08.01.2007

"Gripping" is how Nikolaus Merck finds Karin Henkel's staging of Ferenc Molnar's "Liliom" at the Schauspiel Stuttgart, not least because lead actor Felix Goeser is very good at doing very little. "Goeser plays Liliom like a teetotaling Platonov. He prefers coffee in paper cups to booze, after all it's just as good for splashing on women's shirts. Goeser has a Marlon Brando-like leer with outstretched eyebrows, so to speak. He's got the big mouth, the loud holler and the prolonged opera-like death aria. A big bag of wind. And of course, while other men are driven by ambition, hope and longing, Liliom, like Platonov, just has an enormous void. All he wants is peace. That's why he lies down in the middle of the stage and lays his head on a sack of clothes. But you've got to hand it to him: even when lying down he's charismatic."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.01.2007

Reinhard J. Brembeck is deeply impressed by the second version of Anton Bruckner's 8th symphony, which the Munich Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann has taken on for the first time. "They can effortlessly produce an earthly, dark, vast tone – only made possible by Thielemann's musical conviction. The brass, the most melodious of which the horns, is enormously flexible. He's as familiar with apocalyptic explosions as he is with the uninhibited string sound that's barely to be heard as it prepares its attack. Is it just local patriotism to feel that this orchestra, together with the two other ensembles in Munich, plus those in Vienna, Berlin and Amsterdam, make up the best orchestras in Europe and thus the world?"


Saturday 6 January, 2007


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06.01.2007

Mark Siemons tells how and why the German architect Ole Scheeren is building the headquarters of the Chinese propaganda broadcaster CCTV, based on a design by Rem Koolhaas: a glass and steel construction reminiscent of the endless ribbon of M.C. Escher whose towers lean at a six degree angle. Siemons thinks that it's the shaking off of Western chains that is driving Western star architects to China. "An unmistakable architectonic symbol for this kind of anti-metaphysics is only to be created in the People's Republic of China today, where the political will and the money are available and the cultural situation serves as a perfect reflection of the intellectual ambition. It's this and not the greed for money and fame – as is often presumed of Western architects building in China – that seems to be at the root of the Faustian bargain of advanced conceptual artists with an authoritarian state."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 06.01.2007

Matthias Messmer goes looking for traces of the West in China, most popular for its culture of commerce and not necessarily of freedom. "Currents have a habit of suddenly changing direction. The communist leadership is all too aware of this, especially when the West represents for them a double-edged sword, on which they can both sharpen their own knives but also be badly cut. Two years ago at a meeting of the central committee of the Communist Party, the 'Westernisation and division' of the country by a 'strategic conspiracy of enemy forces' was called a danger for China's future."


Die Tageszeitung 06.01.2007

Two texts on Dani Levy's Hitler comedy "Mein Führer." British-born Walter Rothschild, state rabbi of Schleswig Holstein is very impressed by the film. "Dani Levy's film is superb. Sets, location, camera, staging, light, sound, the little details – everything wonderful. And the content. One laughs, one thinks, one cries." Cristina Nord is much more reserved in her praise but finds the question of "whether one can laugh about Hitler" to be "fixated on authority." "What are we afraid of? Of diminishing the significance? Of relief? Another question: Is a heavy drama of the Führer in the bunker like 'The Downfall' not much more apologetic? By taking Hitler so seriously, by trying to understand him, one pays him posthumously precisely the respect that he does not deserve."

Keno Verseck writes on the street urchins of Bucharest, children like Adita: "A rat scurries through the garbage, waking Adita. He can't see it, it's late afternoon and already dark. He makes a tired hissing noise to scare it away, but it keeps on foraging through the plastic bottles, paint cans, cigarette buts, bread crusts and other rubbish. Adita gets up slowly from the deep pile of garbage. He groans and puts his hand to his aching head, pulls the bag from his pocket, holds it to his mouth and takes a couple of deep breaths."