Die Zeit 10.01.2007

Hanno Rauterberg warns that war is waging in Germany's cities. "You have to call it that because things are being blown up, demolished and knocked down without reason. People are not dying, it's just old buildings that are being gutted and disposed of. And yet it is a war. Since 1945, more monuments have fallen than in the bomb war." He estimates the figure at 300,000. On the same subject, Jens Jessen criticises the over-extension of the monument protection laws, which put buildings under protection not only for aesthetic but also historic reasons – including the "windowless bunker of the 1970s, with ox blood coloured tiles."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 11.01.2007

Writer Cees Nooteboom, together with photographer Simone Sassen, has published a book on the graves of poets and thinkers. Laszlo F. Földenyi read it and wasn't depressed in the least. "The book elecrified me, inspired me. I started to think about who I could get more books from that I still have to read. I've never met a more enthusiastic reader than Cees Nooteboom , and Simone Sassen does not gloat over death as she immortalises the graves with her camera, but rather she conjures life out of stone. This album gets one reading via the detour of death."


Spiegel Online 11.01.2007

Claus Christian Malzahn comments on the mopey Berlin posse in the PDS/SPD (left/social democrat) coalition that's refusing to award Berlin's honorary citizenship to Wolf Biermann. The singer songwriter and dissident was expelled from East Germany in 1976. "It's not surprising that the successor party to the SED (the communist party of the former East Germany - ed), the PDS, is not interested in making Biermann an honouraray citizen. It only proves that this party has not freed itself from its own history and it still trapped in old resentments. The hesitation of the SPD, however, is embarassing (...) In fact, it's playing tactical games. With its distanced position, it wants to protect its coalition partner which fears a public appearance of Biermann in Berlin for the award ceremony as much as Honecker once feared a speech by Bärbel Bohley on Alexanderplatz."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 11.01.2007

Andreas Kilb's review of Stephen Frears' film "The Queen," which is set during the week of Lady Di's death, turns into a hommage to actress Helen Mirren. "Until the news of Diana's tragic death, Helen Mirren had it relatively easy. She copied Elizabeth's posture, gestures and tone but her character was not tested. Only with the growing unrest following Diana's death do we see Mirren's great performance, the actress' moment of glory. After the prologue in the heavens of self-confidence, she enters the purgatory of a royal identity crisis and Helen Mirren masters this with an aplomb that takes one's breath away. It's as though one is watching the break-down of a spirit in slow motion: first come the narrow tears, then a deep gap opens up and then an entire edifice crumbles."


Frankfurter Rundschau 11.01.2007

"Oxford University's Bodelian Library never shared the widespread concerns about the activities of Google and its mass digitalisation," writes library director Reg Carr, who is delighted that the libraries in Barcelona and Madrid have now also joined in the digitalisation process. "Books no longer under license belong where the world can use them, and that's where the Bodelian library and its partners want them, too. No matter what your views on the subject, the Internet today is where the public looks for information. Seeking to resist this unstoppable current of progress would be to repeat the mistake of King Canute the Great, who had to accept that even an English king couldn't stop the rising tide."


Die Welt 11.01.2007

After returning from Brazil, Frank Castorf, artistic director of the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin, talks about Fidel and Hugo, the underclass, today's citizens and his separation from dramaturge Carl Hegemann: "This is no seminar in sociology, we're doing theatre here. And that was the source of our disagreement. Politics in the theatre needs sensuousness, carnality. There's no point getting all cryptic. Then we'd have to turn the Volksbühne into an adult education centre." For Castorf, when the actors disappear for hours in a video as they do in the "Idiot", "after a while people start thinking: 'I get the point. Actor Martin Wuttke appears five times as Dostoevsky characters, from Raskolnikov to Stavrogin. Fine and dandy.' But the man is almost bleeding to death, he could just as well cut off his head. Then people say: 'Sure, that was pretty good the way Wuttke cut off his head. But we were expecting it, it was the logical thing.' You've reached a limit there." (more on Castorf's production in Brazil here)


Der Tagesspiegel 11.01.2007

Dennis Scheck defends Thomas Pynchon's novel "Against the Day" against its American critics. "Many critics demonstrated a surprisingly aggressive anti-intellectualism and a weariness with more complex, experimental literature than found in the annual publications by Philip Roth or John Updike. The American zeitgeist today cares less than ever for any kind of literary innovation. Compared with works by William Gaddis, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen's spectacular family novel 'The Corrections,' one of the biggest commercial successes of the last ten years, stands out for its sterling conventionality. Franzen himself has written a remarkably lucid essay on his disenchantment with American postmodern authors such as William Gaddis ('Mr Difficult', as Franzen calls him). In their reviews, Pynchon's adversaries dovetail completely with Franzen's views." For Scheck, the new Pynchon is "a unique, and that means thoroughly original book. In its best moments it is emotionally compelling and intellectually brilliant, touching but never sentimental, sometimes deathly sad and sometimes uproariously funny, and right to the end as unpredictable as a roller coaster in the dark."