Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 12.01.2007

The Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus has been dead for seventy years, and the rights to his works are now public property. The Austrian Academy Corpus has put the entirety of Kraus' newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch) online. Eva Menasse (author of "Vienna") is thrilled. "The world of Karl Kraus is now accessible, and without breathing masks. Die Fackel has been restored to its original state. It appeared in instalments, issue by issue. That's a digestible format for today's readers too. It was only when it was solemnly clad between book covers that it looked as indomitable as a knight with a closed vizier."

Legal expert Jörn Axel Kämmerer opposes the French law which makes denial of the Armenian genocide a criminal offence. He doubts that it was a genocide in the first place. "The persecution and deportation of Armenians in 1915 brought suffering and death in the many thousands but a measure of certainty about what really happened doesn't exist as it does for the killing of the European Jews. (...) The bill's flaw lies in the attempt not only to proscribe the negation of the proven but also in its aspiration to petrify particular perspectives of controversial historical events and their evaluation."


Die Tageszeitung 12.01.2007

European Green representative Cem Özdemir is not impressed by doubts about the terminological status of the genocide committed on the Armenians, as they have been expressed by the leftist politician Hakki Keskin. In Turkey, where Armenian and Turkish journalists work together, "there are cautious attempts to loosen up, which have not yet reached the Turkish and Armenian diasporic populations in Germany. In Turkey, they're farther along than the Keskins here, who are still propagating old thinking. In Turkey, positions can be heard on television that would shock the Turkish community here."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 12.01.2007

The first page of the feuilleton section deals with oil. Belarussian poet Andrei Chadanovich, who is not allowed to publish in his home country, is delighted that the oil conflict with Russia has destroyed some illusions that Lukashenko had been keen to maintain. "If Belarussians and Russians let go of the illusion that they are one and the same people, the underdeveloped Belarussian identity will finally have a chance. At last the myth of brotherly love between two nationalities, which has stopped Belarussians from addressing their own chances on the international scene for so long, is being dashed."


Die Welt 12.01.2007

Klaus Schroeder considers two studies that classify two thirds of all Germans as latently or manifestly xenophobic, Islamophobic and on the extreme right to be unserious and arbitrary. One study was carried out by two Leipzig medical psychologists for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the other by a group of researchers led by Wilhelm Heitmeyer for the VW Foundation. "The use of the term 'Islamophobic' is almost touchingly naïve. For Heitmeyer, 'Islamophobia is visibly on the rise, for example in the general rejection of the notion that Islam has created an admirable culture.' The respondents are evidently all expected to believe Islam has created an admirable culture, and that Muslim culture fits in with the Western world. But the attentive reader has to ask whether you would have to believe the statement 'The Germans have created an admirable culture' so as not to be classified as Germanophobic."

Michael Pilz lets off a little steam about white women's sentimental view of Africa. "The white Afrophile bases her position on the conviction that the white man destroyed the continent with greed, violence and money and the black man is now carrying on where he left off, in the form of the fat potentate or the barely literate, poor but proud simpleton. The latter can be helped, his children as well. Africans know all sorts of these Samaritans: the anti-genital mutilation activist, the collector of second hand clothing, the adoptive mother." Pilz finds this somewhat paternalistic. "The most interesting embodiment of the white women in Africa thus far hast been the television star Jutta Speidel. She flees to South Africa as a divorced, unemployed, older nurse and discovers happiness there. The locals lead lives without fear, apartheid, or Aids. That's outrageous, but we're dealing with projections here, not with Africa."


Frankfurter Rundschau 12.01.2007

Karin Ceballos Betancur sings a hymn of praise to Apple's new iPhone. "The iPhone takes care of you like a mother and looks like Jude Law. Could be someone else, but whatever. We are convinced of this fantasy until we possess one. Working with an iPhone is like having a sandwich delivered to you in bed by an invisible hand, even though you're not sick and you live alone. It's not absolutely necessary. But it doesn't compete with a loaf of bread. And isn't it nice that it works?"