Spiegel Online 17.01.2007

After weeks of political wrangling, Berlin has decided to offer Wolf Biermann honorary citizenship. The singer-songwriter who as a young man had chosen to live in the GDR was stripped of his citizenship in 1976 by the East German SED (Socialist Unity Party) Politburo while he was on tour in West Germany. Biermann's exile provoked protests by leading East German intellectuals and signalled the beginning of the end for the SED. The left-wing Linkspartei (the successor to the SED and currently part of the Berlin government) voted against awarding him the citizenship. Reinhard Mohr comments on the happy ending to this Berlin drama. "Nothing currently playing on Berlin's stages even gets close to this real-life satire, this historical grotesqueness that reeks of Politburo days. The embarrassing and faceless farce surrounding Wolf Biermann's honorary citizenship makes you wish the Wall would go back up. 'And you don't notice that your reason is borrowed / From the brains of dwarves / From the tails of rats / From the scratchings of beasts that creep,' wrote Biermann once upon a time about his old GDR comrades. Many of them, as we have known for a long time, are still there, cursing the constitutional state and yet milking it for all its worth, to extract their Stasi pensions."


Der Tagesspiegel 17.01.2007

German-based Bulgarian writer Ilija Trojanow is to receive the Berlin Literature Prize today. In an interview with Andreas Schäfer, he discusses the success of his new book. "Der Weltensammler" (The Collector of Worlds - more here) is about the adventurer Richard Burton, who toured India, Arabia and Africa. The book has touched "an existential nerve," says Trojanow: "Many people have an uneasy feeling about the current tendency to present cultural difference as something to be overcome. In fact it is an enjoyable, inspiring invitation to openness and diversity. Aside from that, cultural difference is the state of nature. Cultural development is an eternal hybridisation... that is, the repeated coming together and mixing of cultural elements that differ from one another. That is how culture arises. What we call tradition is a forgotten hybridisation. We also often forget that people who appear canonical to us did not come from the centre, but from the fringes. Kafka, Celan, Canetti."


Frankfurter Rundschau 17.01.2007

Muhammad Ali turns 65 today, and the paper dedicates two articles to the legendary boxer. In the first, Claus Lochbihler examines the relationship between hiphop and boxing, explaining why Ali was the first rapper. "Yet boxing and hiphop aren't exactly on an equal footing, because hiphop – as a boxing match with words, as a way out of the ghetto, as a misogynous masculine ghetto, as one of the few chances for black people to reach a mass white audience – has replaced real boxing. Yet the two are almost identical in structural and socio-demographic terms. They even share their most abysmal qualities."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.01.2007

Gerhard Matzig visited the Cologne Furniture Fair and could not believe his eyes. He saw furniture which was "trying its best to look healthy" and mattresses which could remember sleeping positions. He sums up: "Pascal was right when he said the misery of the world stems from our inability to stay in our rooms. Some of the reasons why we don't do this are currently on view in Cologne."


Die Welt 17.01.2007

Michael Pilz raves about the new album by the Berlin band Contriva which, he says, sounds like it comes from Prenzlauer Berg (the arty part of East Germany) before the Wall came down. "If Berlin-Brandenburg had such thing as a Country style, its own cross-state music, it would surely sound like Contriva. Analogue Folk, which casts an eye back at Club and Rock music, while heading in the direction of quiet and standstill. Prussian Soul, spartan, aloof, sketchy. People who make music like this are harking back to forgotten ways of living: frugality, distance, silence."