Süddeutsche Zeitung 07.02.2007

Tomas Urban writes on right-wing attacks against Polish newspaperman Adam Michnik: "There's a new word in the Polish press: Michnikowszczyzna, the reign of Michnik. It sounds ugly, and that's how it's meant. The word refers to a purported decline in values for which the Polish Right blames Adam Michnik, the left-liberal chief editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza who is now critically ill. Michnik, who has been repeatedly honoured in the West for his struggle for democracy, is painted as the cause of almost everything bad about democracy in Poland today. His supposed motive: to protect his former communist cronies." See our feature "in search of lost sense" by Adam Michnik.


Berliner Zeitung 07.02.2007

Since 2000, Turkish applications for German citizenship have dropped by over a third. In an interview, ethnologist Werner Schiffauer lays the blame with the Germans' negative attitude towards integration, which is deterring second generation immigrants. "This second generation is now aged between 30 and 35. It is made up of educated citizens who have attended German schools and universities, and were it not for outside pressure in the aftermath of September 11, they would not have landed in positions of leadership to such an extent. Because the communities were far too patriarchal. This is an opportunity that has come about due to public hysteria, because this second generation wants to push through wide-reaching reforms in their communities and anchor them in Europe. On the other side the prevailing mistrust is stymieing many of these efforts. Reform positions are often perceived in majority society as a facade, construed as duplicity and manipulation. This in turn confirms the position of those in the communities who believe that German society will never accept Islam anyway and that as a Muslim, one can basically only live in an Islamic society."


Der Tagesspiegel 07.02.2007

Armin Petras, the new artistic director of Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, talks in an interview about the play "Mala Zementbaum," which he wrote together with actor Thomas Lawinky. Lawinky, who made the headlines a year ago when he tore the notepad from the hands of critic Gerhard Stadelmaier (more here), came out afterwards as an unofficial informer for the East German secret police. Petras explains the relevance of this act: "That's just one of the themes we're delving into with our plays, which also include 'Baumeister Solness,' Prinz Friedrich von Homburg' and 'Café Vaterland.' These are all part of a programmatic investigation into what happened in this city in the last twenty, one hundred or three hundred years. For us it was clear that the chapter dealing with the Stasi and the collapse of the GDR has new relevance the moment it starts catching people's attention. Astonishingly, no new plays are looking into this at all, just one film (more here), which has now become very famous." "Mala Zementbaum" premieres on Friday.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 07.02.2007

The theme at this year's Club Transmediale, the evening programme of Berlin's eighth "festival for adventurous music and related visual arts" is "Building Space". Norbert Krampf gives a breathless report of the "illustrious sound architecture constructed from high-precision noise" by the 'Burial Chamber Trio'. "Seldom has a formation managed to weld such consistently minimalistic structures, theatrical staging and maximum accoustic pressure into an almost mystical experience.... Massive basses had backs of necks and trouser legs vibrating, gravitational droning from electric guitars towered into vast mountain ranges, repetitions of minimally varying patters and the renunciation of rhythm unhinged space and time. High compression sound planes revealed layers of sediment, bizarre structures in their interiors. And the sallow, glowering vocal phrases of the zombie-like performance by Attila Csihar laid themselves like conspiracy formulae from Dante's 'Inferno' over the hypnotic seance."