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GoetheInstitute

08/02/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Frankfurter Rundschau 08.02.2007

"The Berlinale doesn't start until this evening, but it has already hit its first scandal," reports Daniel Kothenschulte. "The hotly awaited Chinese economy-boom drama 'Lost in Bejing' by female director Li Yu, which was due to run in the Competition, was banned at the beginning of the week by the Chinese censorship authorities. Now it seems it is allowed to be shown after all – but having been cut by almost a quarter of an hour. How should one meet these demands? It would be awful to be in the position of the artist who is being forced to mutilate her own work – but the situation is equally bad for the festival management, whose political integrity is at stake."


Die Zeit
08.02.2007

In the new films showing in the Competition section of the Berlinale from Clint Eastwood, Robert de Niro and Steven Soderbergh, Georg Seeßlen met mostly broken heroes of a broken patriotism which he sees as a consequence of the disastrous Iraq war. "Not anger but mourning dominates. Just as the Vietnam war broke out in American cinema in the Seventies with it a storm of bloody, dirty, torn images, the Iraq war is bringing images of paralysis, powerlessness and torture in war films, horror films, blockbusters and trash movies alike. Alienation."

In a heated theological discussion with Kardinal Walter Kasper, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk expresses his hopes for a "peaceful utilisation of monotheistic energies." After all, he says: "The greatest achievement of institutionalised Christianity is, to extend the metaphor, that it has given rise to a highly developed reactor technology. What in naive hearts might easily spark combustive mania can, through ascetic and meditative practice and learnable forms of spiritual inquiry, be contained within a workable format." Or as Kaspar puts it: "Religion is never cool."


Berliner Zeitung
08.02.2007

Gerhard Midding reports on the ups and downs in the French cinema landscape: "There's a fatal oversaturation in the country's roughly 5,000 screens, which has led to a rotation tempo like that in the USA with a high number of prints and expensive PR campaigns. Filmmaker Alain Resnais, himself a passionate moviegoer, recently said in an interview: 'I'd love to see all my colleagues' films, but most of them are only screened for a few weeks after they come out.' Nevertheless, film-country France has also found a solution to this problem. Every autumn in Paris a festival is held for forgotten and ignored films."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 08.02.2007

"Of course you can degrade Wojciech Jaruzelski, but what's the point?" asks Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk. The comment comes in reaction to an initiative by President Lech Kaczynski to degrade the former Polish head of state to the rank of private. "After all, for the current governing team Jaruzelski was a communist general, that is to say a false, phoney general. Consequently his military rank must also have been spurious. So why strip him of it? As an inverse way of acknowledging it? There's an absurd whiff of contradiction to all this." See our feature "Not a living soul around" by Andrzej Stasiuk.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung
08.02.2007

Christian Gasser portrays the Geneva comic artist Frederik Peeters whose best known comic "Pilules Bleues" (blue pills) describes his relationship with his HIV-positive girlfriend Cati. "He draws the complications of the day-to-day relationship laconically, and with a sometimes twisted, sometimes black humour, he describes how the emergency state of health becomes normality. He does make HIV and AIDS harmless, but he does take the drama out of it. You get used to everything Frederik Peeters says drily, 'Even living with HIV; the situation is complex but certainly not tragic'."

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Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

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Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

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Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
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Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

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Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
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Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
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Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
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Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

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