Die Welt 16.03.2007

Writer Michael Kleeberg is relieved at Jacques Chirac's departure from French politics: "Our clichee of the typical Frenchman is a philosophising bohemian type with a filterless cigarette hanging from his lips. But in fact a much more typical, and much more common, species is the French petty-bourgeois square. He's someone with roots in the countryside, and that's where he feels most at home. He eats and drinks and likes to gripe. When he can get away with it, he cheats on his wife. He mistrusts foreigners, he's a tad gutless and rather racist, but he's proud of making it through the day and of cheating the accursed state where he can. In the 50s and 60s, Bourvil and Louis de Funes gave faces to his naivety and cynicism. In his successful presidential campaign of 1995 and thereafter, particularly during the football World Cup in 1998, Jacques Chirac styled himself as France's ideal all-round player. Perhaps it was an unimposing role, but it led to success."


Frankfurter Rundschau 16.03.2007

Arno Widmann comments on the surveillance reports filed on Milan Kundera during the communist era, which have now been made publicly accessible. "Up to 13 spelling mistakes have been found in as few as seven lines. And the agents reporting on Kundera were clearly subjected to the problems widely faced in all socialist countries. Once an observation came to an abrupt end when Kundera passed a garbage truck in his small car and the Prague agents remained stuck behind it in their spacious grey Volga. The reports document meticulously that Kundera ordered 100 grams of Russian salad, and that his wife purchased two sausages at the butcher's on Myslikova Street. But they give no idea at all about what was going on in Milan Kundera's mind at this crucial time. The powers that be only knew - or suspected - that he was an enemy. And there they were right."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 16.03.2007

Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist asks what to do about all the "altjungs" (old boys): bachelors, most of them farmers in northern Sweden, who are waiting in vain for a woman to come along. "The principle of strong woman continues to lie over this country like a nocturnal fog over a swamp. But most of these dominant women move away, and men look for them from a position of inferiority. In conversations between the genders, there's a tone of astonished bitterness. The 'old boys' quickly realise how hopeless their situation is: there are few available women in their area, which is transparent in an unpleasant way."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 16.03.2007

Paul Schindl is impressed by the heroism with which Austrians are defending the particularity of their German before EU bodies and in the translation committees. "There was major unrest in an EU plenum when an Austrian bureaucrat said that illegal border-crossers in his homeland were being 'trod upon' (betreten). There resulted half an hour of tumult that stemmed from a concern that human rights in Austria were literally being walked all over. The case was solved: when someone is 'trod upon,' he is 'caught' (ertappt)."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 16.03.2007

Historians Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel believe strongly that National Socialism should indeed be compared to Stalinism. "In the 'Historikerstreit' (historian's dispute), no comparisons were drawn. That's because German historians hadn't the slightest clue about Eastern European history, and that of the Soviet Union in particular. Indeed, after the archives were opened and Eastern Europe returned to European memory, something changed. Now it's becoming clearer that these regimes had very similar challenges and similar mechanisms of force. We described it as a striving for order, for clarity. Both regimes used similar techniques of murder to overcome the problems of their own making. In this sense, new insights can be gained from this comparison."

"Actors, bit parts, Vienese, lend me your ears! I come to praise Shakespeare, not to bury him. You've already seen to that. The revolving stage has turned, it's true. And director Falk Richter has projected sundry videos through its cracks. And Richter is an honourable sponge (who sucks up what he can). But that you stalk around the Burgtheater in your department store suits like branch managers at a bank conference in St. Pölten, and plunge knives into the district manager, the charming Mr. Simonischek, then call him 'Ceasar' to boot, and yourselves 'Romans'... on this very Ides of March, all that shows that Shakespeare's died in March. And you are his gravediggers." Thus comments Gerhard Stadelmaier Wednesday's premiere of Falk Richter's "Julius Ceasar" at the Burgtheater in Vienna.