Frankfurter Rundschau 30.05.2007

The paper preprints the speech that writer Carlos Fuentes will give at the conference "Perspective Europe" - which will take place this Friday and Saturday in Berlin. One of a series of distinguished speakers including Imre Kertesz, Gyorgy Konrad, Wole Soyinka and Wim Wenders, Fuentes will talk about questions of migration and identity in Europe and South America: "With their deep roots in Spain and Portugal, Mexico and Latin America are duty bound - if only for reasons of self-preservation - to extend their international relations beyond the Americas. We live beside a wounded giant, who could break out in a frantic rage and pull us down with it into the abyss. Europe seems to us an increasingly influential factor in the endeavour to create an balanced and healthy international climate." The Europeans, for their part, can learn learn from Latin America, whose "pluriculturalism of the Mestizos" can be seen as a "symbol of the modernity we've long been seeking."


Die Welt 30.05.2007

In an interview with Peter Beddies, director Fatih Akin talks about Cannes, his meeting with Martin Scorsese – and why he will not be able to accompany his friend the rapper Jan Delay to Heiligendamm: he's shooting a documentary in Turkey: "The village of my ancestors, Camburnu, is under threat. For "The Edge of Heaven" I filmed a number of scenes there. But now the Turkish government wants to flatten the village and turn it into Europe's biggest rubbish dump. An unbelievable scandal.... Even if the village ceases to exist one of these days, I must be able to say that I tried everything, I was there with my camera when the people were there fucking the earth. Which is why the film will be called 'Rubbish in the Garden of Eden.' I want to be there filming at every season of the year. This is more important to me that going to Heiligendamm."

Ulrich Weinzierl visited the three-day Salzburg Whitsun Festival directed by conductor Riccardo Muti. Although not particularly thrilled by Domenico Cimarosa's opera buffa "Il ritorno di Don Calandrino" (see our article), he was amply compensated by another festival highlight: "The finale on Whitsun Monday was an absolute triumph. Alessandro Scarlatti's 'Oratorio a quatro voci', one of the treasures which Muti dug up in the archives of Naples and Rome, will certainly find its way into modern repertories and provide rewarding material for experts in historical performance methods. This is a real find. Cavaliere Scarlatti (1660 - 1725) was a generation before Cimarosa and Leonardo Leo, and his 'Oratorio' was first premiered in 1717. With due metaphysical respect, the subject matter is blockbuster material, the story of Jesus' suffering and the passion of his mother. In this 'Maria's Lament,' passion and compassion form a captivating whole."


Berliner Zeitung 30.05.2007

Holm Friebe and Kathrin Passig of the online Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur (ZIA) introduce the Internet's next big thing, not 3D Net but "Semantic Web." It "promises that computers somehow understand the data that they process, and could, for example, potentially deliver better filtered answers and search results or less idiotically automatic translations. The interesting thing about this is not so much whether machines will develop consciousness, but how one can make these stupid machines understand elementary logical connections such as when 'Essen' means the city and not 'to eat'. It is still a moot point however whether the East route (logical reasoning) or the West route (stolid enumeration of word occurences) will offer the most promising path to the promised land. Until now the marching is taking place separately." Read the short story by Kathrin Passig that won her the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.


Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.05.2007

The recent publications by "die-hard atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and the latest der Spiegel cover "The Crusade of the New Atheists: God is to Blame for Everything", prompted Andrian Kreye to bring us up to date with belief research. There are two schools: evolutionary psychology and Darwinism as represented by anthropologist Scott Atran for example: "Why, he asks, in his book 'In Gods We Trust' are societies prepared to pay a high price for belief, at the cost of valuable resources such as time, energy and material? What threats to our survival can be averted with belief? What function does belief have for the individual and the collective? Why have religious denominations traditionally had better survival chances? It was not long before Darwinian belief research came to the conclusion that belief might be securely anchored in human consciousness rather than a product of cultural influences and education. But they were unable to pinpoint a function which defined belief as an evolutionary advantage. So they concluded that belief must be a by-product of evolution which has long lost its original function."