Süddeutsche Zeitung 13.07.2007

Alex Rühle makes his way to Rosental-Bielatal in Saxony-Anhalt, where right-wing extremists wanted to set up a youth club last year. This was prevented, but the neo-Nazis are very much around in spirit. "In this sense, Peter Sloterdijk talks about an 'anger account': Everyone pays in, and the teenagers withdraw from it on behalf of the rest of us. The old chap in the pub at Rosental-Bielatal said he used to go quite often to North Rhine-Westphalia. 'In the shops over there – only blacks. None of us, not a single white. We went to the Baumarkt (home-improvement store) once, and a black came in, he was in the door department, he had such huge hands (he points to a half-meter long shovel), full of money! He got it from the government. Hundreds! I should've just grabbed it. Just grabbed it.' It sounds like an overflowing anger account."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.07.2007

Ernst Horst visits an exhibit at the new Jewish Museum Munich about the Wallach brothers, successful purveyors of traditional Bavarian costumes, who ended up fleeing Nazi Germany after their business was confiscated in 1939. "Perhaps the dirndl wouldn't have been been so popular in the city if the Wallachs hadn't been so good at marketing. For decades, they supplied princesses, traditional performers and theatrical productions with new wares." He even wonders what people would wear to the Oktoberfest nowadays if it had not been for this firm. "Maybe they'd dress like the visitors to the Ascot races, or like the Munchkins in 'The Wizard of Oz.' Rather not."


Die Welt 13.07.2007

Ulrich Baron takes a look at the birth statistics in India and China where ever more female foetuses are being aborted – a gender murder that is taking on horrendous proportions thanks to medical technology. "Statistically speaking, four to five more percent boys are born than girls. In China, however, in 1981, 108 boys were born for every 100 girls and in the year 2000, the relation was 110 to 100, in some provinces 130 to 100."

Eva Behrendt meets up with Nuran David Calis, who, as son of Armenian-Jewish immigrants to Istanbul, made his way from bouncer to celebrated dramatist and director. "'You don't have to die like you were born,' says Nuran Calis over coffee in Berlin, looking a lot stronger and tougher than the gentle young man in the press pictures. What's noticeable is how carefully and slowly he chooses his words and avoids all slang. He likes to tell how he started boxing at 15 and got a job as a bouncer through his trainer at 16, how he earned 200 euros a night and how he once hit so hard that he had to personally take his victim to the doctor."


Frankfurter Rundschau 13.07.2007

In an interview with Nicole Henneberg, Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz tries to make sense of the mystery of writing. "It's possible that the author knows his work the least. You write something and suddenly it seems strange, foreign. The text has a totally different effect on the reader, the author can only suggest something – the reader fills it with life; and either it works or it doesn't. It's this plastic talent that's either there or not. The author can hardly influence that; you can be very diligent, you can learn and think lots but the plastic talent is a secret."


Die Tageszeitung 13.07.2007

Having read essayist Barbara Ehrenreich's history of partying, Tilman Baumgärtel now realises that we are living in sad times. "The gradual abolition of the folk fair in the Middle Ages led to a wave of 'melancholy' in the early modern times in Europe. It wasn't only the clergy and nobility that wanted to put an end to the carnival diversions. Militarism, industrialisation and capitalism required well-rested and competent workers for their 'environments of enclosure' (Foucault) - factories and barracks – and not burnt-out revellers with hangovers and feet danced to a pulp."