Süddeutsche Zeitung, 06.05.2005

In the series "The last 50 days", historian Götz Aly describes "Zero Hour" in the wake of the Thousand Year Reich: "In that hour, the future was dealt out anew, free of all connection with the past. For the great majority of Germans, the day of the unconditional surrender meant collapse and perplexity. They shirked responsibility, put the blame on others, finding refuge in generalities and then in an unthinking bustle of activity. They faced a moral and political vacuum. Thanks to the Allied soldiers, they were freed from themselves on May 8 – and they didn't notice."
Götz Aly is author of "Hitler's Volksstaat", one of the most talked about historical books of the season. Click here for two of his articles in English on our website.

Dirk Peitz describes the new museum in Herford as "a giant redbrick horn. A 28.8 million euro croissant" in which "input and output, alleged and actual relevance stand in an incongruous relationship". The MARTa museum for furniture, art and ambience designed by Frank Gehry has proved so unpopular with the locals of the medium-sized Westphalian city after overshooting its budget of 15 million euros, that protests will be staged tomorrow against the Hartz IV labour market reform, Economics Minister Wolfgang Clement and the new museum. The opening exhibition "(My Private) Heroes" was curated by the museum's artistic director Jan Hoet. "It shows his personal favourites from homey mementos (his grandmother's snuff box) to his favourite artists, like Panamarenko (website): a somewhat arrogant stance in itself". The second part of the show surveys the role of the heroic artistic genius from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day using mostly "emotionally-charged (painterly) expression" from Picasso to Meese. "In between, as if to apologise for the hero stories, is also the entirely unemotional work of fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester."


Die Tageszeitung, 06.05.2005

On Tuesday the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe will be opened. Julius Schoeps, director of the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European Jewish studies, is still unclear about the monument, after having taken a walk round: "I had the feeling of being in a kind of cemetery. Certainly, the graveyard motif played a role in Peter Eisenman's thinking. I wasn't particularly touched on my tour of the monument. I was particularly annoyed by the arbitrariness of the information. Who is the monument to? The Jews? Or maybe the fallen Wehrmacht soldiers? It's not entirely clear."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06.05.2005

"I'm an incorrigible Ratzinger boy", confesses Spanish writer Juan Manuel de Parda. "In the restaurants of the Borgo Pio neighbourhood, which he patronised for years, he liked to order noodles in spicy tomato sauce, with a glass of sweet orange lemonade. Don't you think that as Pope, a man with such diverse tastes will also be able to bring varying opinions into harmony?"


Der Tagesspiegel, 06.05.2005

"No Schiller in the Schiller year." Rüdiger Schaper gears us up for the Theatertreffen (theatre meeting), a major festival in Berlin featuring productions from German-language theatres which runs until May 22. Aside from there being no products by Germany's national poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller 200 years after his death, Schaper sums up the mood at the festival: "The theatre has abandoned its prêt-a-porter guise for the time being. The fashionable themes of faith and religion seem to have volatilised into thin air. And the festival's selection reflects this. German theatre today is as pragmatic as it is variegated. Things that were being endlessly debated just a short time ago (globalisation!), have now been relegated to the rubbish bin of former excitements. And the good old generation conflict? A has-been."
Click here for an interview in German with festival director Iris Laufenberg.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 06.05.2005

On the film page, Alexandra Stäheli writes on the second edition of the Arab Film Days in Zurich: "Notwithstanding the diversity and eclecticism in Arab cinema today, something like a tangible attitude seems to be emerging above all among younger filmmakers. A tendency to focus increasingly on a here and now, a historically concrete situation, to investigate how the political is reflected in the day-to-day – even if this approach can seem somewhat indirect, somewhat refracted, even unmimetic, to western eyes."