Die Welt 02.08.2007

A new generation of stage directors is challenging the German theatre world, writes Matthias Heine, naming Tilman Köhler, Roger Vontobel, Rafael Sanchez and David Bösch among others: "They are light years away from the aged megalomania of Peter Stein and Peter Zadek, who believe they are on first-name terms with the authors whose works they stage. And they are just as far removed from the old revolutionaries like Dimiter Gotscheff, Frank Castorf or Luk Perceval, who have to put the theatre and all of society into question with every new production. And they provide a fresh alternative to the young directors of yesteryear like Armin Petras, Matthias Hartmann and Michael Thalheimer, who have long since taken up positions of power where they tend to get cynical faster than they get old."


Die Zeit 02.08.2007

The weekly paper bids farewell to the two heroes of European cinema, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Jens Jessen sums up the "epochal coincidence" that had the two diametrically opposed directors die on the same day. "The Italian and the Swede are prototypes of the Catholic South and the Protestant North. Both explored modernity, each in their own way. But while for Bergman content was everything, for Antonioni everything was form. When Bergman experimented, which he did from time to time, it was to better narrate the story. When Antonioni experimented, and he did nothing else, it was to avoid telling the story, or better: to avoid a narrative that would imply there were such a thing as objective reality. Bergman wanted to advance toward the truth, Antonioni wanted to show that this reality doesn't exist and that the only truth lies in the futility of his characters' attempt to advance toward it."


Frankfurter Rundschau 02.08.2007

Arno Widmann comments on The New York Times' obituaries of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni: "No obituary of the late filmmakers makes it clearer how necessary they were - and how bitterly we will miss them - than this attempt to portray them as the spectres of a morose, gloomy old Europe, unable to accept the lightness of being."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 02.08.2007

And Wim Wenders has penned an ode to Antonioni:

"Arrividerci; Maestro:

As sad as I was to discover
That you had departed from us,
I was overjoyed to hear
That you went peacefully,
In full control of your senses,
Just as you wanted it. (...)

A clear and remorseless view of the world
And such sensitive
And objective powers of perception
Were your strengths,
And they guided you
Throughout your life.

"Modernity"
For you was no passing trend,
But consisted of the task
of fully capturing our contemporary life,
not from the perspective of the past
but into that of the future. (...)"


Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.08.2007

As EU butter mountains shrink and the milk lakes run dry, Lothar Müller muses on milk and its pervasion of the history of food, the language of the Bible and popular mythology "from Muttermilch (mother's milk) to Milchbruder (milk brothers – the lifelong friendship which develops between the child of a wet nurse and another brought in to feed at same breast) right up to "Milchmädchenrechnung" (a milk-maid's calculation or naive expectation). And butter is like the salt with which it was so long connected, and the bread which it joined in the early Modern period to become 'Butterbrot' (meaning bread and butter, which has the same connotation as peanuts in terms of wages), a central element of this mythology. Since the times of the French Revolution, and not least because food-related issues were always class issues at the time, the mythological legacy of milk and butter melted into the factual history of the bourgeoisie like the workers' movement into the industrial revolution. The 'gute Butter' was not just the symbol of traditional middle-class cooking, but also the target of demands for distributive justice. The subsidisation of butter consumption (which despite desperate attempts by the socialist party to promote margarine was still very considerable) was one of the untouchable tenets of every GDR government."