Monday 6 August, 2007

Die Welt 06.08.2007

Stefan Wirner of Jungle World asks why German politicians speak up about the execution of Saddam Hussein, but not when two journalists are condemned to death and 16 people - apparently all homosexuals - are executed in Iran. "Why is there so little criticism here of the Iranian regime and its cruel methods? It can't just be because so many politicians are on holiday. The left party 'Die Linke,' for example, has found the time to comment on everything under the sun: the debate over raising unemployment benefits, or a judgement about the planned Bombodrom bombing range on the Kyritze Heath. But condemned journalists and executed homosexuals? Not a peep! The non-parliamentary Left has also remained silent. For years now, leftist activists have waged a campaign against the threatened execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the black journalist condemned to death for the murder of a policeman. But Iran? Icy silence. Why does everyone get up in arms every time a death sentence is carried out in the USA, and no one care when people are executed in Iran?"


Die Tageszeitung 06.08.2007

While the Eichmann trial was under way, record numbers of "Stalag" genre pocket books were selling in kiosks throughout Israel. Tal Sterngast watched Ari Libsker's documentary "Stalags – Holocaust and Pornography in Israel" which exposes the creators for first time. "An allied soldier, mostly an American pilot is taken prisoner and held in a German POW camp ruled by sadistic SS women. The prisoners are humiliated, sexually abused and raped. Yet the the story has a happy end. The soldier manages to escape and goes on to exploit and punish the women in return. The covers take their cue from American pulp fiction. The authors were all Israelis writing under American pseudonyms like Mike Baden, Archie Berman or Mike Longshot who were also the heroes of the stories. The majority of them, as the film discovers, had direct or indirect connections to the Holocaust."


Saturday 4 August, 2007

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 06.08.2007

The paper prints excerpts of the speech given by Hungarian composer György Kurtag on receiving the "Ordre pour le merite" in Berlin. Kurtag used the occasion to remember his life-long friendship with composer György Ligeti. Even today, he says, "I'd like to tell him what I've finally discovered in his works after decades. Perhaps there are correlations that only I've discovered. So many things I'd like to ask. Sometimes his later works give answers, but other times it seems hopeless, because he's not here to explain them." Kurtag recalls the world premiere of Ligeti's 1962 "Poeme symphonique" for 100 metronomes: "It was a scandal. The title, which harks back to the heyday of Romanticism, together with the mechanically oscillating metronomes was like a provocation, an attempt to 'epater le bourgeois.' But later concerts showed the sheer poetry of the piece over and above its daring novelty. At first the metronomes, all set at different speeds and started at the same time, first build an impermeable mesh of sound. But then the structure becomes increasingly clear as the quickest machines run to a halt. The beats of the two slowest, the two 'soloists' remaining at the end, are like a moving, lyrical farewell."


Frankfurter Rundschau 04.08.2007

The critically ill author Walter Kempowski looks back on his life in an interview, casting an ill light on the German literature business: "I was poisoned. For ten years, at the height of my career, I didn't receive a single literary prize. That's impossible, unthinkable. What kind of people give out the awards? Mr Grass, for example, gets a whole apartment at the Goethe Institute so he doesn't have to spend a penny." About Grass, Kempowski comments: "I simply couldn't stand him, because of his attitude to politics. Keeping his SS membership secret (more here) and alleging the contrary, that's quite a number. As far as that goes I agree with Rolf Hochhuth, who just said: 'Disgusting'."


Die Welt 04.08.2007

Manuel Brug declares Christoph Schlingensief's "Parsifal", which has just been shown for the fourth and last time, to be an undiscovered gem at the Bayreuth festival. "It doesn't bear thinking about what would have happened if this now exemplary production had been shown as a guest performance at the documenta or at the Venice Biennale, instead of, to the virtual exclusion of the public, to an arch-conservative Wagnerian audience which had won these unpopular tickets in a raffle. This performance should have been filmed and screened again or at least shown live in cinemas from Berlin and Paris to New York, giving people who really wanted to see it the opportunity to do so. Yet in Bayreuth, no one seems to have noticed how this act of subversion known as 'Harsifal' due to the dominant and universal fertility symbol of a rotting hare which appears at the end (hasen is the German word for hare -ed.) has changed the world of Bayreuth for ever."


Berliner Zeitung 04.08.2007

Marin Majica introduces Karl Hans Janke, who was committed to a psychiatric institution in the GDR for "crazed invention," and whose drawings of constructions of space ships and engines are now on show in three exhibitions (here, here and here). "In 1950, Janke was sent to Schloss Hubertusburg. There he spent 38 years of his life, twice removed, in a closed off country in a closed off world at the edge of a remote village. There he invented ideas and inventions which he was convinced would save mankind's energy problems. And a stock of other problems at the same time. 'Non-radioactive engine! No petrol! No diesel! No rocket fuel!' Karl Hans Janke wrote on his 'German space-flight engine.' 'For peaceful uses only, please,' he wrote next to a spaceship. Technically these things do not work experts say. It is an artistic Utopia in the spirit of energy politics."