Monday 13 August, 2007

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 13.08.2007

Heiner Müller's "Quartett", based on Laclos' "Liaisons dangereuses" is ideal for the Salzburg Festival, writes Barbara Villiger Heilig in her review of Barbara Frey's production of the play featuring Barbara Sukowa: "The festival audiences are full of VIPs, and seem like a caricature of past glory. Despite their cosmetics, surgery and diamonds, the women especially show that the 'drapes of the years' cannot be smoothed. The line comes from Heiner Müller's bitter, evil, cynical, macabre and bawdy two-person play 'Quartett' (1981). It takes place in a salon before the French Revolution and in a bunker after the Third World War. The Carabinieri Theatre is like a festive dungeon, and It's minimalistic splendour makes the perfect backdrop for the play."


Die Welt 13.08.2007

Masahiro Kobayashi's "Ai No Yokan" (The Rebirth) has won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival. Otherwise, however, the selection left much to be desired, writes Peter Claus: "It's astonishing that the young filmmakers who make up the large majority of participants at Locarno rarely have the guts to tell their stories in unusual, not to say unsettling, ways... The films shown here lead one to the conclusion that today's widespread fears about the future have also taken hold of young screenwriters and directors. Above and beyond the films on show here, this-year's festival on the Lago Maggiore was a telling mirror of everyday life in the Western world."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13.08.2007

Andreas Rossmann finds that there are grounds for criticising the planned Cologne mosque especially in the context of other mosque buildings – and even if it's not compared to the London design for a gigantic mosque, which was inspired by deconstruction. "You don't have to look into London's future to realise that the design by Gottfried and Paul Böhm owes something to old patterns. It not only falls back behind prominent mosques outside of Turkey such as Louis Kahn's building in Dhaka, a purely geometrical architecture with light spaces developed just for this purpose (completed posthumously in 1983); or Paolo Portoghesi's mosque in Rome (1994), which translates Islamic architecture into a modern language with a stylised minaret in the style of the Cordoba mosque. Even the mosque of the Turkish parliament in Ankara designed by Behruz and Can Cinici (1989) does without minarets and restricts itself to an abstraction of geometry without any decorum."


Die Tageszeitung 13.08.2007

Andreas Schlieker visits an exhibition marking the 80th anniversary of the Chinese Liberation Army – the largest army in the world and a veritable world of its own. "A large 'Department of Culture' with thousands of actors, singers and dancers is also part of the army, serving to assure the audience of the military's alleged love of peace on television: Tenors in uniform sing Heimat songs in a strangled voice in their own entertainment shows. The audience claps in time and the army ballet dances. A Chinese Karl Moik in uniform could jump out from behind the scenes at any moment. The cinemas show films produced by the army, there are even army writers


Saturday 11 August, 2007

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 11.08.2007

The paper prints the speech delivered by Hungarian author and trained mathematician Peter Esterhazy at the opening of the Lucerne Festival, on the topic of origins and destinations: "But equally important is where people aren't from, where they're almost from, or where they'd like to be from. I, for example, do not come from mathematics. (...) At best I'm a student of mathematics, who, interestingly, didn't know what he was studying. Not being able to do something in an intelligent way is an intellectual achievement not to be underestimated. Unlike most humanists, I don't tremble at the sight of a mathematical equation. Gödel talks about the same things as Robert Musil, to put it in a nutshell."


Der Tagesspiegel 11.08.2007

Jean-Michel Berg, a student at the Free University of Berlin, tells of his experiences in the seminar given by writer Ilija Trojanow. "In writing you can do away with reality, you can expand the universe, but you can't give a false recipe for Peking duck," Trojanow had said in his inaugural lecture. "But there's more to it than just being true to the facts. 'I can't imagine anything more boring than one's own sensations,' Trojanow says, thus staking out the ground between him and Peter Handke, for example, and other explorers of internal worlds. That's why our first task was to avoid 'ego-lit' and write about something entirely foreign. We didn't make it very far: to the hairdresser's, a bar, a club, one student even found the foreign in a bookshop. But what annoys Trojanow the most is that students don't research or ask questions, but just reproduce their own cliches. That's hard to take for a writer who trekked through India and Tasmania in the footsteps of Burton, the hero of his novel."


Berliner Zeitung 11.08.2007

Concrete cracks "are not only normal, they're even important," says Nikolaus Bernau on the occasion of the discussion around cracks in the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. The discussion is in his view due to an antiquated "purity cult" of modern materials. "It's not enough to do minor repairs or simply wipe up the cement water at the stelae of the Holocaust Memorial. No, they need to be 'refurbished' as if they were in danger of breaking apart entirely. Entire industries live on keeping surfaces clean, sealing and polishing them. They are not being improved, but beautified. Society however has moved one step ahead. A plank, whether it is bent or tilted, is worth more than laminate; a facade whose paint comes off in the rain is perceived as aesthetically charming. This change reflects the weariness with modern sleekness and with the youth cult of the past decades. A society that is ageing as a whole finds out that the sleekness of modernism was also the assertion of an untenable, ahistoric secular claim to eternity."