Die Tageszeitung 21.08.2007

"The problem is not the mosque but rather Islam," Ralph Giordano wrote recently, with respect to the debate (more) over the new mosque in Cologne. On the opinion pages, Sanem Kleff and Eberhard Seidel ask how the post 9/11 debate has slowly morphed into a debate on Islam. "The message from then on has been: Islam, not Islamism, is the problem. European intellectuals like Pascal Bruckner (more) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (blog), and hundreds of journalists in their wake, have joined forces to create a united, homogeneous, universal and violent Islam. In Germany, this new tone, emanating from the Netherlands, could only be successfully transferred once Turks were made into Muslims and religion was made their primary point of identification."

At the dance festival "Tanz im August," Katrin Bettina Müller develops a dance sociology in the course of the Steve Reich evening by Brussels choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. "The more dancers on the stage, the more complex the pattern becomes – of spirals that weave in and out, of movement sequences that are read backwards and forwards, of circles, triangles and stars that are made to interact. As the music builds up, and the musicians and their instruments orient themselves ever more to the reflections and symmetries, the images of movement take on the qualities of a swarm. The group runs in and out of itself, lets itself be pulled or defines its shape anew; this net can, at any moment, make new decisions and thus one tends to see the dance figures optimistically as a social model."


Frankfurter Rundschau 21.08.2007

Cultural Studies scholar Ulrike Brunotte from Berlin diagnoses a dangerous return of the hero. "Not only religions are returning to the political arena, heroic figures are as well. Yet the threatening scenario that Ernst Jünger painted in the case of the youth of Langemarck has been turned into its opposite: At the time, badly equipped young volunteers were at the mercy of the mechanical superiority of canons and machine guns despite their heightened spirit of self-sacrifice and will to fight. Today, extremely determined suicide bombers have the power to shock technology-wise, highly superior Western societies simply by using their bodies as weapons. But what is the relation between neofundamentalist versions of religion and a new heroism? And how (if at all) is this related to those young Americans who run amok and use religious rhetoric and violent action film scripts to act out their masculinity crisis?"


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 21.08.2007

When Russian explorers recently planted their country's flag on the North Pole, several other countries bolstered their claim to Arctic territory (more here). The debate has prompted cultural historian Thomas Macho to trace the history of polar expeditions. Macho notes that as early as the nineteenth century, the North Pole served as a stage for geo- and power-political conflicts. However, its myth still lingers on. "The trip to the North Pole had good motivations behind it: the demonstration of power and prestige, the search for new sea routes, natural and mineral resources, military interest in training soldiers, the scientific need for completing maps and filling in the white spots, not to mention inspiring topics of meteorological, ethnological, psychological and medical research. All of these motives have, however, interfered with the imaginations of literature and collective phantasies, horrors and desires."


Die Welt 21.08.2007

Dankwart Guratzsch takes a meeting of language experts from around Germany as an opportunity to lament the neglect of the German language. "While the French hold up, unchanged, Moliere's French and still honour it as the valid official language, whose mastery is considered requisite in a complete education, Germany is propagating the myth of an ongoing 'development' of the language, in which the perversions of advertising German, the supposed 'youth talk' and the 'hybridisations' coming out of Turkish/German Kreuzberg are made to reflect the 'new German' of a multicultural society of the future."