Die Zeit 06.09.2007

Emma, the feminist women's magazine (started by Alice Schwarzer in 1977) has relaunched its PorNo campaign but Iris Radisch doubts that the new breed of brutal pornography, with its the gangbang videos and porn rappers, can be tackled with brightly coloured stickers. "It is no longer possible to explain this as the unfortunate but unavoidable consequences of liberalisation in a free society. But the same goes for fighting it effectively. And blowing a whistle at this enemy will certainly not make any impression. The business spirit of neo-liberalism which makes and distributes anything that sells is different from old-school sexism because it is beyond the reach of moral appeal. Sexism was serious about misogyny. Moralising could not turn it around but it could at least reach it. Today's cynicism will have its fun with misogyny as long as there are buyers out there."

The Venice Film Festival is drawing to a close, and Katja Nicodemus has had her fill of the the long-term therapy sessions that the major festivals have become since 9/11. "Shouldn't we be getting worried about a nation which commits this amount of depression, melancholia, resignation, and psychosis and swan singing to the screen? Or should we be happy about a cinema that takes on all its society's crises and wars using every possible genre and with such incredible doggedness? Perhaps festivals really do function like group-therapy. If so then Wes Anderson's 'The Darjeeling Limited' is the patient who gives hope to the others because he's already found himself. Anderson, the lovable loon of American directors, sends three brothers to India in search of themselves and their mother. On their fantastical train journey through the Indian landscape Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson and Jason Schwartzman meet poisonous snakes, beautiful women and patterns of their childhood. And swallow bottle-loads of anti-depressants along the way. At the end of this spiritual journey they meet Anjelica Huston in a temple and she issues following command: People should finally stop pitying themselves and look towards the others, wordlessly and with love. Who would want to contradict her?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung 06.09.2007

Forget Theodore Fontane, you new Berliners, forget Prussia and the estates of Brandenburg, Gustav Seibt declares. "Anyone who travels two hundred kilometres further south arrives in an area even more full of history. Here the past is so intricate that it's fully unsuited to nostalgic identification, although almost everything with which Germany positively influenced the world literally originated here. Between Wittenberg on the Elbe and Weimar on the Ilm, this area becomes increasingly mountainous as it extends southwards. For three centuries, the small cities here displayed a density of intellectual accomplishments comparable only to Renaissance Tuscany or Ancient Greece. Thuringia and the areas of the former duchy of Anhalt are equivalent to Umbria in Italy: the heart of the country. Only the voices that sing such praise of Prussia are silent here."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 06.09.2007

Renate Klett reports from a theatre festival in Kabul: "One piece in the puzzle of the new Afghanistan is the Theatre Festival that has taken place every year since 2004. In its fourth season, it's now presenting fifty productions from all across the country. In these performances, content is more important than form. Most aren't longer than thirty minutes, and have neither sets nor technical support. What they do have is succinct stories, dealing with war and violence, the oppression of women, police corruption or superstition. This is politically engaged amateur theatre, exposing the country's wounds, and sometimes also showing how to heal them. The actors are primarily men, but there are a couple of women's groups in which young girls play evil or stupid men with a lot of zest and a touch of revenge."


Frankfurter Rundschau 06.09.2007

At the start of the new season, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt is dedicating a series of concerts to Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, who made a name for himself as a rock musician in Estonia before turning to contemporary classical music after the fall of communism. Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich questions him about life in the Soviet Union: "The atmosphere was much freer in Estonia, because it lay on the western tip of the Soviet Union. Our professor for contemporary music at the Tallinn Conservatory had a huge record collection, with works by Boulez, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis and others, so we were very familiar with the sounds of modern European music. Added to that, a lot of people had family connections on the other side of the Iron Curtain, because so many Estonians had fled the Soviet occupation. Nevertheless, the Communist Party did have strict control of state concert programmes. There had to be a careful balance between Russian and other Soviet, Estonian and Western compositions in any given programme. But not too much German music, nor this, nor that! What's the message of this text? No religious texts! No socially critical subjects! For me at that time, composing instrumental music was like an escape from these bureaucratic hassles."


Frankfurter Rundschau 06.09.2007

Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava is planning the tallest building in North America, the "Chigago Spire." Dirk Fuhrig cites him as saying that "the upwards spiralling 'Spire' is meant to represent the smoke rising from an Indian camp fire – a echo back to the pre-colonial epoch when the shores of Lake Michigan were a favoured Native American settlement area. But if we put aside this historically romantic symbolism and look at the plans and models, we can see how extremely tall and slender the 'Chicago Spire' is. Calatrava used new developments in concrete construction to allow the building to reach great heights despite its small base."