Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

17/09/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Monday 17 September, 2007

Süddeutsche Zeitung 17.09.2007

At a special service for the inauguration of the Kolumba art museum of the archbishopric of Cologne, Archbishop Joachim Meisner stated on Friday: "Where culture is estranged from worship, the cult stagnates in ritualism, and culture degenerates. It loses its centre" (news story). The remark has met with widespread disapproval, echoing as it does the Nazi idea of "degenerate art." Gustav Seibt responds by remarking that Christianity itself is not innocent of developments in modern art. "The legacy of Christian art is still with us today, bearing witness to the drama and emotional excesses born of the tension between the consciousness of sin and the hope for redemption. The excessiveness of Catholic baroque painting in Italy unsettled the Protestant classicist Goethe so much that decades later he asked how one could paint such appalling things. The second legacy of Christian art is its relentless realism, above all in painting. God became human as the son of a craftsman, and was born in a manger. Again and again, art has been inspired by these beginnings to devote itself to the simple realities of life, epitomised by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. In their works the Apostles have calloused feet and the prophets are short-sighted old men."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17.09.2007

Verena Lueken saw several American films that centre on Iraq at the Toronto Film Festival and concludes: "While political commentators have been debating for a long time if and what parallels there might be between the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, cinema has already decided that the engagements are completely different. But the errors of legitimation, the self-conception of America that stands behind them and the atmosphere on the home front is comparable. And it is definitely the case that, just as cinemas the world over have had the Vietnam film since the 70s and 80s, they now have the American Iraq-film."


Der Tagesspiegel
, 17.09.2007

Writer Kathrin Röggla has read Naomi Klein's new globalisation-critical best-seller "The Shock Doctrine" (more). She is persuaded by Klein's thesis that the liberal economic theories of economist Milton Friedman have been implemented through crisis scenarios induced for the purpose. "She looks at the influence of his school in a variety of countries over the last 50 years and concludes that this most radical form of a market economy never comes about democratically, but rather is established through shocks and crises that are often instigated by multinationals with the cooperation of the CIA or other government organisations and then maintained with terror – simply because the process involves plundering entire classes of society whose potential for resistance has to be broken."


Frankfurter Rundschau
, 17.09.2007

Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich encourages us to forget Anna Netrebko: only mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli deserves the crown of prima donna. The conclusion is reached after listening to Bartoli's latest album, "Maria". "Taking a close look at the 150-page picture-booklet stuck into the CD, one notices that there is only one picture, on page 9, that looks even moderately like the real Bartoli. Why deny it: Ceclia Bartoli is small and chubby. But on stage she is a ball of power and lithesome energy, wild in every fibre, a passionate or intelligent-reflective, wide awake actress, cat-like in a different way from Callas but with no less talent for grandeur."


Saturday 15 September
, 2007


Berliner Zeitung 15.09.2007

Sonja Margolina presents a manifesto by the influential journalist with the congenial name Maxim Kalashnikov. The document, promoted by the Orthodox Church, addresses the renewal of Russia: "The 800 page manifesto blends conservative organisational ideas from the 19th century, fascist approaches to modernisation and post-modern Eurasian fantasies. Clearly visible, in addition, are Soviet thought patterns which betray the origins of the supposedly Orthodox thinker. Soviet ideology, cross-fertilised by Orthodox nationalism, has given birth to clerical fascism."


Die Tageszeitung 15.09.2007

The newspaper prints a special edition dedicated to the future of the newspaper in the era of the Internet. The most optimistic anti-Internet spokesperson is Swiss publisher Michael Ringier, who speaks in an interview with Bascha Miki and Georg Löwisch: "In the Internet, I mostly find what I'm looking for. In newspapers I find things that I never knew interested me. When I glance at the double page of a newspaper, within seconds I've picked out what I want to read. It can be something I wouldn't have found otherwise, because I'd no idea it existed. Added to that, reading a paper is far more enjoyable than reading a monitor. No technology in the world can change that."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 15.09.2007

Roger M. Buergel, curator of the Documenta 12 exhibition in Kassel, has been widely criticised for this year's event, and has himself criticised his critics in Spiegel magazine. That doesn't stop Gottfried Knapp from taking negative stock of the show, which ends this coming Sunday: "The criteria used by Buergel and his team to select the artists for this year's event were all too transparent. Apparently this show was meant to morally rectify earlier Documentas by illuminating niches that had previously been ignominiously overlooked. The basic prerequisite for participating this year was that artists should belong to a minority neglected by the market. They had to be either women - more than half are - or have made clearly critical political or social statements with their works. They had to be from the Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa or South America. Or they had to have the benefit of old age and have made meaningful contributions to art thirty years ago, which unfortunately went unnoticed at the time."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not sure that Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class.
read more