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GoetheInstitute

03/04/2009

From the Feuilletons

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.

Frankfurter Rundschau 28.03.2009

The paper looks at what remains of GDR literature. Ines Wilke doesn't like the question itself. "Why can't we just put aside the category 'GDR' literature for one moment and just read Thomas Brasch and Rolf Dieter Brinkman, Christa Wolf and Peter Weiss, Wolfgang Hilbig and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Reinhardt Jirgl and Ernst Jandl for what they are: writers, language players. Their material is the German language, they are united by the attempt to free this of empty phrases – in the most manifold ways and against the background of the 20th century.


Frankfurter Rundschau 30.03.2009

Hans Magnus Enzensberger is the "Jürgen Habermas of German poetry" Rolf Spinnler learns at a symposium on the poet's 80th birthday (which is actually not until November) in the German Literature Archive in Marburg, The celebration lasted three days and "was played out with all the drama of a US election party convention: While academics from various disciplines analysed his work, the birthday boy hid back stage, appearing only when the conference reached its highpoint to answer questions about his life. Not that Enzensberger would have had anything to fear from the various appraisals of his life's work at the symposium, because everything that was said in his absence was pretty flattering and neatly coincided with the image of himself that the poet likes to cultivate."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 31.03.2009

Swiss writer Urs Widmer explains the difference between the Swiss and the Germans. "I, who have bathed in many German waters, have no problem understanding Herr Steinbrück [the German finance minister who told the Swiss banks in rather crude terms exactly what he wanted from them] who, like your average German customer, goes into a bakery and says 'Ich krieg' das Brot da' (I get that bread there). Of course he gets it, pays and goes. But this sort of transaction is absolutely inconceivable for the Swiss, and the first time they encounter such a thing they will be in shock for hours afterwards. If we want to buy bread in a bakery, we say: "Could I possibly have a loaf of bread like the one over there, if you wouldn't mind, please?' Then we get it and pay, and pay more than the German in Germany who by this time will have been to the butchers and the greengrocers and got his sausages and potatoes and be heading homewards, his shopping done."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 02.04.2009

After 180 years in the heart of Vienna, the piano maker Bösendorfer is being forced to head for the provinces, writes Paul Jandl sorrowfully. Steinway is just way too powerful and there are just not enough prominent musicians who play Bösendorfers. With a few exceptions: "Andras Schiff is fighting a lonely fight against Steinway's globalization of piano music, faithfully rolling out his Bösendorfer to perform Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The crystal clarity of the Steinway is 'high German' against the darkly lyrical 'Viennese accent' of the Bösendorfer. In a protracted diminuendo, the spruces of the North face oscillate in the resonant terrain of the vast concert grand. It is a sound whose legend endures."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.04.2009

Turkey has lost a far right politician. The entire country has thrown itself into mourning. The correspondent Kai Strittmacher is nonplussed: "There are days when you wake up in Istanbul to find country is more of a mystery than ever. Wednesday was like that. Images of the funeral filled the front pages. The streets of Ankara was awash with mourners. In their tens of thousands... Pro-government newspapers expressed their condolences: 'Turkey bids farewell to its hero.' The hero: Muhsin Yazicioglu. Not a government minister. Not one of the big cats. The chairman of a splinter party, the Great Union Party, BBP. A one-time Grey Wolf. Top wolf. A fascist."


Die Welt 02.04.2009

Friedrich Pohl harshly criticises the German musical copyright agency GEMA, which has raised its fees yet again, forcing Youtube to erase all German music videos from its site – and we're talking videos that the record labels actually put online themselves. "You get the feeling that the GEMA is raising its fees simply to finance its vast bureaucratic apparatus. The agency might say that it is acting in the interests of its 60,000 members, but there is seldom any talk of the massive hurdles that GEMA places in the path of musicians who do not use its services (the majority, incidentally)."


Die Tageszeitung 02.04.2009

In an interview filmmaker Werner Schroeter talks about his new and extremely sinister melodrama "The Night", his extravagance, and the barbarity of life without art. "You see it in this 'un-culture' of computer and mobile phones. People no longer have to make any effort to strive for anything. You just google it – this is alienation: anti-art in every way. Pain and searching are part of culture, not just tap, tap, tap! But art is so important, and this goes for ars amandi and cooking too! I get livid when people cook badly!"


From the Blogs 03.04.2009

f!xmbr was deeply frustrated by the re:publica blogger's conference in Berlin. "Here we are in the middle of a global economic crisis on a scale that has shattered all expectations and we still cannot begin to imagine what consequences it will have. This crisis is also the result of the media's inability to critically question the elites, the people in power, to do its research, to come up with alternatives. The media is currently in the middle of a nuclear winter – and rightly so. And what is happening? At the re:publica in Berlin they are offering crocheting courses. People are philosophising about deadly sins in web design, letting themselves be lulled by IBM's PR events and celebrating Twitter's entry into the mainstream. Incredible."


Die Tageszeitung 03.04.2009

Bahman Nirumand assesses the mood in the Arab world, which is concerned about Iran's growing power in the wake of Obama's shift in strategy. "The enmity which occasionally breaks out openly between Iran and the Arab states goes back a long way. In 642 the Arab armies conquered Iran and forced the population to convert to Islam. The Iranians, who regarded themselves as a grand cultural nation far superior to the Arabs, were left with deep wounds that they continue to lick today. And now Arab societies are getting nervous that a powerful Iran might be tempted to reek revenge."

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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