Frankfurter Rundschau 09.05.2009

Iranian-German writer and columnist Navid Kermani and political scientist Claus Leggewie discuss immigration society, multiculturalism and art. The FR prints chunks of the conversation. Leggewie names Mark Rothko as an example of an multi-ethnic artist who made culture rather than interculture. In Germany, Kermani replies, this could not happen. "Someone like Rothko would constantly have to give his opinion on Putin, he would have to defend himself for Chechnya and by virtue of his background, he would be called upon as an expert for the Orthodox Church. Everyone in Germany, who is involved in the culture business but who doesn't have German parents, knows this phenomenon and they are swimming in a sea of invitations to talk on multicultural topics. But when the talk turns to Goethe, the Meiers and Schulzes stick to themselves." Read more articles by Navid Kermani.


Süddeutsche Zeitung 09.05.2009

Gerhard Matzig sees a potential architectural revolution in the making. Concrete – a material that is obviously close to Matzig's heart – has a new face. It is now translucent (images) and is being used in Mexico on a grand scale. "Concrete, which revolutionised architectural history in both antiquity and modernity (as reinforced concrete), could be about to cause a third furore – this time around with image change. Because now we are seeing the light. This new translucent concrete, which has been in development for several years now, is being deployed on a massive scale in Mexico City and it will impact energy efficiency, facade design and aesthetics in general. If the experiment succeeds, architecture will change again."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 09.05.2009

Christoph Egger enthuses about the Ingmar Bergman Archives, a monumental paean to the Swedish film director, and he recounts how Bergman reacted to niggling critics: "...More extreme still were Mads Mandrup-Nielsen's slanderous remarks about 'Scenes from a Marriage' in 1973. His endless formulations were met with a plain 'No' from Bergman every time, until he commented: 'I am starting to ask myself whether there's some truth to what people say, that you cannot tolerate any objective, seriously-intended criticism'. Bergman finally answered: 'I cannot tolerate your criticism. You make me want to hit you.'"


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 11.05.2009

Manfred Clemenz visited the Musee d'Antibes which is celebrating its reopening with a retrospective of the Antibes works by Pablo Picasso. "In the show's artistically most convincing room there are female nudes showing Picasso's audacious constructions of the female form. 'Nu assis sur fond vert', 'Nu couche au lit bleu', 'Nu couche au lit blanc'. This last painting caught the eye of Matisse. He praised it, sketched it and then turned to Picasso: 'I understand why you painted the head like that, but what have you done to her behind?"

Marta Kijowska looks at the burgeoning success of women writers in Poland. Back in 2004, when publishers were raking in cash with chick-lit hits, the critic Przemyslaw Czaplinski complained that novels written by women were boring and petty bourgeois. "This blanket rebuff was certainly unjustified because recent years have seen the publication of all number of excellent books by women. One particularly impressive example is the delayed breakthrough of the political cabaret writer Joanna Olczak-Ronikier (born 1934), whose prize-winning family drama 'In the Garden of Memory', catapulted her into the literary premiere league. Since last year, the journalist Malgorzata Szejnert (born 1936) has been following in her footsteps, with two books that have earned her the title of master of historical reportage. 'The Black Garden', a brilliantly researched portrait of the Silesian workers' settlement, Giszowiec, brought her rave reviews, and she had everyone talking about her again this spring when she published her reportage about the legendary New York immigration quarantine unit, Ellis Island.


Frankfurter Rundschau 13.05.2009

Julia Kospach talks to the grand old man of the nature documentary, David Attenborough, who is a passionate believer that Darwin's theory of natural selection is the truth. He will give any creationist a run for his money: "The creationists' heads are filled with beautiful creatures like humming birds when they think of the creation story. I tell them that I always have to think about a child in East Africa whose eyeball had been buried through by a worm. This is the only way this worm can exist – by burying into eyeballs. I find it pretty difficult to reconcile such a thing with the idea of a benevolent, godly creator."


Die Welt 14.05.2009

The oldest sculpture in the world has been found in the Swabian Alps, a carved figure of a woman, six centimetres high in mammoth ivory. Berthold Seewald discusses the find with researcher Nicholas Conard: "Like most early female figurines she doesn't have a head and there's little detail to her legs. But her sexual features are very prominent: the breasts are large and the vulva is pronounced. It is a representation of womanhood rather than an individual person. This is always the case with early sculptures of women. And if they have a head, they have no face."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 14.05.2009

The Hessian Culture Prize for inter-religious dialogue was to go this year to the Catholic Cardinal Lehmann, the president of the Evangelical Church, Peter Steinacker, the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Salomon Korn, and the Muslim writer Navid Kermani. Actually, Fuat Sezgin was initially nominated as the Muslim, but he declined because of Salomon Korn's comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now the Catholic and the Protestant are refusing to share the prize with the ersatz Muslim, Navid Kermani, after reading an article he wrote about Guilo Reni's painting of the crucifixion, as Joachim Günther reports. Kermani wrote: "For me, however, the cross is a symbol which I cannot accept theologically. Other people can believe what they want, I certainly don't know better. But when I pray in a church, I take care never to pray to the cross. But then I found myself sitting in front of the altarpiece by Guido Reni in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, and I found the image so enchanting, so full of mercy, that I was reluctant to leave. For the first time I thought: I – not just 'one' – I could believe in the cross." But thanks to the inter-religious understanding of Lehmann and Steinacker, Kermani will not be awarded the prize. Surely it should be the other way round?


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 15.05.2009

On the media pages, Heribert Seifert assesses the German online election campaign. And what does he find? Films of party conferences and public appearances by politicians. But a dialogue with the citizens? No chance. "The marginal role played Web 2.0 in the political race is a result of politicians' ineptitude and lack of familiarity with net-specific communication forms. The 'transparent strategy and amalgamation of communication, development and organisation' that the Internet magazine Telepolis described as the feature of Obama's online campaign, is nowhere to be seen. German parties and politicians seldom or never manage to get the right mixture of authenticity and informal address that is required online."