Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25.02.2005

On the media page, "set" describes specialised web logs on the Internet. "According to a survey by Pew Internet and American Life Project, 32 million already read 'blogs', and eight million contribute to them. A lot of what is written in this colourful op-ed cosmos ranges between inspired commentary and narcissistic banality." But the new bloggers include many researchers and academics. "Apart from political reporters with journalistic ambitions, an increasing number of specialists are publishing and linking information in the growing 'blogosphere', or web log community. Such specialised blogs have different names on the Net according to their area of specialisation. Legal web logs are called blawgs, business journals biz blogs, and political reports after 9/11 war blogs."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 25.02.2005

Christine Keck interviews Elisabeth Hartnagel, sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, on Marc Rothemund's film "Sophie Scholl", which won two Silver Bears for best actress and best director last weekend at the Berlinale film festival. The film deals with the White Rose movement, a group of young students in Munich who acted against the Nazi regime. "Elisabeth Hartnagel was not displeased after seeing the film, although she admits that 'the reality was so much more horrible than the film'."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 25.02.2005

"A hard act to follow!" Gustav Seibt is overwhelmed by Walter Kempowski's "Abgesang '45”, the final book of Kempowski's ten volume 'collective diary' of World War Two. "Goebbels' last drivellings, the Wehrmacht's unctuous final report, Hitler's crazed babbling, it all comes alive. Of course, the book has its weak points, masks of self-righteousness and barefaced horror. The suffering of the Germans is all there, but it is their crimes that leap off the page. In Bergen-Belsen a British officer cannot tell if the beds are occupied or not because the haggard inmates are so emaciated. The last trains full of thirsty, screaming deportees squeeze through masses of refugees on the German rail stations, heading for the camps."

Cultural anthropologist Werner Schiffauer looks at the reasons for the rising number of 'honour killings' in Berlin's Turkish community, pointing to causes not in Islam, but in "social discrimination and pressure to conform." For Schiffauer, "an ethnic underclass is forming. Here the recourse to honour is a problem not only because it is used to mark a border with the rest of society, but also because it does this with reference to women. We are honourable, they aren't. And you can see this in our women. Anger at German society as a whole is quickly redirected at women who do not comply with these expectations - by becoming upwardly mobile and distancing themselves from Turkish culture. The relative success of these young women in schools and at the workplace shows their brothers that their peripheral position is perhaps not as hopeless as they make out. When on top these women then start acting 'like the Germans', it is tantamount to betrayal."


Die Tageszeitung, 25.02.2005

On the opinion page, Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center of Human Rights Policy, explains in an interview with Robert Misik that the war in Irak is a lesser evil than European left-wing moral relativism. "It is certainly easy to sit back and say: 'Who are we to decide between good and evil? Who are we to intervene in Irak?' It all sounds good, but what results is Vienna of 1994: a good, secure life when only an hour's flight away genocide is taking place. An unbearably high percentage of the European left thinks exactly this way. The rhetoric combines anti-colonialism and cultural relativism with a general suspicion of liberalism. What results is a defence of the comfortable, bourgeois life in Western capitals. This provincial anti-American isolationism should ask itself why only others should be exposed to the world of danger."


Der Tagesspiegel, 25.02.2005

Lutz Hachmeister, director of the film "Goebbels-Experiment" explains in an interview what interested him in the character of the Nazi propaganda master: "I was interested in Goebbels as a modern figure, as a media politician. He is always portrayed as an abstract manifestation of evil, from which we, as the good children of the next generation, are safely separated. I wanted to lift this partition. After the premiere at the Berlinale film festival last week, a woman from the audience said: 'He comes over as very likeable sometimes, and even good-looking. I think that's terrible.' It was my intention to create this unpleasant closeness. Some viewers and critics wanted exorcism and purification through some sort of commentary or strictly objective stance. This was exactly what I didn't want."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.02.2005

On Monday Frank Schirrmacher, one of the publishers of this paper, complained that 99 percent of schoolchildren at the Eberhard-Klein School in Kreuzberg were "non-German" (he obviously meant not of German parentage) and he painted this as the future looming over Germany. Today Regina Mönch visited the school and cannot speak highly enough of teachers' work there. "As in other schools with a high percentage of immigrants the Klein Secondary School has its own library which it has compiled itself and is much used - by children whose parents own very few books themselves. The school has a higher child-teacher ratio than other schools and the classes are often split into smaller groups to tackle learning difficulties more efficiently and push the faster learners. All this demands a huge amount of effort, patience and self-confidence which rarely receives recognition from outside. Instead, schools pick up the pieces of misguided immigration policies and social decline as a matter of course."