Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29.06.2005

Prominent intellectuals, mostly from France, met in Sarajevo to scrutinise the Dayton Accords, reports writer Hans Christoph Buch. But they were powerless in the face of the real problem. "The failure of the police reform, which resulted in Bosnia-Herzegovina's EU candidature being refused," is manifesting itself as a victory for Milosevic's ethnic cleansing programme in the Yugoslavian Republics. "The Bosnian Serbs are refusing to approve the creation of a unified police force, which would be allowed to pursue criminals beyond city and canton borders regardless of ethnic background. This is not an academic question, because, as in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, organised crime is the real winner of the war. It profits from the collapse of state order and uses the political vacuum for its own ends. And the cross-border operating mafia is often in cahoots with the police."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29.06.2005

German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani comments on the election victory of the radical Islamists in Iran. He fears on the one hand that in future "even more Iranians will gradually abandon all hope or just opt for exile straight away". But he hopes that others will "now realise that the don't give a damn mentality that has spread particularly among the young after the failure of the reformer, is only making their lives worse. They will find a way back to political involvement be it only to defend the few freedoms won in recent years."

Tobian Kniebe visited the Munich Film Festival and reports on the boom of the documentary. "In a time where fictional films are increasingly just muscle-flexing, where every major film is in danger of leading into a logistic or metaphorical battle, the documentary is a way out. All you need is one good idea, a great story, a couple of images nobody has seen before and are not computer generated but found anywhere from Outer Mongolia to some lost film archive - and the film is ready to go out into the world." Documentaries are one of the main focal points at the Munich festival, "for example 'Bearing Witness', in which legendary documentary maker Barbara Kopple spends a year with five female war reporters in Irak. These unbelievably hard-boiled women, one has already lost an eye and looks like Captain Ahab, transform over the course of the year from dry joke tellers to ticking time bombs. A better illustration for the terror into which the land is sinking would be hard to find."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 29.06.2005

Christoph Schröder has been to Ukraine, and was impressed by the lively literary scene. "The men and women of letters who we met exude self-confidence. Oksana Zabuzhko comes across like a wicked diva, and has written a book called "Field Work in Ukrainian Sex", which caused a furore and inspired an entire generation of young women authors that people are already calling 'Zabuzhko's daughters'. They are between 15 and 25, and write about sex and drugs in books with garish covers. We met her publisher, Natalia Fomina of Folio press, at the Goethe Institute. Petro Matskevych, who publishes Ljubko Deresch, made the journey from Lviv. For all their differences (Folio produces around 400 titles per year, while Matsckevych's company Calvaria is fighting to stay in business), both face similar problems: the book market is practically non-existent and few people have money for books. With a population of 45 million, Ukraine has around 60 publishers (compared to 6,000 in Germany) and 300 bookstores (30,000 in Germany)."


Der Tagesspiegel, 29.06.2005

The Styriarte Festival opened in Graz on Saturday and runs till the end of July. A major Austrian music festival, this year's version is dedicated to the five senses, and kicked off with a production of Bizet's "Carmen" as an homage to female sensuality, directed by major German theatre director Andrea Breth and conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Christine Lemke-Matwey was relatively unimpressed. "Taken individually, Breth's images seem heavy and embarrassingly pretentious. But they do work when she relies on her musical intuition. In the fourth act, for example, two young dancers do a fantastic pas de deux, in which the young woman is slammed against the wall with such force that she can only crawl trembling from the stage. Or Carmen's 'Tra-la-la la-la-la-la-la" in the first act: she throws down her mink coat like a dead animal, then lolls around on it on her back. Nora Gubisch (six months pregnant, which the staging unfortunately neglects) is a not unerotic, but somewhat all-round mezzo-soprano Carmen, a virtuoso in cunning who unscrupulously takes what she wants."


Die Welt, 29.06.2005

Uwe Wittstock has visited the Deutsche Bibliothek (German library) in Frankfurt, which if the federal government has its way, will soon be called the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. After the fusion with the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig in 1990, the library stocks the entire intellectual production of the Federal Republic, including everything published in Germany since 1913. For the library staff, the government's recent revamping of the legislation covering the library represents an enormous "mentality change", writes Wittstock. "The staff can no longer see themselves primarily as book collectors, but will have to become information technologists." Dealing with electronic media like audiobooks, CDs and DVDs, which can be collected and catalogued like books, is comparatively easy. "More difficult is the question of how the information stored can also be made accessible in future.... A lot of the data processing media or software that was in use just a few years ago is now so out of date that it is not easy to find equipment or programmes to worm their secrets out of them. Here the Deutsche Bibliothek is working together with other libraries to develop techniques of reliably saving all information, that will also permit it to be passed on to succeeding media generations in the future."