Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06.07.2005

Orhan Pamuk seems to be more in favour of Turkey joining the EU than the FAZ, in its concern for the Christian Occident, previously maintained when it was announced that Pamuk would receive this year's Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. In an interview with Hubert Spiegel, the Turkish author talked about his novels, and his relationship to Western and Turkish tradition. But he also made the following statement: "I see the EU as a promise and an excellent instrument for reforming the limited democracy in Turkey. This hope alone has already achieved so much for my country. Even in moments like these, when Europe is wracked by hesitation and doubt, Turkey is finding it hard to turn an angry back on this promise. But now Turkey is also hesitating about whether it wants to join. And this is much worse, because it means that anti-European sentiment is destroying Turkey's restricted democracy."

Yesterday morning an unofficial monument to the victims of the Berlin Wall was dismantled on the order of Berlin's SPD government. A very heterogenous crowd gathered in the wee hours to protest the removal of the 1065 crosses. Mark Siemons was there: "Long before 6 a.m., four very different groups had collected: police, journalists, members of the conservative CDU and friends of the Mauermuseum at Checkpoint Charlie, some of whom had spent years in East German prisons. This last group were the most vocal. While the others, above all the yellow and green clad police 'Anti Conflict Team' spoke in dulcet tones, the victims of the East German communist regime filled the entire square in front of the former checkpoint, and everyone else lent an ear. Their T-shirts say 'Communism – no thanks', and 'Born in Bauzen' (the GDR's notorious penetentiary where regime opponents were incarcerated). Nine of them chained themselves to the crosses, and a pale young man held a burning candle in his hand" (see yesterday's In Today's Feuilletons for more).

Perhaps not entirely without envy, author Martin Mosebach wonders how Dan Brown's book "The Da Vinci Code", which is currently being filmed in Paris, can sell 45 million copies worldwide. He finds a hint in the book's one-to-one copying of reality. After all, which tourist has not been to see the Mona Lisa under the glass pyramid of the Louvre? "Yes, the Mona Lisa is really there, yes, she really is androgynous, perhaps because Leonardo wasn't interested in women. And which novel reveals such astonishing insights, all of which become crystal clear as if time had stopped under the pyramid while the groups of tourists file by? One of the novel's ingeniously simple devices is to turn the entirely non-secret location of the Louvre, which is literally overrun by tourists, into the setting for the most secretive goings on."


Berliner Zeitung, 06.07.2005

Wolfgang Kraushaar recently revealed in the FAZ (see our summary) - and above all in a new book - who planted the bomb on November 9, 1969 in the Jewish Community Centre in Berlin. It was Albert Fichter, a former member of the legendary Kommune 1, and the bomb failed to detonate. Today journalist and historian Gerd Koenen, who has published several books on the German terrorist Red Army Faction, writes in the Berliner Zeitung: "Somebody else was involved." "The bomb, as many have long suspected and Kraushaar has finally proved with witnesses and documents, came from an agent provocateur from the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the notorious man in the little hat, Peter Urbach. According to the report by explosives experts from the Berlin police who detonated a duplicate bomb, Urbach's bomb could have torn the building apart and killed many of the 250 people attending the commemoration of 'Kristallnacht' (the Night of Broken Glass on November 9, 1938)."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 06.07.2005

"The honeymoon between architecture and the zeitgeist is over," says Alexander Hosch, commenting that the visionaries among today's star architects have got their feet back on the ground. "Today's architecture is no longer about ... much-exalted giant follies with tiny, almost homoeopathic doses of users. Today's architects have to bend to strictures, just like everyone else.... These include the disdainful wishes of investors and adapting highly complicated forms to fit tight schedules and budgets. The high art of architectural creation is now controlled by profit ratios. Then either you work like Zaha Hadid, who followed her much acclaimed Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati with a flawlessly functioning car plant, or things don't work for you at all. That was the case of Daniel Libeskind, whose idea for Ground Zero was taken apart by a colleague and the building authorities."