Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

03/08/2005

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.

Die Welt, 03.08.2005

Daniel Binswanger, French correspondent of the Zürich-based Weltwoche tries to figure out why young European intellects are so fascinated by Giorgio Agamben: "Agamben is setting a new benchmark in lectern prophecy", he believes. "It's the perfume of the radical that gives him his edge. Agamben's critique of democracy could not be sharper. His book 'Homo sacer' (1995) is an eclectic survey of the history of the western democratic state comparing it to an enormous concentration camp in its essence. He sees the modern state as a totalitarian event in the efficient management of naked biological life because contemporary sovereignty is exercised through bio-politics – the control of naked life. According to Agamben, the power of decree to which concentration camp prisoners are subjected has no legal limitations and constitutes the secret matrix of the modern administrative state." Militant anti-globalisation types love this message. But Binswager is not impressed. "Every era has the trendy philosophy it deserves. Ours seems to be getting needy again," he concludes.


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.08.2005

Jürgen Schrempp has frittered away 50 billion euros of Daimler Chrysler's net worth since 1998 but writer and entrepreneur Ernst-Wilhelm Händler doesn't think he's responsible for the entire problem. "What he did had the majority support in the supervisory board for ten years. The entire committee is responsible. The chairman of the board is at least as responsible; in this case, that's Hilmar Kopper from the Deutsche Bank." Händler claims that it's the participation of banks or states like Lower Saxony in the case of Volkswagen that are bringing the German economy to its knees and not the much criticised private investors. They, says Händler, are doing the economy good. "If you go about this business without passion or prejudice, things like this don't happen. Megalomania only makes economic sense if it pays off. A strategic investor or a hedge fund does not in principle know the sheer megalomania."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 03.08.2005


Marc Zitzmann visited Christian Dior's house of birth in Norman Granville where an exhibition is being staged to celebrate the couturier's hundredth birthday. Zitzmann was obviously impressed. "In the belle etage, memories fly to and fro. Here a fitted blazer from Robert Piguet and an evening dress from Lucien Lelong, who works for Dior as a designer. There the famous cast iron star which, when the superstitious fashion designer found it in 1945, prompted him to take up the offer of industrialist Marcel Boussac to open his own house. There the gold edged little cane that the couturier used during rehearsals to alert new models to wayward details: 'Really, I don't like it one bit.'"

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 03.08.2005

Irish writer John Banville asks why the IRA in their most recent statement announced that they would put an end to their armed campaign but not disband the organisation. He is all but optimistic. "The 'armed struggle' is over, but criminality will continue, perhaps even escalating in brazenness and brutality, because now the IRA is no longer taking responsibility for the activities of its members. Many of the 'tough guys' who run the dirty business of war on the streets of Belfast and Derry and on the remote roads in South Armagh, are among the most active and brutal criminals in Europe, Russia included."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.08.2005


"The heroes of the Soviet Union and Russia went on a hunger strike at the beginning of July. They were furious that the government had changed the laws on hero status without them being consulted," reports Sonja Margolina, who has limited sympathy for the strikers. After all, recent times have seen war criminals such as the Chechynan warlord Ramsan Kadyrov being crowned as heroes without any protest whatsoever." Until now the status of the heroes has been dependent on their great acts being recognised by the public. And they have wallowed with their considerable privileges in the illusion that they also had state recognition. This is not surprising as the majority of the heroes had and still have close ties to the state. Many of them belong to the governing party and are responsible for socially detrimental decisions and the corruption of administrative bodies. If they want to lay claim to moral leadership, they will have to do it from the front rows of the opposition. It was only when they saw their privileges coming under threat that they showed resistance."


Die Tageszeitung, 03.08.2005

Pop-theorist Diedrich Diederichsen experienced the everyday racism in Paul Haggis' film "L.A. Crash" as a "sort of Tourette's Syndrome" a way of channelling drives in stress situations. "Every dialogue that one of the characters in the film launches, starts with a racist insult. And almost all of the characters have a job with the state or related institutions – as a lawyer, investigative policemen, regular cop, with a health insurance company or a TV company. And the film presents the institutional anti-racism at play in the workplaces in an equally bad light as the spontaneous racism of a cursing motorist or an aggressive policeman."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

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.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more