Die Zeit, 11.08.2005

She slept through "Tannhäuser" but was wide awake for "Parsifal": rock icon Patti Smith was wowed by provocative director Christoph Schlingensief's staging at the Richard Wagner opera festival in Bayreuth. She was especially thrilled by the controversial huge floppy-eared dead rabbit in the first act. "Schlingensief's guileless fool doesn't know which animal to kill. The swan is replaced by a simple, symbolic childhood image. People laughed at this dead rabbit, but for me it opened a whole new perspective. American kids discover Wagner through the death of Bugs Bunny. In his legendary 1957 cartoon 'What's Opera, Doc?' Chuck Jones has Elmer Fudd kill our beloved rabbit. Throughout the film Elmer sings 'Kiww the Wabbit' to the Ride of the Valkyries. At the end he carries the dead Bugs up to Valhalla." The newspaper features photos and – online only – an interview. Smith was in Rome when Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, and comments: "I like him – a lot even. He seemed more relaxed than before. He's changing. His whole life he sat in studies and libraries, and read and taught, and now he feels the people's love. You can see it."

Pop theorist Diedrich Diederichsen is utterly revolted by the documentary about the porn classic "Deep Throat". "The film focuses on parallels with today's cultural struggles: Isn't it all the same today? Christian bigots want to destroy our porn! Although the film doesn't cover up the Mafia involvement or that Linda Lovelace was beaten by her husband into performing, the porn in 'Inside Deep Throat' is portrayed as a product of the freedom and success of the political sixties and the Left. As if the wonderful world of porn had lost its innocence, as if the contemporary porn industry were but a later aberrance. The blindly liberal American anti-rules/pro-freedom argument, anti-state/pro-deregulation - and in this film pro-porn/anti-politics - has never questioned whose freedom, whose rules and whose politics are actually at stake. In the name of this liberalism 'Inside Deep Throat' squeezes out a tear for the comical seedy world with its crazy men and wild women who swear that having sperm rubbed in your face is good for the skin."


Die Tageszeitung, 11.08.2005

Historian (more) Gabriel Kolko looks at the Second World War and its consequences for China. "People are generally not revolutionaries by nature. Lenin's power was a product of the First World War. The Second wiped out the middle classes in China and real income had dropped by as much as 90 percent by 1943. Catastrophic inflation drove many people to the Communists. The people were not Marxist-Leninists but they wanted China to be great again, they were nationalists. In Vietnam the Communists led the storm on the rice stores. The mobilisation in China and Vietnam was based on national identity, the Communists there were highly nationalistic. China's Communist Party grew from 40,000 members in 1937 to 4.5 million in 1949. The Communists in China were the leading power against foreign intervention, in that case the Japanese. The Kuomintang on the other hand were utterly corrupt. The Communists stood for a China that was productive and nationalist. This nationalism is still the core of Communist rule in China. If there were elections today, the Communists would certainly win because they have made China powerful again."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 11.08.2005

The best film so far at the Locarno Film Festival, writes Heike Kuhn, is a German-Belgian-French co-production, "Fratricide" by young Turkish filmmaker Yilmaz Arslan, who has lived in Germany since 1975. The film which "is as uncompromising as Fassbinder" shows nationalist feuding between Turks and Kurds in Germany. "The hope for a multi-cultural flirt with world peace and integration dies a thousand deaths in 'Fratricide'. Mehmet stabs the Turk with the pit bull because he threatened Azad. The wound provokes the dog and it turns to attack its owner. The audience will never live to forget the image of the dog ripping the bowels from his body. The violence eats the violent but it also swallows down the innocent, hair and all, and spits the remains into the gutter. 'Fratricide' is a furious and tragic settling of accounts with the German dream. Up-rooted and frustrated, the exiled resort to their worst traditions, vendetta and fratricidal war."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11.08.2005

Thomas Burkhalter heard great music in Istanbul, but is sceptical of the hype about the music scene in the Beyoglu district: "For example the groups Orient Expressions and Mercan Dede work with drawn out melodies, Turkish string instruments, ney flutes, darabukas and jar drums, but also with an Australian didgeridoos and Spanish guitars. They use elements from Turkish folk music, brass fanfares from South East Europe and Indian Bhangra. In this way an imaginary Turkish music comes into being, heralding visions of a better world: a stress-free, enjoyable World Music produced at an international level for culture-loving audiences, most of whom are upper middle class Turks or Europeans. These sounds have a lot in common with the visions of Istanbul's city planners and tourism managers. But they have less to do with the realities of the city." See our feature "Rocking Istanbul" for more on music in the Turkish metropolis.


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11.08.2005

Matthias Aumüller is up in arms about the new Russian edition of the works of philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. The editors claim Bakhtin's authorship of works published by under the name of Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov. The two members of the Bakhtin Circle were victims of Stalin's purges in the 1930s. "This is scandalous because the argument for Bakhtin's authorship has not been proved, and just as much can be said for the opposite thesis, namely that Medvedev and Voloshinov were co-authors of Bakhtin's 'Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics', published in 1929. Almost everything Bakhtin wrote before or afterwards was either unfinished or never published at all."