Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 26.08.2005

The UNO summit on the information society is due to take place in Tunis in three months' time. Yet the Tunisian state currently uses everything in its power to control the press, reports Beat Stauffer. One of the few journalists willing to talk to him about the state of Tunisian media was Lotfi Hajji who founded Tunisia's independent journalist trade union (SJT) in Autumn 2004. The newspapers "received instructions and guidelines on what topics they should cover and in which way they should do it." If an editor-in-chief doesn't follow these guidelines, he risks sanctions," reports Hajji. He cites the case of the weekly magazine Realities, which in 2000 published an article on Tunisian prisons that did not please the authorities one bit. The authorities subsequently withdrew the subscriptions of all libraries, university institutes, and state administration offices, and cancelled their advertisements in the magazine. The lesson worked," says Hajji. "Since then, Realities has become much tamer again."


Die Welt, 26.08.2005

Cornelius Tittel writes a portrait of photographer couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, who have travelled the world photographing industrial buildings destined to be demolished. Bernd Becher explains: "With time we've developed a sort of ideology without really formulating it. I've always said we're documenting the sacred buildings of Calvinism. Calvinism rejects art, and for that reason has never developed its own form of architecture. The buildings we photograph emerge from just this purely economic type of thinking." A retrospective of the Bechers' works opens tomorrow in the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 26.08.2005

How exactly should one describe the charm of singer Anna Netrebko's voice? With Netrebko's performance in "La Traviata", glamour has returned to the Salzburg Festival, which runs to August 31, writes Eleonore Büning. Büning does a fine analysis of Netrebko's voice, coming to a measured, yet generally very positive conclusion: "In the fast passages her voice is stiff – they don't bubble out of her on their own, it's more like they're accomplished like scale exercises. And the swirling embellishments, for example in 'Sempre libera', are not as nimble as you would want them to be. On the other hand, the steely confidence of her intonation is fantastic, and so is the fervent, intense brilliance of her high notes. She's completely at home on the upper end of the scale."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 26.08.2005

Palestinian author Hassan Khader, who grew up in the Gaza Khan Yunis refugee camp and now publishes the literary magazine Al Karmel, writes on the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. "The camp is a completely closed, self-sufficient universe, a place where all emotional and social needs are fulfilled. Yet it is also constructed on a powerful victim mentality and false premises, like 'the world doesn't understand our pain' and 'no one listens to the victims until they start to defend themselves.' But such sentiments aren't much help the morning after. We have yet to find out how strong our survival instinct is in terms of liberating our siege mentality. We have to see the day after in more colours than simply black and white."


Die Tageszeitung, 26.08.2005

Max Dax talks to Asha Bhosle, (more here) the most listened-to singer in the world. Over the past 50 years, she has recorded some 20,000 songs in Bollywood and sold hundred of millions of records. "It all comes down to my discipline. God has given me this energy. For many years I recorded two, three, maybe four songs a day. On some days I recorded as many as seven. And these songs are always recorded with live musicians in the studio; I've never sung to taped accompaniment. My music is usually used for Bollywood film dance scenes so I think it's easy to dance to. Bollywood has everything that moves the Indian heart: comedy, slapstick, heartache, drama, dreams, over-exaggeration, but above all Indian music, Indian dances, and colourful Indian costumes. Bollywood has proved that in India, cinema can overcome all cultural barriers. Remember: India is a big country and my music has been capable of bridging all of its 251 languages."


Berliner Zeitung, 26.08.2005

Anke Westphal reports on three events taking place in Berlin on the theme of punks in communist East Germany. The exhibition "ostPUNK – too much future" opens today in the Salon Ost gallery. The documentary film "Schräge Zeit" (wierd times) will be shown starting September 1, while a new edition of a 1999 collection of essays and photos "Wir wollen immer artig sein" (we just want to be good) comes out October 1. Westphal comments: "as a punk in the German Democratic Republic, life wasn't the same as in the West. In the West a wild single could get you into the charts, in the East it could put you in prison. In the East your attitude to life was by no means a private matter.... The exhibition's title clearly marks the difference to the West punks' 'no future' attitude. Forms of life that diverged from the established GDR norms were often politicised against the will of their advocates, and labelled as anti-socialist and subversive. 'Too much future' is a sarcastic reflection on the planned nature of life in the GDR – and on the accusation of thanklessness hurled at its restless youth."