Monday 7 November, 2005

Violence rages in the French suburbs

The feuilleton pages are a running commentary on the violence in the French suburbs. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Martin Meyer tries to understand what's motivating these young fire-starters. "The new partisans are mobile, informed and versatile. They have no Chinese red stars or little red Mao books. They may be increasingly 'nihilist', and armed with a willingness to commit a violence honed by thousands of computer games. The events satisfy their desire for action, and are steered by the vague 'idea' that 'this'll show the people in power'. But this mentality, far from theory and doctrine, makes it extremely difficult for the public security forces to respond efficiently. The more a spontaneous terror movement sees itself as 'playful', the more difficult it is to tackle ."

Alex Capus, an author living in the Paris, puts things in perspective in Saturday's Die Welt: "When the suburbs of Paris burn, you don't notice a thing in the chic districts of the inner city." If you see someone with dark skin in Saint Germain or Auteuil, he writes, you know it's the street sweeper. "You don't have to tell the youth in the suburbs that they have no place in the inner city. Wherever they go, the police show up. For white people state violence is invisible, for black people it's everywhere. The children of immigrants should go to school in the banlieues, and think about their future. Many do exactly that. But it doesn't help. Because whether they drop out of high school at 15 or leave with top marks, they're going to be unemployed anyway. And if one of them does manage to have a career as graphic designer or tax collector, he still remains a second-class citizen. If he wants to go to a disco in Saint Germain on Friday night, the bouncers still won't let him in."

The Süddeutsche Zeitung looks to the rap world for answers: For Clemens Pornschlegel, the burning banlieues are not just a French phenomenon. "The hatred in the immigrant ghettos is aimed at the Western world which, as rapper Akhenaton (more here) puts it, is "a bastion of absurdity" into which it is impossible to integrate. "Only gangsta as identification / yields a million / stinking jackals, and the darky / is the mangy / product of racists / from countries with profit lusts".

Also in the SZ, Daniel Geiselhart lets French rapper Fofo Adom'Megaa aka Rost explain the situation. "The older kids all went to school, some even went onto college, but still none of them can find work. The big brothers can no longer convince the younger ones that there's any point going to school. After all it hasn't done them any good. Now these teenagers are setting the cars on fire."


Die Tageszeitung, 07.11.2005

Georg Blume writes a portrait of the Chinese businesswoman and TV moderator Yue-Sai Kan, who presents international celebreties to 300 million of her compatriots in her show "Yue-Sai's World" (more here). The programme is filmed in her flat in Shanghai. "In the dining room there's a heavy round wooden table covered with a plate of glass, easy to clean. A lot of eating and chatting goes on, preferably loud and in Chinese. In the living room there are several conversation corners with western sofas – for discreet salon talk, still relatively unknown in China. The Chinese bank director sat down with Yue-Sai at the kitchen table, Ralph Fiennes sat on the sofa and danced on the balcony. Yue-Sai adapts to each one of her guests."


Saturday 5 November, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 05.11.2005

Last week Franz Müntefering stepped down as the Chairman of the Social Democrats. The post will be filled by Matthias Platzeck, the former state premier for Brandenburg. This will make him vice-chancellor to Angela Merkel in Germany's coalition government and as a result, the country will be effectively run by two East Germans. Jens Schneider looks at the quiet rise to power of a generation who have been given "a second chance" and who make such a "striking contrast to the ego-exhibitionism of the West German generation of alpha animals, which is now stepping down. There are several explanations for their reserve. It could be read as a result of the subdued public side of GDR society which encouraged people to exercise self control and mistrust rather than create a distinctive profile for themselves. The niche world in particular was characterised by plain speaking. A healthy dose of common sense was often the only protection against the madness of daily life in a planned economy. This is one source of the conspicuous pragmatism."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 05.11.2005

Author Brigitte Kronauer was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize on Saturday. Andrea Köhler praises the work of the author, who was born in 1940 in Essen. "How boring literature would be without the sharp contours of her talent for heartless observation, without antipathy's coloured reflection of life in all its profanity. What would Brigitte Kronauer's emphatic cosmos be without the cushion-plumping petty bourgeois women, what would the adventures of understanding be without those 'glorious muscular facts'? Both are present in her books: organic ambiguity and innocent human oafishness, vegetative ecstasy and compact presence. Kronauer's characters are no caricatures. By that I mean: they are not sketched from the outside, but approached from the inside."


Berliner Zeitung, 05.11.2005

Talking with Wolfgang Zieglr, pop theorist Diedrich Diederischsen makes it clear once and for all that a Pope is not a pop star, and that goes for JP II as well as Ben 16: "Of course you could talk for hours about the similarities between pop performances and religious rituals. But if that equation were to hold, every damn priest would be a pop star. There's always something immediate in a pop star's personality that becomes a fetish object. The Pope doesn't decide on his clothing and appearances, they're prescribed. And in fact people don't give a damn about his personality either. If Karl Arsch had been voted Pope, the Catholic youth would have reacted just as they did for Ratzinger."