Berliner Zeitung, 09.11.2005

"The French will have to make time to consider why they are so ill-prepared to understand the current crisis and why therefore they are threatening to exacerbate it," writes French sociologist Alain Touraine. "It is not just the 'under-privileged' who need to change their attitude to society. French society can also become a threat in itself if it fails to combine integration and cultural differences, universalism and individual cultural rights, if it can't break down the walls between a republicanism riddled with prejudices and group identities based on aggression. ... We can no longer pretend that France is the protector of universal values, and that in this mission it has the right to make second-class citizens of anyone who doesn't fit the bill of this ideal "national ego'".


Die Welt, 09.11.2005

The Berlin writer Günter de Bruyn has a good bellyache at the "Ost-anaysis" still so popular among West Germans. And he makes it very clear "the bad mood that pervades in East Germany would have subsided long ago were it not for the East-West wealth or poverty divide that so many observers in their psychology bubbles choose to ignore. It is not remnants of the GDR lodged in people's minds that generate the widespread discontent, but the huge numbers of people who are unemployed and have no hope of getting work. The Stalinist grandfather, whom many an Ost analyst has pointed a finger at, would look very out of place in even the most nostalgic red circles, were all women and men to have enough work and bread."

Hanns-Georg Rodek introduces 2005's most unusual film: Philip Gröning's documentary "Die große Stille" (the great silence). It is a film about the monks of the "Grande Chartreuse", the founding monastery of the Carthusian Order in the French Alps. "Since the foundation in 1084 life has remained more or less unchanged, and takes the form of prayer, study, work and worship, including a two-hour officium starting at midnight, followed by three hours of sleep and morning mass. The Carthusians are a silent order and the monks converse only during their weekly walk." The film is equally slow and silent which doesn't bother Rodek in the slightest. "It is only in silence that one really begins to hear: the dripping of dewdrops, the creaking of floorboards, the beating of the heart. And only when words become silent does one really begin to see. There is no guide to take you through the monastery, no voice-over, no inserts. Our years spent learning the language of cinema are of no use to us here. This film demands a very different kind of looking and listening."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 09.11.2005

Verena Lueken is not at all taken by Lars von Trier's films "Dogville" and its sequel "Manderlay". "The camera acts like an amplifier of the film's didactic rhetoric, which von Trier filched from Brecht. With its homespun ideology and narrator (John Hurt) who cleverly connects the scenes to fills the gaps in the story, it takes a form that European film critics have been pitching as the future of cinema since 'Dogville'. Because finally someone has shown us that film in its usual form is an illusion machine. How long are we supposed to have been sleeping, if this is to come as a revelation?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 09.11.2005

Alexander Kissler sums up the "startling" results of a new study put out by the Bonn federation Haus der Geschichte, in which Germans, Poles and Czechs are asked about their ideas on expulsion and flight. "The result is a lesson in the art of talking at cross purposes." The study, writes Kissler, shows for example "that the large majority of Poles do not differentiate between the dubious 'Prussian Claims Society', a self-declared group representing the interests of Germans with claims to family farms or homes in what was formerly Prussia, and the attitude of the Federal government of Germany." According to the study, sixty-one percent of Poles believe "it is probable or very likely that the German government 'will one day reclaim former German territories and estates."