Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 08.03.2005

One year ago Al Qaeda murdered 190 commuters in Madrid. To commemorate the event, King Juan Carlos will inaugurate a "Forest of the Absent" memorial on March 11. The country is still traumatised, reports Paul Ingendaay: "A year after the attack, 70,000 people in Madrid are suffering from panic attacks. The consumption of alcohol and tobacco has increased 17 percent in the capital. Statistics like these make the headlines and confirm the impression that the people are 'processing' the tragedy. But public debate about the defence of democracy, religious symbols, the definition of a multicultural society or the boundary between religious fervour and fanatical delusion has not even started. Obviously Spanish people do not think Bin Laden's recent threat that events would repeat themselves applies to them."

Kerstin Holm reports the Russian village of Sapozhok (more), where a Siberian village priest offers young men judo classes to lure them away from the growing Baptist community. "Oleg Kusmin belongs to the generation who became priests at the beginning of the 90s, when the Orthodox Church was hurrying to find spiritual guides for many leaderless congregations and dilapidated churches." At this time the motto was something like 'frock first and questions later'. "In the industrial city Kirov a biker became a priest. He rode to the church on his motorbike and several of his rocker friends became members of the congregation. In Ryazan another young priest organised a paramilitary youth club. Father Oleg uses martial arts to propagate Christianity and has more influence than anyone else in the village over the young people. Today, children who were once bullied and the kids who used to do the bullying all go to the young priest's training and religious services." For the girls, Kusmin's wife Irina offers aerobic courses twice weekly.


Die Tageszeitung, 08.03.2005

In an ongoing series on how to interpret the 1968 student movement today, Wolfgang Kraushaar, member of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, defends himself against accusations made by sociologist Klaus Meschkat (see In Today's Feuilletons, Tuesday 1 March, 2005). Meschkat had written that in portraying the "victim" Rudi Dutschke as a "potential terrorist", Kraushaar discredits himself "as a historian of the movement." Kraushaar answers: "It has always been clear to me that the question of Dutschke's attitude toward violence, armed struggle and guerilla tactics is of central importance in the history of the movement. This issue should not be left either to Dutschke's family members or to his former friends and comrades. (...) That a debate on the question is now arising is only to be welcomed. But the current attempt to de-legitimise this debate, and replace it with avowals of personal belief are destined to fail."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 08.03.2005

Katarina Holländer reports on the "Avantgarde im Untergrund" (Avant-Garde underground) exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bern, which displays Russian non-conformist paintings from the Bar-Gera collection. "The works are by artists whose refusal to comply with the dictates of social realism put their lives at risk and barred them from exhibiting under the communist regime. Before the fall of the Soviet government, Kenda and Jacob Bar-Gera were contacted by two Czech art historians, who helped smuggle out the art works that make up their collection. They had no influence on the choice of paintings, and accepted all the works sent by the artists. These smuggled goods, which were stockpiled in Cologne and a few other locations, today play a vital role in the cultural memory of Russia and the world as a whole."
Kenda and Jacob Bar-Gera are Holocaust survivors living in Cologne and Israel. The Bar-Gera Museum for persecuted art opened in Ashdod, Israel in 2003. The exhibition "Avantgarde im Untergrund" runs until April 24, 2005.


Die Tageszeitung, 08.03.2005

"Help, it's the 8th of March!" exclaims Pascale Hugues on International Women's Day, explaining why a French woman will never understand her German sisters. "German women do not celebrate on March 8. (...) It is a dreary, resentful, tense day. A day full of alarmist statistics and depressing evaluations. (...) In no other European country are there so many demarcation lines between the sexes: women's cafes, women's parking places, women's representatives. Whereas in France, 'even in our most militant days we would never have shut a man out of the room,' as a founder of the Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes français once said to me. 'We were feminists, but we still flirted.' (...) Today would be a good day to lift these barriers."
Pascale Hugues, a former Berlin correspondent for Libération, works as a freelance journalist in Berlin.


Frankfurter Rundschau, 08.03.2005

Christian Schlüter congratulates the philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on his 75th birthday. Tugendhat, who attended Martin Heidegger's lectures in 1949 and wrote his habilitation, or post-doctoral thesis, on the concept of truth in Heidegger and Husserl, gradually distanced himself from the phenomenological movement. After a period as visiting scholar at the University of Michigan, he became Germany's foremost representative of linguistic "analytic philosophy", as practised in the Anglo-Saxon world. "In addition to his lectures at Berlin's Free University, Tugendhat's 'Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination' (1979) is legendary. In it he harshly criticises his former colleague Dieter Henrich and the 'philosophy of consciousness' of the 'Heidelberg School'. For Tugendhat, self-consciousness is no longer to be seen as an immediate or pre-linguistic 'being-to-oneself' but as an intentional and propositional consciousness of something. Even self-consciousness is always oriented, or related, to something, as in the sentence: 'I'm hungry.'"