Die Welt, 08.12.2005

Günter Grass has founded a writer's club called the "Lübecker Literaturtreffen" and recently held a press conference to state its purpose. Eckhard Fuhr welcomes the new "collective rout," to quote Grass, reflects on the parallels and differences from the Gruppe 47 and is able to see beyond the damning critique of feuilleton journalism. "What remains is the 'question of power', which recently erupted. Günter Grass' opponent, against which he launches a veritable polemic, is the feuilletons, or German feature pages, which, in a hybrid overstatement of their own importance, contest the artists' and arts' creative right of the first born. 'We are the first, the feuilletons remain the second. We endure,' he called to the befuddled feuilletonists present. Grass' generation has demonstrated what endurance is. A power plant that has guaranteed the basic provision of the Republic, this generation is still part of the network. Even if some would like to see it shut down."


Die Zeit, 08.12.2005

"'The Bacchae' is the play of the day," writes Thomas Assheuer, who has been to performances in Frankfurt, Munich (here and here) and Amsterdam. "What drives directors to this play? Is it the old longing for antiquity that animates the German disposition from time to time? Or an 'aesthetic of evil,' the artistic doctrine of conservative intellectual snobs? Probably neither. Anyone who chooses to put on Euripides' tragedy 'The Bacchae' today is also staging a diagnosis of today's world that couldn't be more dismal. It's the certainty that the major hope following 1989 is dead: that after the tragic 'world civil war,' only comedies in the form of diplomacy and the rule of law would be on the program. Nothing remains of that hope but ashes."
See our feature "Bungling the Bacchae" by Peter Michalzik.

Jörg Lau is very relieved by the exhibition "Flucht, Vertreibung, Integration" (Flight, Expulsion, Integration) in the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn. "Given all the political pressure, both from within and beyond Germany, it's nothing short of a miracle that the team from the Haus der Geschichte has created an exhibition with such an impressive intellectual independence. At the end, one is relieved to realise that it is in fact possible to blend out all the noise of the debate about the "Centre against Expulsion" that is being planned in Berlin and finally take a new, open look at the history of expulsion."


Die Tageszeitung, 08.12.2005

"Modern conservatism is just as authoritarian and dumb as the old one," writes Robert Misik about the book "Die Kultur der Freiheit" (the culture of freedom) by Udo di Fabio, a judge on the Federal Constitutional Court and voice in Germany's new wave of conservative thinking. "Udo di Fabio has written one of the dumbest books to appear in recent times... In its disdain for the mainstream, the authors of neo-conservatism are taking up the old avant-garde posts. It's as if they want to get rid of old habits, but in fact the old braids it wants to chop off are the dreadlocks of hedonism. The freedom to be happy according to one's own dictates is seen, as di Fabio writes, as 'the arbitrariness of individuals... to do and not to do whatever they want'."
See our featue articles "Who are Germany's new young conservatives?" (here) by Mariam Lau, and "What do the conservatives want?" (here) by Gustav Seibt.

Dorthea Hahn interviews French sociologist Dounia Bouzar (more here) on the unrest in the French banlieues. Dounia contests any explanations for the riots based on ethnic or religious motives: "It's simply young people who grew up without a culture. Because there is no culture whose values include burning cars. For the most part, those who set cars alight come from families that have been here for three or four generations. Only a few of them were petty criminals. But it's true that we are facing a major problem. Never before have children in France set their schools on fire."