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GoetheInstitute

20/12/2005

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Die Tageszeitung, 20.12.2005

Eberhard Seidel looks back at a date in German history that seemed unspectacular at the time but which is still changing the face of Germany today. On December 20 1955, Anton Storch, the Christian Democrat minister for employment, signed an agreement with the Italian foreign minister Gaetano Martino which paved the way for Italian gastarbeiter to enter Germany as a cheap labour force. "Germany was never more German than in 1955. At no time since 1871 had fewer foreigners and members of ethnic minorities lived or worked in Germany than in the mid-fifties. Less than 500,000 foreigners lived in the Bundesrepublik. Today there are 7.5 million, and another 1.5 million who have been nationalised over the past ten years. The fifties were the realisation of an old German dream. The politics of extermination and expulsion of 1933 to 1945 meant that the ethnic, religious and cultural homogeneity which had been talked about and longed for since the early Romantic period was almost in place."
See our feature "Project Migration" for more on the topic.

Detlef Kuhlbrodt portrays the self-appointed fifth Beatle Klaus Beyer, who has spent twenty years singing and recording songs by the Fab Four in German. Beyer has just released a new CD, "Helft!", a German version of the Beatles' "Help" album as well as a new DVD pot-pourri of his home-spun music videos. "The DVD shows a good cross-section of the former candle-maker's work. Beyer fell in love with the Beatles' music in the early 1970s, after hearing them on the radio. Because he didn't understand the texts, he bought an English dictionary so he could translate them into his own language. While the revolutionary contemporaries of the now 53 year-old artist liked to listen to English pop music because their parents couldn't understand it, one of Beyer's key motivations for translating the songs of John, Paul, George and Ringo was so his mother could understand what they were singing." Soon Beyer started recording the songs against the background of their instrumental parts. "Then in the early 80s he started filming the songs using super-8, still photo tricks and wonderful home-made decorations. The most famous of these was the two metre long and one metre wide U-boot he assembled for his film 'Yellow Submarine'."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20.12.2005

Marcela Knapp reports from Zimbabwe where he visited the Zimbabwe Women Writers organisation, which has been giving support to women authors and all women in the country who are seeking a public voice. "One of the organisation's projects involves interviewing former women freedom fighters who struggled for Zimbabwe's independence, which puts a special focus on their current situation. And the book 'A Tragedy of Lives – Women in Prison in Zimbabwe' deserves particular attention. It tells the stories of female prisoners, and shows that most female prison inmates turned to crime in need, in order to feed their families."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 20.12.2005

The Hasidic reggae artist Matisyahu explains in an interview how he combines stage life with the Torah. "I seek advice whenever I have a question. For example: Is is okay to stage dive, to jump into the audience? I did it spontaneously once or twice until my wife pointed out that it might result in my coming into physical contact with women. There is a law that men and women should not make physical contact if they are not married. So I asked a Rabbi and he told me to avoid it."

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Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
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Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
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Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
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The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
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Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
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Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
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Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
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Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
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Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

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Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
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Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
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Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
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Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

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