Frankfurter Rundschau, 09.03.2005

Peter Michalzik has discovered "a flower of paradise": actress Friederike Kammer, who plays at the Schauspiel Frankfurt theatre. "When she stands on stage, you are hit by the very fragility of her body. It jumps at you, creating a peculiar feeling of immediacy. When she stands next to you, the fleetingness of her being, which she calls 'my instrument', is simply astounding. Immediately, you think: fragile. And again: fragile. Then when she is sitting across from you, it becomes evident that things are not as they appear. Kammer first stunned the Frankfurt public with her performance in 'A Streetcar Named Desire', a production that conforms to Frankfurt's understanding of good theatre: a big city mix of action, psychology, and the pretension to fulfilled lives. Playing across from guest star Susanne Lother, who portrays a magnificent knackered lush, Kammer gives the role of the tidy little housewife seductive charisma and sex appeal. Kammer plays such an offensive Stella - going against the play, the role and the other actors, in short against everyone and everything – that at times she seems to have the stage to herself. This creates the tension that has drawn Frankfurt crowds until today." Starting Friday, Kammer plays the title role in Armin Petra's staging of "Lucretia Borgia" by Victor Hugo.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 09.03.2005

What the FAZ has been warning about for a long time has now come to pass: the public broadcaster Sudwest Rundfunk (SWR) wants to reduce its world class vocal ensemble from 36 to 18 singers. Suffering from an insufficient rise in public user fees, the broadcaster is trying to remain competitive with football and folk music. SWR manager Peter Voß had justified the decision in a report entitled the "Updated State of Affairs". Eleonore Büning comments: "An act of barbarity lurks in the twisted phrases of the report: sub-points 2.4.2 and 2.4.3 of the 'Updated State of Affairs', which threaten that 'disbanding' the ensemble would be the best way to reduce personnel, speak for themselves. The SWR Vocal Ensemble, also known as the 'Südfunk Choir', is as good as dead when halved and de-professionalised. The excellent singers will have no problem finding other work. But the region loses its concerts, the state loses its best known cultural ambassador and the German music scene loses one of its shining lights."

"Him too? Jean Genet, saint and martyr for an entire epoch, was also a Nazi?" asks Jürg Altwegg, reviewing Ivan Jablonka's biographical study "Les vérités inavouables de Jean Genet" (Seuil). In the 1950s, Jean-Paul Sartre elevated the French dramatist to "Saint Genet, actor and martyr". Later, Michel Foucault saw in Genet the figure of a lunatic and criminal created in the mould of inhuman institutions. Jacques Derrida, for his part, exalted Genet's "subversive instinct". Now this myth is being subverted. "Jablonka's study reveals that Genet's legends and lies are at least partially rooted in the Second World War. Before chanting hymns to Palestinian terrorists and the Baader Meinhof Gang, Genet had sung praises of Hitler and the Nazis no less enthusiastically than Louis Ferdinand Céline. Genet was the lover of a French SS officer. He raved about 'blonde warriors' and praised the massacre at Oradour as pure 'poetry'. For Jablonka, Genet's Nazi leanings were the result of an 'intellectual and erotic fascination'. He did not expect anything good from Hitler, he was just delighted by all the horror."


Die Tageszeitung, 09.03.2005

Berlin's Museum of Applied Art is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Ulm School of Design with an exhibition of the school's best works. Ronald Berg explains that despite its short life from 1953-1958, the school is considered a reincarnation of Bauhaus and has come to symbolise German quality design. The main difference with the Bauhaus movement was that the Ulm designers saw themselves not as artists, but as practitioners playing an active role in the production process. Berg writes, "In Ulm, form was never a goal in itself: the designs had to be functional. The best example is Max Bill's stool, made of three u-form boards with a wooden slat between them. You can sit on it, use it as a portable book shelf or put it on a table as a lectern. Similar in concept was Marcel Brauer's steel pipe stool-cum-side table." The Ulm school closed when its funding was cut off by Baden Württemberg's prime minister, Hans Filbinger, who had been a lawyer under the Nazis. Drawing a comparison with the fate of the Bauhaus school in Dessau, Berg writes, "Strange that the most radical and ultimately most influential institutions of modern design arose in German provincial towns, only to be snuffed out shortly after."


Der Tagesspiegel, 09.03.2005

Jörg Königsdorm interviews pianist Andras Schiff, who explains how he came to Beethoven – and how he learned to play Beethoven's music differently from Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Kempff and Claudio Arrau. "The more I play and study Beethoven's sonatas, the more I see that a lot of the pianistic tradition is wonderful, but a lot is simply sloppy. Take a very famous example: before the first movement of the 'Moonlight Sonata', Beethoven very distinctly writes 'senza sordino', a clear indication that on today's piano very little pedal should be used. But how often is this movement drowned in leaden sentimentality because people are still possessed by some notion of screwy romanticism? This doesn't have anything to do with Beethoven. In fact, it's a very revolutionary piece."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 09.03.2005

Kristina Maidt-Zinke reports cheerily on the Martin Walser Exhibition entitled "Nichts ist ohne sein Gegenteil wahr" (Nothing is True Without its Opposite) in the Literature House in Munich. "Martin Walser has turned himself into an exhibition by donating letters, manuscripts, first editions and posters from his private archive. Among them is, for example, a revealing and moving correspondence with Uwe Johnson from the winter of 1960 - 1961, in which Walser defends himself against the accusation that he lacks human warmth. 'I have no warmth and no coldness,' he writes, 'and the luke warms have to live as well, more spat on than spat out.' Johnson answers without mercy: 'Mr. Walser is stiff... He loves himself to the point of tears, he defends himself by hating society; people with experience recognise his evil look early on."