Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22.12.2005

"Before the year comes to a end, there is one more sensation to report" writes Niklas Maak. "Berlin has a new art gallery and no one knew anything about it until a month ago". Thomas Schiebitz, the painter who represented Germany at the Venice Biennale this year, phoned up his artist friends in Berlin and asked them to show new works in the temporary "White Cube" space in the Palast der Republik before it is torn down in January and replaced by a newly constructed city palace. "And so within 19 days, without curators or an institution in the background, an exhibition came together the likes of which has not been seen in Berlin for a long time." But this only serves to highlight the doziness of Berlin's institutions, writes Maak. "Many of the artists have been living in Berlin for a long time: Olafur Eliasson, Thomas Demand and Tacita Dean (to name but three of the best known) might have their studios right under the nose of Peter-Klaus Schuster, the director of Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin's 'Museum of Contemporary Art' – but none of them have ever had a solo show there. Eliasson showed in London instead (attended by no less than 2 million visitors), Demand in New York's MoMA, Tacita Dean in the Paris Musee de l'Art Moderne. You have to travel a long way to see the art being made in your own capital." The show is open from December 24 to 31.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 22.12.2005

The paper publishes (sadly not online though) a hitherto unknown article written on Christmas 1916 for the "Soldaten-Zeitung" (soldier's newspaper) by Austrian novelist Robert Musil, author of "The Confusions of Young Torless" and most famously "The Man Without Qualities". "In place of Christmas candles there are flares. Instead of Christmas trees decorated with cotton balls, treetops poke out from under nine feet of snow. Those who want to pour molten lead into water to tell their fortune as we do at home have to go up to the front posts, where bullets hit and warp into strange shapes. Instead of angels' choruses, grenades explode in screeches now and then. This is how the trenches are celebrating Christmas and New Year's Eve this year." Musil also shows his talent for patriotic prose: "We wait, knowing we will do our part when duty calls. If the snows of the new year are dyed red, it will not be our fault. We defend, they attack. Our conscience tells us this today as it did two and a half years ago, irrespective of how the other side tries to paint things."


Die Welt, 22.12.2005

In an interview with Gerhard Gnauck, Polish author Pawel Huelle discusses the new Polish government and voices criticism of his country's refusal to deal with its recent past. "Millions of Poles have been waiting since 1980 for some form of settling of accounts with communism. This system had blood on its hands and fatal economic consequences. But there has never been even a symbolic act of this kind. That's why the election was won by politicians who promised to tackle the issue. I'm not expecting a witch hunt. That would only end in parliamentary bickering and a media battle."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 22.12.2005

The filmmaker has pulled off a rare coup" enthuses Sascha Westphal about Roman Polanski's adaptation of "Oliver Twist". His last film "The Pianist" implied not only a banality of evil but also a banality of good. Polanski now varies and deepens this idea in his version of "Oliver Twist". In a senseless world, even the acts of goodness and humanity bestowed on Oliver during his odyssey through pre-industrial England are nothing more than expressions of randomness. And when it comes down to it they have no more meaning than the horrors he is forced to endure. Everything is just coincidence and luck and only people like Wladyslaw Szpilman and Oliver Twist who can come to terms with this fact will not have real doubts about their existence."


Die Welt, 22.12.2005

Kai Luehrs-Kaiser interviews German theatre's enfant terrible Christoph Schlingensief on his staging of Richard Wagner's "Parsifal" at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Asked whether he had had stage-fright before the premiere, Schlingensief answers: "And how. I was torn apart inside, and suffered like a pig. I thought, my work's good, and shows I've got my own very personal way of dealing with images on stage. But at the same time it was also clear that it's a 'last time', just like it's announced in Parsifal. And that has to do with the piece itself. Parsifal is like tinnitus. Once you've got it in your ear it never goes away."