Monday 2 January, 2006

Frankfurter Rundschau, 02.01.2006

Karl Grobe presents a virtual museum about the Soviet gulags. The museum was founded because of the lack of real commemorative sites, while politicians prefer to mine history for stately symbols. "On the one hand the ruling elite swears by historical continuity. It falls back on symbols and traditions of the state prior to the revolution of 1917. One example being the advancement of the day in the early 17th century when citizen Kusma Minin and Prince Dmitri Poscharsky were supposed to have called for unity against foreign intervention, into a national holiday. (...) On the other hand the national anthem of the Soviet Union (mp3) whose words have been rewritten three times over, has been preserved as the Russian national anthem. And the 9th of May, the day of victory in 1945, is still a national holiday, Liberation Day, although this was no liberation from the Stalinist dictatorship. Soviet and Russian history correspond at some points but not at others. There is a conspicuous lack of rationality when it come to defining what Russia is.


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 02.01.2006

When the former East German Palast der Republik in Berlin is torn down starting January 18, what is really being erased is a political symbol, says cabaret writer Peter Ensikat. "It has nothing to do with the beauty or unsightliness of a building. If that was the case the adjacent Berlin Cathedral (more), whose beauty was limited by the tastes of the last German Kaiser, would have to be torn down with it. As was the case with the ruins of the city palace after WWII, with the East German Palast (which was built on the same site -ed.) what is at stake here is an ideology seeking to remove all traces of what is foreign to it. What began as a tragedy with the Kaiser's palace is now continuing with the Palast der Republik as a farce."

In a reportage on the building, Willi Winkler quotes from the original construction plans. "'The architecture of Berlin's centre should bring optimism, courage and zeal to all workers', declare the otherwise cloudy specifications for the building holes in the centre of post-war Berlin. 'It should straighten up the weak-minded and be a thorn in the eye of the enemies of progress.' - they certainly got the thorn bit right."


Berliner Zeitung, 02.01.2006

"Throbbing Gristle was the most exciting, the most influential pop group of the 1970s, and shaped the music of their time like no other band. They took the music out of pop music, reducing it to its true core: a game of signs, codes and iconography. In their hands pop was about the destruction and the creation of identities," writes Jens Balzer. The band, which split up at the height of its fame in 1981, has come back together after 25 years and gave a New Year's Eve concert in Berlin's Volksbühne theatre. "Throbbing Gristle reunited in 2004 with a concert in London. The film documenting the event was premiered on Thursday in Berlin's Arsenal repertory cinema. On Friday an exhibition with documents and devotional objects from the band's history opened in Berlin's Kunst Werke gallery. And on New Year's Eve Throbbing Gristle presented their new album "Part Two" in the Volksbühne Theatre, which had been sold-out for months: a powerful, inspiring din."


Saturday 31 December, 2005

Berliner Zeitung, 31.12.2005

When he stepped down as chancellor, Gerhard Schröder had a military band play "My Way". This inspired Serbian author Bora Cosic to take a critical look at culture in Germany, his home in exile: "I now see how a very large country can degenerate to the point that it becomes its own province. It's as if the country's spirit welled up from the small cities and villages in which, understandably, an obsolescent taste reigns. The whole place strikes me as a kind of ethnological museum documenting a very well-ordered life, but what is it all for? Of course, in the laboratories and institutes, libraries and archives, smart people are driving the country forward. But everything that happens in the public sphere is influenced by the statesman who weeps to the sound of schlocky music when saying his goodbyes."
See our feature "Journey to the Alaska of my past" by Bora Cosic.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 31.12.2005

Talking with Martin Meyer, pianist Alfred Brendel argues for faithful renditions of composers' works: "I get the feeling you have a certain predeliction for eccentric key-pounders. But what is worse: being true to the work or being true to yourself? Let's leave fairness out of this. The most exciting impulses must come from the works. The pianist should then blossom with their help. Of course young pianists must be trained to be independent. But on the other hand they also must be shown, down to the very last note, how meticulously a performance must be worked out beforehand. That can only be done with imagination, and with the help of your own personal experience: as an example, but not as the sole definitive truth."