Berliner Zeitung, 03.01.2006

Torsten Harmsen heard a familiar tone in the New Year's speech given by German Chancellor Angela Merkel: "Merkel brings a style to German politics that people thought was a thing of the past: the officialese of the former GDR, where she was brought up. She can't help it. And it is almost a joke that 15 years after the end of the GDR, its style lives on at the highest political level – under completely different circumstances. Just listen to how Merkel addresses the public: 'What can you accomplish in a year? A whole lot! What if we were to set ourselves the goal tonight that at every stage in the coming year we'll accomplish just a little more than before?' That sounds like a pep talk to a group of East German Young Pioneers, but then - for the grown-ups - it's reminiscent of the slogan of East German leader Erich Honecker: 'What has been reached is not what is reachable'."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.01.2006

Wolfgang Benz, author of "The Holocaust" and director of the Centre for Research into Anti-Semitism at Berlin's Technical University, is not at all taken by plans for a Centre Against Expulsion. For Benz, the signature of the German organisation Association of Expellees, which represents the interests of Germans expelled from countries formerly included in the German Reich, is too clearly visible, and the planned museum is like an answer to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. "The idea that the intellectually unambitious and artistically rather antiquated concept would represent a German national project was fed from the start by obsessive insistence on Berlin as a location and by pointing the finger at all those who opposed it. The blueprint of the planned permanent exhibition confirms this suspicion. It uses terms like 'outlawed' and 'stripped of rights' as titles for sections describing 'death camps' in which German men, women and children were held into the 1950s. But death camps were something else."

Tilman Spengler visited the exhibition "China – The Three Emperors" of art treasures from the 17th and 18th century in London's Royal Academy. "If one follows the fundamental Chinese differentiation between 'nei' inner and 'wai' outer, then works of art unquestionably belong to the inner realm. According to the Heidelberg art historian Lothar Ledderose, 'they are treated like the body's inner organs, whose important function one appreciates without needing to have seen them.' If we carry this metaphor over to the body of the state, it becomes clear why the ownership, the sheer power of disposal over the material heritage of the Chinese culture, was so important to Chiang Kai-shek that when he fled the Communists in 1949, he took dozens of bombers full of the most valuable art treasures out of the country with him. Because cultural goods underpinned the legitimation of political leadership."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 03.01.2006

The current row between Russia and Ukraine gives Michael Jeismann grounds for concern over the consequences for the EU and core Europe: "It seems relatively likely that the process of European integration which is pulling at the outer edges will at some point demand a sacrifice from the centre. This is not necessarily something the centre is prepared for politically, and it probably is not something that the Union as a whole would be prepared to swallow. The row over gas between Ukraine and Russia is a mild foretaste of things to come."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 03.01.2006

Thomas Winkler celebrates the comeback of the band "Throbbing Gristle" which has had two concerts, an exhibition and film premiere in Berlin between Christmas and New Year. "Between 1975 and 1981, Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti (alias Christine Newby), Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter created, in Industrial, a new musical genre, laid the foundations for the mainstream success of the likes of Marilyn Manson and the Nine Inch Nails, successfully ran a prototype independent label, used pornography and the Nazi aesthetic to raise heckles, prepared the way for Noise in pop music and, according to some experts, were even responsible for the techno movement of the 90s."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 03.01.2006

Three museums designed by architect Ieoh Ming Pei will be finished in 2006: in Doha, Suzhou and Luxembourg. The developers in Luxembourg did not make life easy for the architect, but talking in an interview, Pei takes it with a grain of salt: "A laissez-faire attitude on the part of the client is generally not good for architects. Designers need strong constructors, they need friction. I design in a contextual way, and am not desperate to leave my unmistakable signature all over the world. I don't see my designs as a 'brand', or an international trademark. In the words of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: I don't want to be new, I want to be good! For me architecture is a pragmatic art, one that's based on necessity. Freedom in expression can only exist within the context of movement, dimension and proportion. And always in relation to the genius loci."