Unicum is part of everyday life at German universities, like the student canteen and exam nerves. Nearly every student has once had the magazine with the red logo in his hand. Reading it is free of charge and worth the while: for 25 years Unicum has reported on everything concerning student life....
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The Berlinale Dream Girls retrospective
The Berlinale, Berlin's international film festival, starts today. This
year the retrospective section is dedicated to "Dream Girls".
Katja
Nicodemus visited one dream girl for Die Zeit. The door is opened by Bernard d'Ormale,
companion of the right-wing French extremist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. "He
sticks out his hand and opens with: 'Do you work for a newspaper
worthy of the name?' A tense silence ensues. Bardot takes a drag on
her cigarette." Later she says that "nobody, no human, is as close
to her as her dogs. Not even her husband? The answer is astonishing:
'You know what? I was always the man in my life.'"
Writing in die tageszeitung, Elisabeth Bronfen looks beneath the dream girls' glamorous surface and sees rumblings of the
oncoming societal shake-up of the 60s. "One detail shows in retrospect
how the cinema in particular set the course for the upheavals of the
following decade. At the beginning of 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' Monroe sings
about how she left Little Rock to realise her dreams of happiness,
glamour and money. Four years later, the capital of Arkansas was back
in the public eye in connection with a young woman. Dignified and
courageous at the same time, Elizabeth Eckford (more here)
walked past an abuse-hurling white mob in her dapper petticoat with her school books clamped under her
left arm. She was one of the
nine black school children that the governor, aided by the National
Guard, was trying to prevent from entering the school."
Die Tageszeitung, 09.02.2006
Christian Semler interviews Daniel Cohn-Bendit on the cartoon
controversy. The former revolutionary and current Green Party member of
the European Parliament says that if the German newspaper Die Welt
printed the cartoons (more here), it had little to do with defending freedom of expression. "If the caricatures had been insulting to
Christianity or Judaism, the paper would never have printed them. A paper like Charlie Hebdo (which printed the caricatures yesterday –
ed), that showed Christ on the cross with an erection and a condom
saying 'I only fuck with condoms' as part of its anti-Aids campaign, a
paper like that can print the cartoons. This whole chest thumping in
the name of the freedom of opinion reeks of hypocrisy."
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 09.02.2006
Author Daniel Kehlmann acknowledges in an interview that he is gobsmacked at the success of his recent novel "Die Vermessung der Welt" (The surveying of the world), which has topped German bestseller lists for months: "Half in joke I could say 'Ich und Kaminski' (Kaminsk and I – an earlier novel of Kehlmann's – ed.) was a very aggressive satire
of the world of media and journalism, and then I saw that journalists
and media people loved it. 'Die Vermessung der Welt' is a very
aggressive satire about the Germans, and I now see that all Germany
loves it. It seems really very difficult to be unpopular."
Die Welt, 09.02.2006
The 2006 Winter Olympics open tomorrow in Turin. Trieste-born author Claudio Magris
declares his love for the city: "Turin is the other city of
my life. Without Turin I would hardly, or never, have grown up. Without
Turin I could never have begun to write... In Turin I came to know freedom;
here I learned how to think, and here I also learned to develop a
strong, straightforward relationship with Trieste. Because really,
without the experience I gained in Turin I could never have started to
write. In those years Turin was an absolute antipode to Trieste. Trieste was a place of decadence. Turin, on the other hand, doubled its population in the fifties and sixties."
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09.02.2006
Frank Wittmann provides a brief introduction to the latest African pop music from Paris, Couper-Decaler-Travailler or Coupe-Decale for short. "The interesting thing is that it was developed by young musicians from the Ivory Coast diaspora.
Although Western and Central African pop music has always been a
complex mixture of different sound and rhythmic traditions, until now
it was the continent rather than the diaspora that set the pace in
musical innovation. But Coupe-Decale is making this hierarchy teeter." Douk Saga is one of the best-known musicians, while Shanaka Yakuza is the man responsible for the "drogbacite" dance, inspired by the moves of footballer Didier Drogba.
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