Monday February 27, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 27.02.2006

With some bewilderment, Joachim Güntner observes the growing fear of foreign infiltration in Germany and its feuilletons. "Wherever one looks these days, whether to the swans on Rügen or the inhabitants of Berlin's Neukölln district, the apocalyptic images seem to be found among immigrants. Either the Germans will all die from the avian flu, or it will come to Islamic rule, as some warn." And Güntner can hardly believe the horror stories going around. Without naming his sources, he reports, "There's news of Catholic parishoners in Duisburg that were being sent across the street by Turks claiming that one sidewalk belonged to them and their mosques; one hears tales of women in headscarves threatening 'We're going to outbirth you.' Becoming a minority in one's own country is a frightening thing because there's no hope of returning to the homeland – an illusion that immigrants can at least harbour."


Die Welt, 27.02.2006

Russian author Viktor Erofeyev associates Russia's harsh winter of 05/06 with the country's politics: "How long will, as Steinbeck says, 'the winter of our discontent' last? The country is returning to its traditional national political style with a strict and unchecked vertical power structure. 'Russia should be frozen, so that it doesn't start to stink', wrote Konstantin Leontiev, a 19th century Russian Slavophile philosopher. The first round of authoritarian rule ended with the bankruptcy of Czarist Russia, the second totalitarian order led to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. What can Russia expect from the third historical attempt to get by without Western-style democracy?" See our feature "Russian dichotomies" by Viktor Erofeyev.


Die Tageszeitung, 27.02.2006

Gabriele Goettle has visited Elfriede Walther, former director of the moulage atelier at the Deutsche Hygiene Museum (German Hygiene Museum) in Dresden, and discovered a woman with a gift for talking about her metier: "'You've noticed I'm making a distinction between wax models and moulages. The difference is this: a wax model is a mock-up model, an enlargement or a miniaturisation etc., while a moulage is based on an exact impression or moulding of a patient, and so is an absolutely authentic representation of the medical symptom. The moulage sales catalogue at the DHM always only had a limited offer, and much more emphasis was placed on the confectioning of wax models. But for me it was extremely important to build up our moulage collection and expand our stock of original mouldings.'"


Saturday February 25, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25.02.2006

The Slovenian writer Drago Jancar warns against taking too light a view of the crimes committed by Tito's partisans against fascists, Italians and others: "Today it has been proved that there were appalling massacres of unarmed prisoners of war, and civilians who were dragged out of their homes. Their corpses were tossed into the anti-tank ditches around Celje and Maribor, in the karst caves in Istria and in the terrible caves of Kocevski Rog. Peasants, schoolchildren, intellectuals, women and children. Each one an individual with a first and a last name, each one with hopes and dreams. The wheels of violence never stopped turning in 1945."


Berliner Zeitung, 25.02.2006

Taking a glimpse into the future of human communication, Harald Jähner presents the website myspace.com which has been around for a couple of years and which celebrated the registration of its 50 millionth user this February. "You can use the profiles to draw attention to yourself like a nightingale with its song or a poodle with its stink. And as in a classic poetry album, friends are the currency of myspace. You and your profile can consort with another and thus make friends. 'Thanks for adding yourself,' it says. Madonna has 42,578 proven friends. Myspace is dominated by the sound and feeling of American highschoolers. Those who want to, however, can click further around the world and may suddenly find themselves in quite complicated situations: in Tehran's lesbian scene, for instance, whose permissiveness does not exactly conform with our image of Iran."


Bertolt Brecht's "Im Dickicht der Städte" at the Volksbühne in Berlin

Frank Castorf has staged Bertolt Brecht's "Im Dickicht der Städte" (In the Jungle of the Cities) at the Volksbühne theatre in Berlin, where he is artistic director. Writing in Die Welt, Reinhard Wengierek focusses on the bitterness of the performance: "A mix of Brecht and Beckett. The social, political and sexual fight for survival is staged here as a garish tragedy. Again and again Castorf resorts to gruff melancholy: 'Life is so poor, the milk we live on is so bad,' says Brecht, and that's exactly what Castorf has staged. Despite its verve, the performance is shot through with a deep sadness. Beautiful, ugly, true. A chance for poor old B.B. and the Volksbühne, which for all its ribaldry still remains a highly artificial, fine madhouse for fans and connoisseurs."

In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Petra Kohse is amazed by the "lack of interest" that radiates from the play. The reason, she says, must be that "there are too many blanks as far as the actors are concerned. Of all things. Only Astrid Meyerfeldt holds high the banner that one normally associates with the theatre. That way of bringing over the text with such lucidness, with such a personal, bodily presence. Meyerfeldt is a standard bearer: in shining gold stilettos in front of the Brechtian tinsel. That's the stuff. And she looks good, too."