Der Tagesspiegel, 28.02.2006

Christine Lemke-Matwey is somewhat taken aback but in general impressed by Sebastian Baumgarten's modernisation of Georg Friedrich Handel's "Orest" at the Komische Oper in Berlin. "Rather than focussing on Orest's mortal danger and the madness raging in his head, and rather than focussing on the stength of sisterly and family love over any world-view, Baumgarten gets caught up in a thousand incoherent strands of discourse. He peppers the piece with Giorgio Agamben, Alexander Kluge and Georges Bataille, sometimes murmured into the music, sometimes whispered. In the end all the conceptual theatre and superstructure manage to overshadow the actors altogether. That's annoying, and unsettling in the long run. Perhaps Händel did simply stick one of his many conventional jubilating endings onto the 'pie'. Perhaps Baumgarten is right to show a world where love has long lost its sway. But: does anyone want to believe it, or should anyone believe it?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 28.02.2006

The sadistic murder of the 23 year old telephone salesman Ilan Halimi has horrified France (news story). The act was committed by a band of suburban youth of African and Arabic origin whose motive was anti-Semitic. Johannes Willms sees the crime as evidence that integration politics have failed. "The more precise the investigator's picture gets, the clearer the danger of failed French integration politics becomes: creating a new type of sadistic criminals who are no longer contented with minor crimes and drug trading, and expanding their radius of activity beyond the urban 'problem areas.' These developments demonstrate the need to find solutions to problems that have been ignored far too long. Ilan Halimi is a victim of anti-Semitism, but also of this ignorance."

Alex Rühle visits Richard Sennett (more here) in a studio near Boston and describes the sociologist's conversational style: "To call Richard Sennett a pleasant conversationalist would be an understatement. Again and again in the course of the conversation, one is overcome with a sudden feeling of devotion. This gentle, circling speech, the way he sits with his ruffled-up silver hair in a cloud of pipe smoke, the way he tells of his Russian grandfather and Joseph Brodsky, his friend who 'is good enough to speak French with me.'" Sennett,we learn, is writing a cultural history of handwork.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 28.02.2006

Ingeborg Harms is escorted by Hubert de Givenchy through the Parisian exhibition "Perfection Partagee." The exhibition is a collection of all the clothing by Cristobal de Balenciaga which made Princess Mona von Bismarck the best dressed woman of the world. Givenchy can hardly bare to think about how pretty things used to be compared with today's fashion. "'Everything that I see today is horrible. The fashion is worse than ever. The mannequins look miserably poor, they're not taken care of, the clothes have no form. It's painful and not very encouraging, in fact, I'd prefer not to talk about it.'"

Edouard Beaucamp has visited an exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam featuring the two major Baroque artists Rembrandt and Caravaggio together for the first time: "Contrary to what you would expect, Caravaggio does not enhance Rembrandt, but Rembrandt does enhance Caravaggio. Caravaggio's existential force is so compelling that Rembrandt's expressions are often flattened to become painted accessories, while his figures volatilise into the realm of the dollish or the fantastical. Rembrandt is painting. Caravaggio is life."


Die Welt, 28.02.2006

Islamic scholar Ralph Ghadban points to a striking coincidence: the wave of protests against the Danish cartoons broke out in Saudi Arabia just two days after the country signed several economic agreements with China. "The connection between the two events cannot be overlooked. The heightened prosperity of Saudi Arabia as a result of rising oil prices and the appearance of two major customers, China and India, strengthened the independence of the country, and the West suffered a significant loss in importance. It's a handy opportunity to ease pressure from the West after September 11, an opportunity being brutally made use of by Iran and Syria."

Ulrich Weinzierl talks with author Daniel Kehlmann, whose novel "Die Vermessung der Welt" (The Surveying of the World) about the meeting between Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauß has long topped the German best-seller lists. "Asked about his astonishing productivity, Kehlmann parries that measured against the standards of the 18th and 19th centuries, his creative output is not at all remarkable. It's only in the more recent past, he says, that the characteristic small oeuvre has been naturalised in the German-speaking world."