Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 03.03.2006

"One beautiful Sunday in the Cold War, I set Axel Caesar Springer's chalet on fire atop a Swiss mountain." In his book "Ein Sonntag in den Bergen" (A Sunday in the mountains), author Daniel de Roulet confesses to the hitherto unsolved crime committed in 1975. Roman Bucheli is appalled at the arsonist's candour: "De Roulet explains that for him Axel Springer, founder of the Axel Springer media empire, was a Nazi, and so he wanted to let him know that his presence in Switzerland was undesirable. Only in 2003 – oh, saintly naivete – did he find out while chatting with a Berlin psychiatrist that he had been wrong about Springer. That was when he decided to 'have a look through the Cold War, those days when we were still Sunday-terrorists'. What follows in the 120 casually-written pages is a mixture of coming clean, emotionalism and love story – de Roulet insists he also committed the crime to show his girlfriend at the time that he was a man of action – all peppered with reminiscences from Vietnam, the Iraq War and September 11. But what the book does not contain is a self-critical appraisal of the partial blindness associated with the time."

On the media page, Colin Porlezza explains why Silvio Berlusconi is "no accident", but rather an integral part of the Italian media system. An independent journalistic culture never developed in Italy, Porlezza writes: "First of all, in Italy there is the so-called 'editoria impura', which subordinates journalistic principles to the interests of the owners. These owners are mostly commercial groups that otherwise have nothing to do with the media sector. Secondly, news reporting is strongly politicised. This is a continuation of the tradition of party-based newspapers, although these have mostly been phased out by now. The result is that opinion-based journalism is the dominant reporting style."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 03.03.2006

In an interview, author Paula Fox discusses her trip to Europe in 1946 as a stringer for a news agency, which she also describes in the second part of her memoirs, "The Coldest Winter". She had to keep her emotions in check at all times, she says, otherwise she would only have been able to write "shock, shock, shock": "But there are two episodes where I do talk about my feelings: one time when I describe my heartless laughter as the pilot of the plane I took out of Warsaw sunk a wing over a row of German war prisoners as if he wanted to decapitate them all. The other time was when someone in Prague told me about a professor whose entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. A few days after the liberation he saw a German soldier on the street, followed him and hanged him by the neck on a meat hook."


Der Tagesspiegel, 03.03.2006

In spite of all the kitsch and exaggeration, Rüdiger Schaper cannot get over Alain Platel's ballet "Vespero" based on Monteverdi's "Vespers" which premiered at the Berliner Staatsoper on Wednesday. "It takes some time to recover after the end of Platel's Vespers. Fifteen, twenty minutes of collective madness. A remorseless ghost invades the ensemble. The dancers quiver in ecstasy like the North American Shakers. Something takes possession of them, first their arms, then their upper bodies, then their legs, it varies. Is it exorcism, is it masturbation of all limbs, is it a wild trance? What ever it is, it refuses to be shaken off. It grows. Unperturbed, the female soprano stands there and sings the 'Magnificat'. Again and again. An enticement, a promise which is never fulfilled. It hurls the dancers to the ground. At last the moment arrives and the mountain glows. But the shaking gets more violent still. A fight to the death. Cold turkey, because the drug is withheld?"


Die Tageszeitung, 03.03.2006

Tobias Rapp enthuses about the structural changes in the pop music world brought about by the blogosphere. "After years of music journalists attesting to the death of the record industry (and not without a certain malice) now their own institutions are endangered. On-line hypes simply can't be reproduced with the means classical music magazines have at their disposal. They're just too fast. (...) But of course the main advantage of the music blog is that it can put an mp3 of the piece of music being written about directly in the text." Here are a few blogs and online magazines recommended by Rapp: Pitchfork, Tape, yousendit.


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.03.2006

Holger Liebs visits French artist Pierre Huyghe whose film "A Journey That Wasn't" is showing from today at the New York Whitney Biennial and also at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. The film combines footage from his journey to the Antarctic in search of the extraordinary albino penguins and scenes from the musical he made about the adventure which was performed, black icebergs and all, on the ice rink in Central Park. Huyghe stresses he was not interesting in experiencing the extreme. "That would be exoticism. You know in advance that you will fail when you search for the empty, unexplored land, the 'elsewhere', hoping to capture it and bring it home. You lose the 'elsewhere'. But I don't think that's a bad thing. Failing is an necessary condition for my work. That sounds very melancholy, but melancholy means desiring something, while the object of your desire slips away, disappears." A retrospecive of Huyghe's work is also opening in the Tate Modern in London on July 5.