Der Standard, 10.03.2006

The Austrian paper has printed the first part of an acceptance speech by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas for the Bruno Kreisky Prize for promoting human rights (part II will follow tomorrow). Habermas discusses the declining prominence of intellectuals through television and the Internet: "On the one hand, the communication shift from books and the printed press to the television and the Internet has brought about an unimagined broadening of the media sphere, and an unprecedented consolidation of communication networks. Intellectuals used to swim around in the public sphere like fish in water, but this environment has become ever more inclusive, while the exchange of ideas has become more intensive than ever. But on the other hand the intellectuals seem to be suffocating from the excess of this vitalising element, as if they were overdosing. The blessing seems to have become a curse. I see the reasons for that in the de-formalisation of the public sphere, and in the de-differentiation of the respective roles."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.03.2006

More than just a political movement, Hamas is working on a complete re-education of Palestinian society, writes Joseph Croitoru. "In the West, and also here in Germany, we often overlook the fact that in past decades Islamic fundamentalists have created a self-contained culture, to preserve the Islamic tradition as they understand it." This is particularly visible in "the blend of nationalism and Islam in Hamas battle songs, especially the ones celebrating suicide bombers which are found worldwide on the Internet as compressed audio files."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10.03.2006

Tobias Moorstedt presents the online communities myspace, friendster, tribeworld and orkut, in which millions of American teenagers cavort on a daily basis, together with pop stars like Madonna and the Arctic Monkeys, and the occasional Brazilian drug ring. "The users are only too glad to discuss their preferences, wishes and the groups they belong to in their profiles. Orkut's conditions for users specifies that all texts and entries are intellectual property of the firm, and hardly anyone has complained. According to salon.com author Andrew Leonard, the large majority of users 'belong to the first Internet generation, who've become used to their lives being like an open book'."


Der Tagesspiegel, 10.03.2006

Peter von Beckers considers the most recent "theatre debate" – Gerhard Stadelmaier got all excited in the FAZ and Joachim Lottman in Spiegel about "Schmuddeltheater" (performances with lots of blood, sperm and tears; some background here). Becker writes, "Spiegel has lost it, the theatres have lost it, Stadelmaier has lost it. That's the impression that an outsider has of the most recent theatre skirmish. The fronts run between the devil and the dear god of theatre, between proud directors (who bury themselves in their works with humility and genius) and obstreperous dwarves (who just skim over it like dorky sows) are far less clear than the current heated or maybe just sweaty debate suggests." The misery of contemporary theatre has much more to do with its "total inability.... to represent power and the powerful as something other than caricatures."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10.03.2006

Andrea Jöhler reports from the Whitney Biennale in New York, which has a motto for the first time this year: "Day for Night." Here it is the collective which triumphs, Jöhler writes. "Like American cult author J.T. LeRoy, whose identity was recently revealed as the multiple fiction of a family ensemble, Reena Spauldings is an artificial piece of art whose complicated birth certificate unites all the possibilites of fiction; the novel in which she plays the central character was generated in the Internet by the Bernadette Corporation, a branch of Reena Spaulding's gallery. The Bernadette Corporation which has, among other things, a fashion line, a magazine (made in USA) and an underground film studio in Berlin, has turned into a corporation which puts its own critique of capitalism to the test. At the Biennale, this took the form of a store marquee over the entrance to the exhibition space. Fine: we're all buyable."