Saturday 19 March, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19.03.2005

The Bavarian State Opera is the biggest in Germany. For many it is also the best, and it is certainly the best-equipped. Christoph Albrecht, who was set to replace Peter Jonas as artistic director in autumn 2006, will not take up the office. Richard J. Brembeck is delighted, holding Albrecht's candidacy as a "daft idea" of former Bavarian culture minister Hans Zehetmair. For Brembeck, Albrecht "brought attention to himself mostly through unhappy incidents and negative headlines: Musical director Semyon Bychkov's refusal to complete his production of Richard Wagner's 'Ring Cycle', the dismissal of stage director Joachim Herz and the dispute with director Peter Konwitschny over 'The Czardas Princess', both of which wound up in the courts. None of this paints a picture of a modern, innovative, charismatic and motivating manager." Brembeck sets out his demands for the successor. The person should be "young and active, team-friendly, artistically and financially innovative, and able to attract audiences beyond the usual cultural bourgeoisie."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19.03.2005

A series starts today in the Literature and Arts section looking at the theme of liberalism from a variety of perspectives. The first contribution comes from British-German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who challenges Isaiah Berlin's concept of liberty. "A word on Berlin's mistakes: He speaks of 'two concepts of liberty'. These he calls 'negative' and 'positive' liberty. 'Negative liberty' is the liberty from constraints. This liberty ranges from the inviolability of the person to the freedom of expression and association." Positive liberty, on the contrary, is "conditioned by something that stands, so to speak, above everyday activity. The moral instance meant here is, in most cases, rapidly transformed by sleight of hand into a real power.... Yet this raising of the concrete individual to a moral entity is an outright invitation to usurpers to act as its representative, to ignore the real wishes of people in the name of the whole, even to oppress them in the name of 'true liberty'."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 19.03.2005

"The principle of state robbery": Götz Aly's "Hitlers Volkstaat" is certainly the most controversial book in Germany today. The historian once again lays out his findings on the precarious and criminal financial basis of the National Socialist dictatorship. "It was a large scale pan-European money-laundering machine for the benefit of Germany." The destination of all expropriations was "the German war treasury. That is how certain peak loads could be covered. Exact figures are difficult to assess, because the Germans bundled the nationalisations of Jewish property in many cases with the widespread expropriation of other groups." You will find Götz Aly's essay on state robbery during the Nazi era in English here, in German here.


Monday 21 March, 2005

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 21.03.2005

Jens Bisky welcomes the debate surrounding the exhibition in Leipzig's Modern Art Museum on Bernhard Heisig (see In Today's Feuilletons from 17 March 2005) who was defamed as an East German state artist. "This exhibition signals a new epoch in the handling of East German art. It was denounced as historical trash in Weimar in 1999 at the "Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne" exhibition (Rise and Fall of Modernism); in the same year in the Kunsthaus Apolda it was combed through for traces of "Westness". The 2003 exhibition in Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie "Kunst in der DDR" (Art in the GDR) opted out, chosing the path of historicism and aestheticism. Political condemnation and praise in the name of art seem to be two sides of one coin representing a schoolmasterly avoidance of the issue. Now in Leipzig and soon in Dusseldorf and Berlin, we will have to survey the contradictions, the interweaving of greatness and smallness. And it's about time."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21.03.2005

Gerhard Stadelmaier, the renowned theatre critic is despairing again. 2005 is the Schiller bicentennial but the German theatre is producing only flippant updates. Stadelmaier would like to see a new "Wilhelm Tell" for example. "This great, solitary man, a man alone with himself, his rage, his powerlessness, his world. This Tell, this lone wolf, forced to shoot at his own child, is loathe to take part in politics. But he is forced to become an assassin so that others who mean nothing to him can be free. This man who makes poetry of his world and his mountains like a pastoral lyricist, transforms the most beautiful poetic meter into an arrow with which to kill a tyrant. He is suddenly cleft in two between feelings and obligations, history and the individual, this divided modern man..."


Die Tageszeitung, 21.03.2005

"Unreal, senseless and as breathtakingly beautiful as a chord from Richard Wagner." To his astonishment, Niklaus Hablützel is unable to squeeze out any meaning from "The Downfall" director Bernd Eichinger's version of "Parsifal" at the Berlin Staatsoper, and abandons himself solely to the music and images. "Chief conductor Daniel Barenboim has no inhibitions about savouring the most trivial charms of this score, and Bernd Eichinger at least has a similar understanding of the essence of the piece. He seeks no deeper meaning in all the nonsense of knights and holy grails, he concentrates on finding the right images for this endless music. And he finds them in his own background, in Hollywood, in the big cinema of the big studios. What he does is very good, but systematically disappoints all expectations of the Wagner community, both fans and enemies alike. No scandal, nowhere, no Nazis, no gays and not even a bit of critical deconstruction."