Berliner Zeitung, 29.03.2006

In a brief commentary, writer Richard Wagner rebuts his Ukrainian colleague Yuri Andrukhovych, who in his speech (here in English) at the Leipzig Book Fair expressed fierce criticism of the EU's stance on his home country. "Andrukhovych made himself the mouthpiece of his people. They, he said, had a legitimate right to participate in the successes of the EU, individually and collectively with freedom of entry and membership. The demands are familiar, and can be heard from other poor countries with failed state concepts. They have only themselves to blame that they have not been accepted into the EU. It was not a good strategy to equate the Union with Europe after 1989. Andrukhovych seems to think that it's completely irrelevant that neither the economy nor the society, nor even the institutions of Ukraine even vaguely meet the EU norms. His argument is based on the simplistic declarations of his predecessor, Ivan Franko. 'We too are Europe', were the words of that learned fellow. But did he say why?"


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 29.03.2006

Peter Schäter takes a critical look at the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue industry, kept running largely with European funds and now being rejected by an increasing number of Palestinian artists: "The dialogue partners are flown abroad because they can't meet in Israel or the occupied territories. Two years ago a joint Antarctic expedition with a budget that could have kept a refugee camp running for months on end sparked a lot of hype. 'While conflict is brewing at home', the German TV news reported at the time, 'four Israelis and Palestinians have set a sign of mutual understanding in the eternal ice.' That has about the same effect as when a Kosovo Albanian and a Serb go out for a drink in Zurich."


Die Tageszeitung, 29.03.2006

Ariel Magnus portrays the musician Qubais Reed Ghazala, who describes himself as having "grown up with the melody of the ice cream van in the cultural void of the Midwest" and who as chance would have it was one of the first people to stumble across a form of aleatoric music which he called "circuit bending". "It is now forty years since this American put a little battery amp with no back panel into a drawer, and somehow managed to short circuit it with some sort of metal surface and produce synthesizer-type noises. At the time synthesizers were weird and expensive things, which penniless teenagers only knew about from the radio." In the meantime Ghazala has built hundreds of short-circuit instruments, including the classic photon clarinet and the Aleotron."Some of his instruments are played by touch, others need only the shadows of hands to start the circuits singing."


More farewells to Stanislaw Lem

Die Welt prints an excerpt from an interview with the Polish science-fiction author who died on Monday aged 84, about growing old, dying, and human intelligence: "You know, intelligence is a razor's edge. You can use it meaningfully, but you can also cut your throat with it. Deep down, it's unhealthy." The entire interview conducted in November by Patrick Grossmann appears today in the magazine Galore.

In his obituary in the Frankfurter Rundschau, Manfred Geier savours the "productive imagination" of the late great Lem, who claimed not to have known the source of his ideas. "Poland's most successful 20th century writer is only scantily represented in literature studies in his home country, because his scientific knowledge prevented a purely literary appraisal; for science fiction fans only interested in technical discoveries Lem's philosophical reflections only interfere; and most scientists see his work as some sort of literary game which feeds parasitically off science."


French comments on the new unrest in France

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, author Jean Rouaud is deeply unsettled by the "inter-generational understanding" in the current protests in Paris. "The theoretical and argumentative poverty of the younger generation is inversely proportional to their brand awareness and savvy in all things technological. But their loving parents are there to compensate for their children's shortcomings in the culture of dispute, and talk on their children's behalf." But this should not be tolerated, Rouaud believes, because in fact the older generation is the enemy, sitting "on their sinecures."

In an interview with Michaele Wiegel in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, French sociologist Alain Touraine describes the French protests as a reaction to Bonapartist policies. "France is more poorly armed than other societies for the challenges of globalised competition. The primacy of the state has resulted in us never learning to negotiate reform by means of social consensus. France has never engaged in serious social dialogue. All major social reforms have been implemented top down, by the government or through laws."