Süddeutsche Zeitung, 07.04.2006

In an interview with Henning Klüver, author and journalist Claudio Magris explains Silvio Berlusconi's recipe for success with an example: "We had a family living above us, the typical Mr and Mrs Clean. They kept their home spic and span, but threw their trash onto the street. If there'd been a genocide in our stairwell they couldn't have cared less. (...) For years this social strata was controlled on the one hand by the Democrazia Cristina, and on the other by the Italian Communist Party and the unions. It was never its own free political subject. Then Berlusconi came along and declared: you are a subject, free to vote for me! In doing so he pulled out every stop, violated all the rules of decency and brought about this strange cultural climate which is frightening even so many of his own people. These are the people we should address. It was a major mistake of the Left just to show them scorn."

Alvis Hermanis and his Riga Theatre are showing "Latvian Stories" at Berlin's Hebbel am Ufer Theatre. Peter Laudenbach was highly impressed by the twenty monologues from post-Socialist Latvia. "The starting point for this work was research. Each actor had to seek out a person and spend a month observing them and getting to know them – no freaks, no weirdos, just ordinary, unspectacular people. 'The greatest dramas take place in the lives of people like this, you just have to look closely,' says Hermanis of his methods. 'This is the opposite of the star cult of global pop culture. Theatre is leading a guerilla war against the culture of mass media. This war is less dangerous than cultural opposition under a dictatorship during the Soviet Union, but it is far more complicated.'"

The poet Durs Grünbein remembers Samuel Beckett and the "freshness of disillusionment" which the novel "Watt" brought him. "To put it simply, Beckett's novel is to Proust's opus what a gynaecological anatomy atlas is to the confessions of a lady who is valiantly wasting away from some rare cervical condition."


Die Tageszeitung, 07.04.2006

For a week the press has been up in arms about Berlin's Neukölln district, after staff and board at one problem school called for its closure and for its rowdy-to-criminal students to be spread among neighbouring schools (more here, news story here). Robin Alexander reports on how the local residents see the hype: "Long-time residents of Neukölln have developed a theory, says one neighbour: this kind of hysteria appears periodically about once every seven years. It starts with articles in Berlin's Tagesspiegel, then seesaws up to the national news magazine Der Spiegel. Then it slowly ebbs away with TV news stories and headlines in the Bild Zeitung tabloid. But this also has its good side. When rents went up in recent years a lot of local residents simply stapled the latest Spiegel article to an otherwise blank letter of objection: 'Shots fire across Neukölln's streets'."


Die Welt, 07.04.2006

"In France social change has always been brought about by revolutionary upheaval; the country has seldom been able to implement reform," writes Wolf Lepenies. "The French have remained opposed to reform and addicted to revolution. Foreign observers are amazed by the continued influence of revolutionary rhetoric and the readiness to protest, which in the recent conflict over "First Employment Contracts" has brought a million people onto the streets in Paris alone. But there is another constant at work behind the scenes of French politics: the continued existence of the monarchy – from Napoleon and de Gaulle down to Mitterand and Chirac. The royal court ('La cour') and the street ('La rue') are still the preferred political arena even in the republic. Against these parliament will always take a back seat. "


Berliner Zeitung, 07.04.2006

Ulrich Seidler interviews radio presenter and cabaret artist Jürgen Kuttner on his show "Lovely Lenin" at Berlin's Volksbühne theatre. "I'm not trying to understand every last detail of Lenin's life and work. I mean after all he failed miserably. What interests me is his power of determination, his courage to say: laws, schmaws - it's time for a revolution. Things suck here, so we must do 'what is to be done'. That's what I'm after, it's less about the historical figure. And another thing, it's a lot harder to make Lenin into a trademark than Che Guevara. Or a sort of motherly figure like Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin's got a much higher irk factor."