Monday 10 April, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10.04.2006

Author Najem Wali takes a depressed look at the daily killing and tortures in Iraq: "Paradoxically, three years after all the fantastic promises of democracy, everything now revolves around the question: has Iraq already slid into an all-engulfing civil war that will sweep its neighbours along with it? Or is the country still on the verge of disaster, still able to be rescued from a further spread of killing and destruction? But no one is discussing the essential question of how far democracy has developed. What kind of democracy can that be, to have imposed lies and deception on the Iraqis for three years? It's all just a (very ugly) sham!"


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10.04.2006

Bettina David sees in the Indonesian law against pornography, which forbids supposedly provocative clothing and which women's organisations are opposing, a worrying Islamification of the multi-ethnic state. "The obsessive pre-occupation with the topic of pornography suggests a deep alienation from the local cultural tradition. An ever-growing number of Indonesians orient themselves in their everyday lives to a globalised neo-orthodox understanding of Islam. As this draft bill shows, this orientation towards Sharia-defined Islam is not only a step away from the West but also away from the local, historically rooted cultural tradition."


Tristan triumphs in Berlin

Eleonore Büning of the FAZ is satisfied with the musical interpretaion of "Tristan" in Berlin's Staatsoper. "Daniel Barenboim and his famous Staatskapelle... bring the fire of love, desperation and jealousy to a dramatic blaze." But the staging by Stefan Bachmann was less convincing. "This is Bachmann's third opera after 'The Magic Flute' in Basel and a 'Cosi' in Lyon. One of the basic rules that he has definitely mastered is that singers don't like to have to move too much when they sing. They all enter with the pace of a procession and then take a turn to the left or to the right. Once they've arrived at stage centre, they stand around, decoratively."

Writing in Die Welt, Kai Luehrs-Kaiser celebrates the debut of the architects turned stage designers Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. "When the curtain rises, we are looking down a white, cut-open half pipe, cinemascopically extended. In it, fragments of the off-stage press against each other, like vegetables under cellophane. Portals, ropes, excrescences." Luehrs-Kaiser rates Peter Seiffert the best Wagner hero of the world. He "sings his first Tristan with a perfect, hardened tenor. His voice bursting with good health, refusing to die, he, in his agony, still sends lively zombie looks to the ceiling."


Saturday 8 April, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 08.04.2006

The literature and arts supplement honours Samuel Beckett, born 100 years ago. Stage and film director Werner Düggelin attended the rehearsals for the world premiere of "Waiting for Godot", at the Theatre Babylone, a small theatre on Boulevard Raspail in Paris with about 300 seats. "Roger Blin took a long time to cast the play. He simply couldn't find the actors he was looking for. Then he said he was going to look in the vaudeville theatres, where he found a comedian who could play the hand organ. His name was Lucien Raimbourg, and he became a star playing Vladimir. The others were Jean Martin, who was a member of Blin's entourage, and Pierre Latour. Blin was an actor too, and he played Pozzo."

Belgian author Jean-Philippe Toussaint tells how he offered Samuel Beckett a game of correspondence chess for his opinion on a play he had had written. "If I won, he would read the play and tell me what he thought. If he won, I would go over the play once more with an eased mind. My letter ended: if you agree, 1. e4. He answered by return mail: black resigns. Send me the play. Cordially, Samuel Beckett."


Die Welt, 08.04.2006

"Denying historical facts and ignoring weighty evidence is not a crime, it's stupidity. This is not the realm of justice, but psychiatry. Stupidity and propaganda cannot be met with censorship, but with all the means of antagonism the public has at its disposal," writes sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky (book info here) in a plea for unlimited freedom of opinion. "The more often a thought is repeated, the more believable it seems. Many convictions aren't based on conceptual clarity, empirical proof or logical reasoning, but on pure habit. Only argument can filter the truth out of diverse contentions. A description can only be recognised as true and a precept can only be seen as correct if there is full freedom for objection and disapproval.
People can only – sometimes – be made smarter through correction. Only the pain of error shows them the way to the truth. The good thing about a mistake is that the next time round you recognise it as such."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 08.04.2006

In France, the no longer so "Nouveaux Philosophes" – primarily Bernard-Henri Levy and Andre Glucksmann – are back in discussion after 30 years. Are they, the old question, simply right wing? Martina Meister believes things are more complex. "It's the expression of a painful vacuum, and sad proof of the end of a myth. It represents the end of the French intellectual, as the world imagined him. Nobody dares to bury this myth for good. Not in France and definitely not in Germany, where we stubbornly cling to the legacies of Zola, Sartre, Foucault and Bourdieu. But it's over: the French intellectual is dead." (see our feature by Andre Glucksmann here)


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 08.04.2006

Thomas Steinfeld visited the author Peter Handke in the little village in France where he lives, and the two went for a walk over the fields. Steinfeld took note of the aphorisms that fell from the poet of worldly and literary wisdom. "'Actually,' said Peter Handke when there was no more cloud ear to pick off the scrubby elder berry bush, 'I've always been concerned about being forgotten.' And to the response that he's writing far too many books and is too visible to be forgotten, he says, 'Yes, but there's something like reverse ambition.'"