Der Tagesspiegel, 11.04.2006

59 days before the start of the FIFA World Cup hosted by Germany, dramatist Moritz Rinke poses the weighty question: "It is often said that in major tournaments, the German national team reflects the state of the nation as a whole. Coach Sepp Herberger and Konrad Adenauer stood for the founding myths of the Republic, and not for experimentation; Willy Brandt and team manager Helmut Schön for 'go for more democracy', while Helmut Kohl and head coach Berti Vogts stood for ups and downs, taking both sedately in their stride ("The field was too long for one-two passes"). But what on earth do Angela Merkel and Jürgen Klinsmann stand for?"
See our feature "The Republic's sexiest calves" by Moritz Rinke.


Die Welt, 11.04.2006

Lilli Gruber visits Zahra Khomeini, daughter of the leader of the revolution and president of the Women's society of the Islamic Republic, in Tehran. Asked why 28 percent of Iranian women need psychological assistance and anti-depressants, Khomeini was – as in all her responses – quite succinct. "For starters, if some women have psychic problems, that doesn't mean that all women do. I'm an optimist by nature and prefer to see the glass as half full rather than half empty. Plus which, we'll never really know what goes on in the bedrooms. There may be some regrettable cases but we do what we can. And there are problems everywhere in the world. By and large, the people here are young, healthy and happy!"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11.04.2006

Cultural historian Willibald Sauerländer (book info) is very taken with an exhibition featuring renaissance painter Hans Holbein the Younger at the Kunstmuseum in Basel (more here): "Dürer's works are among the nation's art treasures. Grünwald's paintings unsettle in their excess of colourful visions and religious disquiet. Holbein's paintings, by contrast, are brilliant and cold, highly intelligent but impersonal, as inscrutable as the faces of his perfectly formed portraits. Researchers have a hard time with him because Holbein, the artist, always remains elusive in his works. Even his biography, about which we know very little, points to a life of uprooting and alienation. Perhaps this homeless curriculum is the signature of his modernity. More than a quarter of a century later than Dürer, his is a time of social, economic and religious upheaval."

Jutta Limbach, former president of Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and now president of the the Goethe Institut, Germany's chain of culture institutes, talks in an interview with Thomas Steinfeld and Johan Schloemann about the 2 percent annual cuts in the institute's budget (news story), and defends planned budget reallocations: "Today the Goethe Institut uses 42 percent of its budget for cultural work in Western Europe, countries the Bundesrepublik has been on friendly terms with for decades. By contrast, in Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and China the institutes are few and far between. Already in 2003 talks were held with the heads of the European institutes about a partial budget shift in favour of other parts of the world. That doesn't mean we want to pull out of Western Europe altogether. But we have to spread our attention more equitably... Our goal is to present more German culture abroad. Precisely for this reason we need to cut structures to free up more funds for artistic and literary projects. That will mean cutbacks in the European network, principally in furnishing and equipment."
See our feature "Making multiculturalism work," by Jutta Limbach.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11.04.2006

In an article subtitled "While we pale with envy: young Turkish women in Berlin blend modesty and eroticism", writer Iris Hanika simply can't get enough of the fashion statements displayed by young women in head scarves. "What we have here is a current form of radical chic. In the 1920s, it was chic to be communist in the European salons. In 1970, rich white people in New York found it chic to invite Black Panthers to their parties. Today in the immigrant neighbourhoods of Europe it's chic to follow Islam. The young Turkish women in Kreuzberg go one step further, however. Not only do they find radicalism chic, they also want to be radically chic, which they achieve wonderfully. These women are marvellous."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11.04.2006

Moscow-born author and journalist Sonja Margolina asserts that Russia's control of Ukraine and Belarus is in no way a further betrayal by Europe in the Munich-Yalta tradition, as Andrej Stasiuk and Yuri Andrukhovych have suggested. "Anyone calling for assistance has to admit that there are many who would help, but that those who have managed to make their way into the EU – the Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and citizens of the Baltic States – managed this largely on their own. No assistance from abroad, no counsel by foreigners can replace the need to cultivate one's own elites, build up modern institutions and create an intellectual basis for one's own nation." (see our feature by Sonja Margolina)