Die Zeit, 04.05.2006

In the discussion of immigration and integration, author Peter Schneider makes a "curious" discovery: "German writers have been very engaged and are generally the first to react to racist attacks by neo-Nazis – they have demonstrated their position by calling for demonstrations, campaigns, civil initiatives. But in their writings, the people whose civil rights they are willing to fight for at any time are seldom to be found. It's as though the immigrants, whose children go to school with our own, in whose restaurants we spend our evenings, who we meet as neighbours or at parent's night at school, have yet to find their literary place; at most, they are teammates, minor characters, but almost never protagonists." (see a feature "The panic savers" by Peter Schneider here)

Thomas Groß presents the new star among the German immigrant community: Muhabbet. "Whether in the news or most recently at the movies, all you see is gang wars, forced marriage and honour killings. Murat Ersen – alias Muhabbet – doesn't say all that doesn't exist. Nor does he say that as someone of foreign origin, Turkish in his case, all his experiences with Germans are good ones. But he does say that 'A little discrimination isn't going to kill me.' And he points out that not everyone corresponds to each and every cliché. He himself provides the best example. He is well-spoken and polite as he sits back on the couch of his record company to talk about himself, his new album 'R'n Besk' and his growing role as a figurehead. No tattoos, no cool talk, practically no accent – if at all from the Rhineland, because Muhabbet comes from Bocklemünd district in Cologne. Bockemünd, he says, 'is a neighbourhood like Berlin's Rütli School' (more here)."
(see "In Today's Feuilletons" of April 29 for more).


Frankfurter Rundschau, 04.05.2006

"Really, it's a great idea. It's a straight multicultural idea that could only come from a straight leftist, Mr. Ströbele from Kreuzberg. But it hasn't really been thought through," laments Ursula März. "If we, as Mr. Ströbele has suggested, translate the German national anthem into Turkish so that the Turks can sing 'unity and law and freedom' in Turkish, there's a danger of discrimination. We can't have the Turkish takeaway owner bellowing the German national anthem from the sidewalk in Turkish while the waiters in the Chinese restaurant next door fork through their glass noodles in shame.... And the people from Africa and Latin America? What will be the moral status of the tango school in Dortmund if singing the German national anthem is not one of its rituals?"


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 04.05.2006

Swantje Karich reports on a truly unique happening: a women's soccer game in Tehran. The Iranian national team played against the team of the Turkish soccer club Al Dersimspor from Berlin-Kreuzberg. For ninety minutes the audience watched the women players kick, scream, get totally out of themselves under an open sky. Not a man in sight, nobody to check them. A few female guardians of public morals watch the goings on sceptically. For 90 minutes, soccer is a women's sport and seems to carry promise of a life without religious restrictions. For the guest team as well: Susu, Safiye, Mehtap, Paros, Silke, Conny, Friederike and their teammates. They came to Tehran to support the Iranian players and to realise their own dream. For that, they're willing to accept that they have to wear head-scarves and a special, wide track suits."


Die Tageszeitung, 04.05.2006

"Some people take drugs: religion, love, alcohol, violence, money, power," writes the poet Jochen Schmidt for the taz series "My Values". "But I'd rather toss it in right away than waste my time with all that. Instead I put my energies into work. Work is the only dogma I believe in completely, after the loss of the transcendental shelter in modernity. Of course I'm talking about non-alienated work, art that is, in whatever form it happens to take… You've got to struggle to see the bright side of a visit to the housing office or filling out a tax return, to cast out the devil of meaninglessness. It's all research, it's all material. Of course I mean art in the democratic, not the elite sense, like a handicraft. Breathing poetry into life in full knowledge of your own mortality, that's the real challenge of everyday life."


Die Welt, 04.05.2006

Jürgen Gosch's staging of "Macbeth", which will open the Berlin Theatertreffen to start tomorrow has kicked up a controversy, with many reviewers criticising its brutality. Reinhard Wengierek believes the production is anything but cheap showmanship, rather theatre that "hits the audience to the very quick". "It's only natural that the customary limits of manners, and civilisation even, should be transgressed in this mass of burst veins and raw, swollen human flesh. Precisely because this is done in the theatre in a pre-announced, unnatural way, it grips the audience like in no other art. Nothing irritates people more than naked flesh, showing man in his fake-blood-soaked squalor. Today's movies teem with violence and no one gets upset. But the same things are immediately greeted in the theatre with the scandal-verdict 'blood and guts theatre.' On the one hand that's a sign that people's sensibilities have not been entirely dulled. But on the other hand, the loud call for self-censorship and moral policing is dumb, hypocritical and detrimental to critical reflection."