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12/05/2006

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Berliner Zeitung, 12.05.2006

Belarussian writer Artur Klinau tells how Alexander Lukashenko manages to keep Belarus under his spell. "Belarussian society is split between those who live in fear and those seeking to free themselves from fear. Between those pursuing an illusion and those yearning to return to reality. You can't say this split in Belarussian society has only come about recently. It's existed since the moment Lukashenko came to power. Moreover, the split was the very reason why Lukashenko could become president in the first place, because his votes came from that part of Belarus that was still entirely under the spell of the Soviet Empire, from those who wanted to return to the land of happiness."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 12.05.2006

Franziska Augstein presents the report of the commission of experts on the GDR, which has not yet been published but was already roundly attacked by the historian Hubertus Knabe earlier this week in Die Welt. (See Monday's "In Today's Feuilletons") She actually finds its suggestions quite constructive, for example the proposal for a museum for "Rule, Society and Resistance" beyond the Stasi jails, the Wall in Berlin's Mitte and museums that alredy exist. "A memorial landscape that wanted to show millions of former GDR citizens that they had spent 40 years in ante-chambers of solitary confinement and torture cells would not draw many visitors. Hohenschönhausen is not the only site that's trying to do that. That's why the commission's complaints are actually well founded: 'The tense interaction of the rulers and the ruled, between acceptance and dependence, enthusiasm and contempt, dissatisfied loyalty and scraps of happiness' has not yet been adequately captured in GDR commemoration."



Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12.05.2006


Rainer Stamm, director of the Paula Mordersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, looks back on a revolutionary nude in the history of art, more exactly: the first female nude self-portrait, painted by Paula Mordersohn-Becker exactly one hundred years ago, "She gazes out of her self-portrait with a blend of cheek and inquisitiveness. The format of the canvas – one metre high, for her rare – shows she's not going to content herself with a study. Instead of showing a location, the background shines in a lemony yellow punctuated by dabs of green. Her hands surround her lower stomach. Often this position indicates pregnancy, but here instead they point metaphorically to the twin creative powers of the woman artist. She alone is in a position to give birth and to create art."


Die Welt, 12.05.2006

Gernard Gnauck summarises the reaction of Polish intellectuals to the newly formed national conservative government. Jokes about Kaczynski are spreading rampantly. "Today the ridicule doesn't just manifest itself in the form of jokes but also in photo-montages which are circulating on the internet or even in advertisements. Large black posters adorn Warsaw's streets with the warning: 'The IV Republic is coming.' Underneath there's the call: 'Doctors! Stay in Germany!' or 'Plumbers! Stay in France!' or 'Soldiers! Come back from Iraq!'"


Frankfurter Rundschau, 12.05.2006

Frank Hoffmann's staging of "The Taming of the Shrew" at the Ruhrfestspiele as a live comic strip was enough to entertain Stefan Keim for the first half. "Every once in a while, the performance turns totally surreal, a widow with a mop doggy shuffles across the stage, sometimes the scene freezes for a photograph. When Petruchio (well played by Siemen Rühaak) conquers the shrew, the scene slides into the slow motion showdown of a gangster film. Unlike his completely awful 'Minna von Barnhelm' last year, Hoffmann has a workable concept this time."

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Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K.
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Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west. Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.
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Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.
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The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.
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Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

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Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

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Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.
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The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin's incendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.
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