Monday 15 May, 2006

The Georg Büchner Prize, Germany's leading literary prize, has been awarded by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung to Romanian-German poet Oskar Pastior.

In Die Welt Dorothea von Törne finds it "utterly amazing that someone who was deported to a forced labour camp in the Soviet Union in 1945, who did three years of military service and who eked out an existence in a construction office as a concrete technician soon started to sing astonishingly beautiful anagrams like 'Urologe küßt Nabelstrang' into the German federal auricles. (Hear and read some of Pastior's poems.)

Martin Lüdke of the Frankfurter Rundschau is also thrilled by the "wonderful, surprising and long overdue decision. If you have experienced Oskar Pastior reading, his glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, if you have heard his quiet, friendly, warm yet clear and slightly odd-sounding voice, and seen how his top lip and moustache start to vibrate when he purrs out the vowels, if you have experienced through him that poetry is alive and breathing, that words sound and meaning flickers, you will be celebrating with him. (Here a link to Pastior reading)

Hubert Spiegel of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung thinks the prize was deserved but he is still not happy with the decision. "Decency dictates that one does not fail to honour a soon-to-be octogenarian for his life's work, and the academy stuck to this dictate. Yet in doing so it risks nothing. Would this prize not have been of immeasurably greater import to this writer a quarter of a century ago?"


Die Welt, 15.05.2006

"If you want to defeat bin Laden and the mullahs, start by driving a hybrid." Die Welt reprints a piece by Politician and author Ayaan Hirsi Ali and writer Leon de Winter, calling on the West to "radically reduce its reliance on the Arab oil that fuels the global jihad." That should be possible within five years, they write. There are already many alternatives to fossil fuels — solar and wind energy, clean-burning coal, bio-fuel such as ethanol, hybrid cars, hydrogen engines. It is true that it may take decades to transform the global energy system, but a technological breakthrough would dramatically lower oil prices and strangle Osama bin Laden’s vision of a wealthy Islamic Caliphate based upon oil income." Here you'll find the full English version.


Saturday 13 May, 2006

Berliner Zeitung, 13.05.2006

The German Film Prize was awarded on Friday in Berlin. Anke Westphal reports on the event, dominated by the film 'Das Leben der Anderen' ('The Life of Others,' see our feature on the film here): "Despite all the pretty trappings of competition, things went as expected last night in the Palais am Funkturm. 'Das Leben der Anderen,' the Stasi drama by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck that did so much to reconcile East and West Germany with its plot, its aesthetics and its cast and crew, won seven Lolas at the Deutsche Filmpries 2006." Here a pdf list of the winners.


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13.05.2006

Forty-five years ago this Thursday, Luis Bunuel was awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival for "Viridiana", which then set off the biggest film scandal of the Franco era. Christiane Habermalz writes that the censors were already wary of the film script: "'The action described in the film scenario is disgusting in the first half, and extremely unappealing after that. For this reason I believe it will not make a good film', wrote one of the state assessors.... The warning remained a minority opinion, but the end of the film did have to be changed – an anecdote Bunuel never tired of telling. The censors found it morally objectionable that in the last scene Silvia Pinal, who played the novice, and Francisco Rabal, who played her cousin, should remain alone in one room. It was Munoz Fontan himself, the state functionary overseeing the production, who suggested that the maid should also be there, to clear the scene of any dubiousness. Bunuel was delighted. He had the three play cards, and so created a wonderfully subtle end with the hint of a menage a trois."


Die Welt, 13.05.2006

Tilman Krause comments on the list of "Our best – 100 gays making waves in Germany", compiled by the gay magazine Hinnerk, which put the cannibal of Rotenburg at No. 4. "Arnim Meiwes is clearly the secret hero of everybody who still believes in 'living out' sexual fantasies as an 'emancipatory act'... In our society it is the gays who have succeeding in really extending the distance between sexual activities and anything soulful, loving or humane."


Spiegel Online, 13.05.2006

Mariam Lau settles accounts with the Neocons, whose hopes for a democratic Iraq have failed so catastrophically. "The problem with the Neocons is not that that they were wrong: there is nothing ignoble about failing to realise a dream like the democratisation of the Arab world. The problem is the permanent sugar coating, the Orwellian wrapping of their mistakes. And when there's no longer any way to avoid acknowledging a problem, without seeming fantastical, they get all Hegelian and explain everything that's taking place as the stony path to progress."