Opening of PEN conference in Berlin

The International PEN Congress in Berlin has opened with speeches from Günter Grass and German President Horst Köhler. Grass defends Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter's rant against "a theatre critic named Stadelmaier" (more here) and joins him in his criticism of the Iraq war, or more specifically "the time-tested, hypocritical numerical order of the West, the body count. While we try, in a fine accounting tradition, to keep lists of the victims of terrorist attacks – and the number is more than enough - nobody keeps track of the corpses that result from the American bombings and missile attacks. Whether in the second or the third Gulf War (Saddam Hussein conducted the first one, supported by the USA, against Iran): the rough estimates are in the hundreds of thousands."

Tilman Krause notes in Die Welt that while Günter Grass' opening speech got more applause, Horst Köhler's unspectacular malignities were more substantial. "Köhler reminds us that 'the praise of the dictator is still penned by the poet.' He also doesn't conceal his opinion that many writers – the present excluded, of course – have fallen prey to opportunism. Indeed! Anyone who has wallowed in as much political blindness as poets and great thinkers in the last 200 years, can handle a little self-doubt."

Writing in the FAZ, Heinrich Wefing finds Günter Grass' critique of the Irak war a little cheap. "Why do we have to wait in vain for Grass to draw attention to a few despots in Arabia, in the Caucasus or Africa, who understand literature as nothing other than praise of the tyrant; the endless harping on Bush and Blair gets a bit tedious."

In a text in die tageszeitung on the PEN congress, Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez voices his concern on the state of the world: "Ultramodern wars of conquest for the control of raw materials are now taking place, as in Iraq, with all the hype of a mega blockbuster movie production. We never thought we'd have to experience such things after the colonial era. Deep-rooted racist and religious fanaticism only feeds the terrorism which has torn down all borders and frontiers: here a racism reborn in Europe from the ashes of the crematoria of the concentration camps."


Die Zeit, 24.05.2006

Katja Nicodemus is pleased to report that Cannes is dominated by women this year. Ron Howard handles them badly, Aki Kaurismaki with respect and Pedro Almovodar praises them to the heavens. "'Volver', which is the best film in competition so far, is a pretty radical celebration of the existence of women. The only man is stabbed to death in the first ten minutes and lands in the deep freeze. Thus, Almodovar clears the way for Penelope Cruz, who commands the film like a queen of the Spanish quotidian."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24.05.2006

Wolfgang Schreiber refuses to believe the tales going around about the decline in quality of the Berliner Philharmoniker under Sir Simon Rattle, and roundly answers the journalists who have propagated them (see our feature "Rattle's downward roll" from Die Welt, and here an article in German from the FAZ): "This is the dialectic of success: 'Rattle-Bashing' is starting to gain momentum. Herbert von Karajan, of all people, who led the Philharmoniker for three and a half decades, is put forward as evidence that the orchestra has lost elements of its ancestral sound quality; Rattle and people like him, people say nostalgically, have lost or forgotten that 'romantic, Bacchanal pathos' that Daniel Barenboim or Christian Thielemann embody so well. Such a rollback coming from young music critics has an absurd ring to it. As if Claudio Abbado, Karajan's immediate successor, hadn't also had a concerted hand in radically rejuvenating and expanding both the sound of the orchestra and its musical understanding. Simon Rattle has simply carried on with this famous orchestra's more flexible way of listening and playing. The same goes for its opening up to modern strands of music. And at the same time he has kept attendances where they were at almost one hundred percent."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24.05.2006

Peter Hagmann was delighted by the world premiere of Salvatore Sciarrino's new opera "Da gelo a gelo" at the Schwetzinger Festspiele. As always with Sciarrino, "the music whispers, you have to prick up your ears – but then you discover an inventive richness, a polymorphism of individual moments and a tonal beauty that grips you for the entire two hours of the performance. And on the other hand the score lives from the special kind of monody that has become Sciarrino's real trademark. The music is characterised by punctuated sequences in the style of Medieval modal notation, and by sustained procumbent tones that resolve in short, rapid strokes."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 24.05.2006

Tomorrow is Father's Day, and Elke Buhr takes the opportunity to think about "male regression in the family. (...) While women today may have their own credit cards, they're still held responsible for the household and the children; their power over the domestic realm remains unbroken. Career women still throw their husbands a warm sweater, make dinner first and do the taxes later, plan the social life, keep track of the kid's plans and continue to put things away while they're chatting with you. Men play along, behaving like teens in their mother's house." Buhr sees the situation getting worse, not better. "Particularly in the so-called progressive milieu, where men have done away dogmatically with the old masculine cliches, it's women who find themselves alone when it's time to drive a nail into a wall. The super-competent professional wife and mother is thus confronted with the self-discovered 68er man who treasures his uselessness like a record collection."