Peter Handke refuses Heinrich Heine prize

A farce comes to an end. In an article entitled by the paper "Je refuse!", the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung publishes the brief correspondence between Peter Handke and Düsseldorf Mayor Joachim Erwin on the subject of the Heinrich Heine Prize. Handke writes: "I am writing to you today with the express intention of saving you (and the world) the bother of a meeting of the Dusseldorf City Council (if that's what it's called) to declare the decision to give me the prize null and void. I'm also doing this to save myself the bother, or rather the ghost of myself which is currently haunting the public, and even more importantly to save my work, or should I say stuff, from being exposed again and again to this kind of ridicule from one party politician or another."

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Thomas Steinfeld takes a bitter look at the Heinrich Heine Prize affair, with especially harsh words far the city's politicians: "The last idea the city council had before Peter Handke officially refused the prize was that Heinrich Heine University should organise a symposium at which his work could be discussed, and where Handke himself could answer for his words and actions. The whole thing would have constituted a tribunal arraigning the poet, to his own detriment. There is something consternating about the idea. Can the Düsseldorf aldermen really have learned nothing from the conflict of the last ten days, do they really not see what an injustice they have done?"


Berliner Zeitung, 09.06.2006

The paper quotes a passage from Hungarian writer Laszlo Darvasi's "Wenn ein Mittelstürmer träumt. Meine Weltgeschichte des Fußballs" (Dreams of a midfielder. My history of world football), in which the author discusses how football brings out the animal in man: "Of course you've got to start with the referee, because he's the one the crowds burden with the most animal names. He is ox, bull, cow, pig, rhinoceros, rat, dog, ape, canary, great tit and louse. Zeus, the great metamorphosist, takes the most unusual forms in the football referee. And it is commonly said of midfielders that they're as industrious as ants. The striker puffs himself up like a peacock... In every team there's a bull, a horse and one kind of bird or another. And a butterfly. A louse. One Argentinian goalkeeper was called the mole because he regularly missed high cross-kicks, but always stopped the tricky low shots."


Der Tagesspiegel, 09.06.2006

Esteban Penrod, counsellor at the Costa Rican embassy in Berlin, explains why Germany will lose today's kick-off match with Costa Rica: "First of all, the host country traditionally loses its opening match. Secondly, people in Germany only know Costa Rica's beautiful beaches, volcanoes, nature and friendly people. No one has a clue we can actually play football, so the German players will certainly underestimate us... Finally, of course, it is possible that Costa Rica could lose the first game – but that will only forestall the next meeting between the two countries in the finals! And then we Costa Ricans will get our own back and become world champions."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 09.06.2006

Media specialist Vinzenz Hediger explains why football and film simply don't mix as well as football and TV. "In real games – and this is perhaps where the beauty of the game lies – it's more often the rule than the exception that a player either 'isn't in top form' or 'isn't focussed', and that there's no prospect of a miraculous 92nd minute turnaround. In film, however, that miraculous turnaround, which in real games is left to chance, has to happen. In other words, football's lacking appeal in films arises precisely from the fact that there is no possibility of failure in films; that a player no longer has the option of failure once he becomes an actor."

"Ras" presents the latest statistics published by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) according to which "paper has by no means outlived its usefulness as an information medium. The newspaper market is booming, particularly in Asia. This indicates that the emerging nations aren't exactly making a great leap into the age of electronics. According to the WAN data published earlier this week on the occasion of the World Congress in Moscow, newspaper sales in China increased by 18 percent over the past five years, 33 percent in India and 15 percent in Malaysia. China has the largest market for newspapers (97 million copies sold daily), followed by India (79 million), Japan (70 million), the US (53 million) and Germany (22 million). 70 percent of the world's bestselling newspapers are published in Asia."