Die Tageszeitung, 13.06.2006

Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk talks in an interview about his time as a Bhagavan follower in Poona, and what the political Left and banks have in common. The classic Left functioned as a "bank of anger", "where all those who knew that powerless rage was not enough could deposit their rage. What we need are "bank of anger" establishments in the form of leftist parties, to make the anger of the disadvantaged politically operational. That's why the leftist principle doesn't function any more today, because the Left behaves more as part of the feel-good system, and less as an agency for collecting and transforming anger."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13.06.2006

Have the German feuilletons gone crazy? asks writer Monika Maron. She cannot believe why in the dispute over the similarities between Emine Sevgi Özdamar's book "Life is a caravansarai..." (1992) and Feridun Zaimoglu's new and highly-acclaimed novel "Leyla", Özdamar's individual experiences are being written off – by all the papers, including the FAZ - as experiences that any Turk would have had (more on the accusations here). "No one will level a plagiarism charge at Zaimoglu. The legal definition of plagiarism is clearly outlined and will not affect Zaimoglu's 'Leyla'. But the suspicion that he might have swallowed Emine Sevgi Özdamar's 'Carvansarai' whole will probably be hard to suppress for an unbiased reader of these two books. And this is not because of their common-or-garden content, of the young Turkish girl on her train journey to Berlin, which has of course occurred thousands of times. What I refer to are Emine Sevgi Özdamar's most personal interests, her poetry, her metaphors and her world of images. But all this, as I read in the papers, is not Özdamar's own literary creation, but the shared Turkish cultural experience of the fifties and sixties, when all Turkish girls obviously went through the same thing, thus ruling out any claims to intellectual property."

Mark Siemons sees a predominance of Mao Pop at the third Dashanzi International Art Festival in Beijing. Just what the western gallerists, who are there in droves, are after. "In one of the most spacious exhibition halls, which today goes by the name of '798 Space' one can make out the words on the wall: 'Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts.' This has obviously been created with a tirelessly winking visitor in mind. On the one hand he should not be able to resist the pleasant frisson caused by the 'authenticity' of the location', and on the other he will be confident of his ironic advantage."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13.06.2006

All of the papers praise Hungarian composer György Ligeti, who died yesterday in Vienna aged 83. Reinhard J. Brembeck writes: "His communicative energy was overwhelming, fascinating, visionary, magical... The history of music seemed to flow like lava from this wiry figure with its rasping, unmistakably Hungarian voice. With both his rhetoric and his music, Ligeti was able to thrill his audience like no other great composer of the past 50 years, but he could also be silent. In 1961 he held a now famous lecture on the subject of 'The future of music', and didn't say a word."

Hans-Arthur Marsiske is wowed by the football-playing robots at the RoboCup competition in Bremen: "Back in the mid-90s, a bold, some would say foolhardy, group of individuals declared it wanted to win the football World Cup in 2050 with a team of robots. Their goal was as useless as putting people on the moon, and not even vaguely calculable, either in economic or military terms. Nevertheless, or perhaps for this very reason, researchers from around the globe answered: great, count us in! Now the international RoboCup community has grown to around 4,000 researchers and up to ten times as many children and young people, all of whom put boundless energy into the project."