Physical Dramaturgy: Ein (neuer) Trend?

Dramaturgie im zeitgenössischen Tanz ist ? positiv gemeint ? ein heißes Eisen. Idealerweise sind Dramaturginnen und Dramaturgen während der Erarbeitung eines Stücks die besten Freunde der Choreografen. more more

GoetheInstitute

22/06/2006

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.

Die Zeit, 22.06.2006

Hilal Sezgin paid a visit to Feridun Zaimoglu, who has been accused of plagiarising Emine Özdamar's book ""Life is a caravansarai..." (1992) with his recent novel "Leyla" (more here). After listening to tapes on which his mother talks about her childhood, Sezgin can clear him of all suspicion. "There can no longer be any reasonable doubt that Zaimoglu's mother has related her entire life to her son on tape, in a relatively unfiltered way. And slowly I get the real surprise. 'You and your mother talk about such things?' - 'Oh yeah, and she's told me all kinds of other stuff too. You know, I didn't even have to ask, she knew it: I needed stories. She said, I'll tell you everything. That really shook me up, because what she says goes way beyond the borders of shame that normally exist between mother and son. We both knew it, that's the strangest thing. We were sitting there in the living room in Ankara with the door closed. My father knocked from time to time and asked, do you want some tea? I was smoking, and so as not to fill the room with smoke I opened the window. But she said, no, close it again, the neighbours mustn't hear what I have to say. Mother, I said, later thousands of people are going to read it!'"

There is much talk of a "new patriotism" in Germany these days, where the World Cup is the stage for much flag-waving and calls of "Deutschland! Deutschland!" In face of this, Gunter Hofmann can't understand all the talk about a relaxed, open-minded patriotism among Germans, and asserts that there's no sign of such an attitude. He points to the "peculiar force" with which foreigners alone have been given the responsibility of integrating. "The underlying pattern of thought is that if there is such a thing as xenophobia, it's due to immigrants' reluctance to integrate. Of course there has been a certain reluctance. But this argument also provides a wonderful excuse for avoiding the obvious question of whether there ever was an interest in promoting integration and whether politicians ever tried to make people perceive other ethnic groups and cultures as something positive... At any rate up to now this debate has never been quite as relaxed as the 'relaxed patriots' claim it is, nor quite as appreciative of other cultures. If things continues like this, the good mood World Cup might be a kick in the right direction."


Die Tageszeitung, 22.06.2006


The new patriotism has found an unexpected proponent. "I didn't think this kind of a celebration would be possible," says Gregor Gysi, chairman of Germany's Left Party, in an interview with Jens König and Peter Unfried. "One sees in the faces of the young Germans that they feel neither superior nor inferior to other nations, but rather equally entitled. For the first time, we are seeing a normal, relaxed, sovereign relationship to the nation. This is a real experience for me. And that reassures me."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22.06.2006

Gottfried Knapp prophesies that in the future, art-hungry visitors to Paris will not be able to say no to a couple of hours at Quai Branly. The new museum of art, culture and civilisations is simply a "world sensation," and its collection of objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania and America is of inconceivable value, Knapp writes. "Already the special exhibition 'African Chimeras,' showing a mere selection from the entire collection, has demonstrated that France's holdings of African works beat the rest of the world hands down. There are the helmet masks of the Bamana Culture from Mali: animal-like figures carved of wood, exquisitely light and elegant. In most of them a slender, S-formed antilope's neck emerges from the body of a crouching mythical creature, with antlers rising up to the heavens. It's easy to imagine how dancers wearing such filigree animal figures could give new expression to effortlessness."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22.06.2006

The major work of the most important Japanese manga artist is called "Adolf", of all things. Christian Gasser reviews the five-volume comic novel which has now appeared in German, and portrays Osamu Tezuka, the "God of manga," who left 600 stories on 150,000 pages to posterity. "Tezuka, born in 1928, created the manga as we know it in the years after the war. In contrast to his predecessors, he used techniques borrowed from American films. His use of changing points of view, detailed images, speedlines, sound effects and his dynamic page layout, created the pictorial language that defines manga as we know it today. But even more important were Tezuka's innovations in content. Just one year after starting as a comic-strip artist, he published the 200-page book 'The New Treasure Island,' the first epic manga work which sold a sensational 400,000 copies."


Der Tagesspiegel, 22.06.2006


On what would have been Billy Wilder's 100th birthday, the feuilletons are full of homages to the Jewish emigre director, winner of 6 Oscars, who died in Beverly Hills in 2002. Fellow director Volker Schlöndorff, who shot a series of interviews with Wilder in 1987, recalls a visit to the filmmaker's Californian home and reflects on what made him so unique. "Next to film, his great passion is for art – before sports and politics. His house is like a museum. Paintings lie around on the floor, even in the halls and closets. 'But why do you only show the back sides?' I asked him. 'Look,' he said, turning a few pictures around – Egon Schiele nudes at lesbian play – 'What would my Filipino servants think of me?' Is the influence of painting to be found in his films? Definitely not. He saw the world at critical eye level – which is what makes him a classic in his own right. He went about his work with the same economy, ease and relentlessness that the painters he admired did theirs."

Get the signandsight newsletter for regular updates on feature articles.
signandsight.com - let's talk european.

 
More articles

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talks   about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatified Pope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

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.
read more

From the feuilletons

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not sure that Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.
read more

From the Feuilletons

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

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.
read more

From the Feuilletons

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class.
read more