Monday 10 July, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10.07.2006

David Frankel's film of Lauren Weisberger's "The Devil Wears Prada" has fomented the discussion in the USA about how suitable women are as company heads and more to the point, to be the next president, writes Andrea Köhler. "A boss with no Y chromosome – and this is the predominant message emerging from all research into women's chances for the top job – has to be immaculate, the embodiment of self-control and perfection. Which probably explains why Meryl Streep's devil in Prada has turned prototypical overnight. She doesn't shout, she whispers, her terror is poise, her sadism has style. The perfect female boss is more than anything else, the pure manifestation of her function, unsullied by human flaw."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 10.07.2006

On the first day of the Euro-African Conference on Migration and Development in Rabat, which will be attended by 57 African and European states, the paper dedicates two pages to the topic of immigration.

"There is not too much migration in today's global economy, but too little", says US urbanist Mike Davis ("City of Quartz") in an interview. "Europe's epochal problem is that it is losing people at a rapid rate, not that it is being flooded. As long as Germans are not prepared to ban condoms or stage public fertility rituals, they should accept that immigration is their only hope of securing the transfer of pension and welfare payments to an ageing population."

"Legalise it," writes Sonja Zekri, listing a few good reasons: "If you leave death, fear and destitution out of it for the time, the worldwide refugee business, as seen through management eyes, is basically a win-win situation: everyone profits. The refugees hope for a better future; the human traffickers – from the peasant farmer in the Carpathians who carries Afghanis across the border into the Schengen area after their thousand-kilometre journey to the boss sitting in some East-European metropolis – all make a pretty penny from their services. In the countries of immigration entire sectors are not viable without migrants. And the countries of origin now receive a fortune in bank transfers from the migrants. These payments now bring more money into Morocco than the tourism industry, and in Sri Lanka they top the tea trade."


Die Tageszeitung, 10.07.2006

Martin Zeyn presents the French comic strip artist Joann Sfar, whose story about a Cabala-canny cat has sold more than 450,000 copies in France. "Sfar's favourite target is the imperious tone. In 'The Rabbi's Cat' he has a cat lecture on the Jewish imperative not to take the name of God in vain, and even has him win a dispute with a scribe. European literature is very familiar with the picaresque novel in which fools say the truth – but a cat? E.T.A Hoffmann prepared the terrain with his 'Kater Murr, the Educated Cat', however his cat is no authority in theological territory."


Saturday 8 July, 2006

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 08.07.2006

Hassan Khader, publisher of the Palestinian literary magazine Al Karmel, reports on the failed plans to set up a stable location for the fine arts in Palestine – for example in the Alkasaba Theatre: "I was part of the theatre's first advisory committee, when it moved from Jerusalem to Ramallah seven years ago. I well remember the optimism at the time. The theatre had a several-story building at its disposal with two stages, a film theatre and a cafe. (...) There was talk of working together with the city council to attract capital and young businesspeople who would invest in an ambitious dream: transforming the neighbourhood into a pedestrian zone, a cultural space with galleries, cinemas, restaurants, bars and cafes. (...) Of course none of that happened."


Berliner Zeitung, 08.07.2006

Ingeborg Ruthe portrays the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who had his first taste of fame at the Biennale in Berlin in 1998 and now runs a regular "art company" here with 20 employees. "Eliasson's works put our sensorium to the test. And without striving for the religious pathos so fashionable at big art events these days. With his soundless, blazing, reflective, dangling constructions he very matter-of-factly inverts relations of scale, making the invisible visible with colour, light and kinetics, in other words through chemistry and physics. In a strobe-lit water cascade the individual water droplets suddenly hang as if frozen in the air."