Zinedine Zidane sees red

Today's feuilletons brim with comments on the expulsion of French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane. Ten minutes before the end of his last match, the World Cup finale pitching France against Italy, Zidane was sent off for head-butting Italian defender Marco Materazzi.

In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Martin Meyer reflects on Zidane's attack on Materazzi, about rules and civilisation and how "surprisingly efficiently" Zidane was "in finding his way back to the atavistic." But "one can't but admire the artful quality of his brutal solo performance. While Zidane's soul was already firing a cannonade, his mimicry and body language played out a coolly concerted choreography. Smiling like Iago, the prospective malefactor first moved harmlessly in the other direction. Then he turned around, hesitating affably and, still with a look of pure innocence, suddenly rammed his adversary with his hairless head. The whole thing had something of the Commedia dell'arte about it: first a pensive, treacherous dance, and then the victim drops silently to the ground."

Dirk Schümer, for years the cultural correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Venice, still doesn't understand the Italians: "'We never would have won without the scandals.' This was the analysis given by the brains of the team, Gennaro Gattuso, in the flush of victory. He may well be right and yet this voices a perverse Italian anthropology. We need a stimulus to leap over our own quagmires. And more to the point: only once we have tried to manipulate the rules underhandedly do we gain pleasure from accepting them. That's just the way we are."

In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, author Georg Klein takes his hat off to Zidane's head-butt. "What he did was effectively to destroy a legend. He has not shattered the media story about the Frenchman of Algerian descent who was a talented football player. He has burst the bubble of culture. As we watched the long slow-motion video repeat we saw that the field of our European civilisation is not laid out to meet everything life throws at us with only good and bad words. A clever, well-respected and now wealthy man opted, on the basis of his experience, for the abrupt violence of the head-butt. Zidane might have spared Materazzi's nose, but he spared himself nothing."

"Great desires and great failures are the stuff of the tormented-artist novel," sighs Dirk Knipphals in Die Tageszeitung. "Zidane only demonstrated that his career could never be assessed by traditional standards. He showed that he can only be judged with a yardstick that he himself carves out. And it's for that very reason that Zinedane Zidane has now become immortal."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11.07.2006

Bahman Nirumand met the Iranian journalist and opposition figure Akbar Ganji, who was recently released after six years in prison and is now in Europe. "Ahmadinejad and his radical Islamists, who want to retain their monopoly on power through populism and artificially created crises, are the last potential that the theocracy has to offer, he says in a firm voice, which is presumably intended to erase any doubts even in his own mind. The basis for democratic change is wide enough, he says, but it lacks an organisation, a leader. Does he want to, will he take over the leadership? He avoids a clear answer."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 11.07.2006

Eva-Elisabeth Fischer attended some early performances at the Festival d'Avignon, but real pleasure has eluded her until now: "Demure artistes show mature variations of what they've been doing for the past 20 years. They still do it well, but not as well as they used to, and above all there's nary a surprise in sight. This serenity can possibly be put down to the choice of Josef Nadj as artiste associe, or programme organiser. In selecting him, festival directors Hortense Archambault and Vincent Baudriller were consciously playing it safe... And as such, a once unique festival is running the risk of slipping into the Sargasso Sea of summer guest-performances forever. Artists need inspiring surroundings. In this year's programme everything unfortunately looks even older than it is."