Monday 7 August, 2006

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 07.08.2006

The Swiss writer Thomas Hürlimann whose latest novel "Forty Roses" will be available in Germany soon, tells how he became a writer. It didn't happen overnight, but his breakthrough was connected to his escape from his monastery school. "I wrote my first play at sixteen. Then I shuffled off my cowl, threw a yellow scarf around my neck, clambered over the monastery wall, hitch-hiked to Zurich, where I stormed into the director's office at the theatre and told a speechless secretary that here was the literary talent the house had been waiting for. I asked her to tell me as soon as possible when the premiere would be taking place and it still seems like a small miracle today, that only a few weeks later the dramaturge Dietbert Reich, a man who was swamped by plays sent in by people, asked me to come for an interview."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 07.08.2006

Paris still has 375 cinema screens, largely thanks to local arthouse and experimental cinemas, reports Marc Zitzmann. As opposed to the cheaper chains, these old establishments survive through originality. "The Palm for marketing goes to Jean-Jacques Schpoliansky. In his cinema (Balzac) audiences are plied with little concerts by graduates of the Paris Conservatory and with homemade cakes. The owner gleefully shouts out to his regular audience - the club of friends of 'Balzac' counts more than 1,100 paying members - that they should not forget they are sitting in the best movie house in Paris. Cheap self-congratulation? You won't find a programme like his 'Night of the Omnivore' in a multiplex: From 10 pm to 6 am, you can watch features, documentary films as well as TV broadcasts on the subject of food - while sampling the culinary delights from the newly reinvented 'usher's basket' created by the likes of Jean-Francois Piege, two-star chef of the Hotel Crillon."


Saturday 5 August, 2006

Berliner Zeitung, 05.08.2006

There is no politically correct solution to the current Middle East conflict, writes film director Amos Gitai, who also outlines the dilemma for the Israeli peace movement: "For left-wing Israelis like us, the war we are currently going through is particularly complex, politically. For years now we have used articles, books and films to try to prove that the conflict could be solved by withdrawing from the Occupied Territories. Now Israel has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip and Lebanon and it is precisely here that Hamas and Hizbullah are choosing to strike. In the parts of the Golan Heights that are still occupied, things are peaceful. We know what the Israeli Right would say: withdrawal was not the solution.


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 05.08.2006

Werner Spies writes a wonderful article about his meeting with Hitler's favourite sculptor Arno Breker in Paris in 1975. He also talks about the Classicism which Breker and Picasso (L'hommo au mouton) were both tackling in their vastly different ways. "The path to Breker brings us to history's graveyard. And an exhumation is not something you would describe as beautiful. The Blood-and-Soil doping, the meeting with the hypertrophied biceps, thighs and lovingly embossed sexual organs, compared with which even wishy-washy, seducible apparitions like Cocteau seemed like a shot of life, do not lead us to a radical, dangerous chapter in the history of twentieth century art, but maroon us in the voluptuous magnetic field that today surrounds the corpse-plundering curiosity cabinet of Gunther von Hagens. It is in company like this that self-explanatory art lives on. Here as there it deals with quantities of flesh and muscle, with the plastination of a dead Classicism. Imagine what a success a partnership between the two would be. Is it not gruesome that the idea of the classical canon and of Johann J. Winkelmann now find its gilt covering among forgers and knackers?" (See our feature "The monumental is my sickness", an interwiew with Arno Breker from 1979, as well as a review of his first major retrospective "Hitler's Favourite Sculptor".)

Die Welt, 05.08.2006

In the literature pages, writer Ilija Trojanow continues his introduction to the workings of the Bulgarian Mafia, launched a month ago in the Berlin Tageszeitung (taz). This time, he focuses on how secret service and criminals sustained one another through authority over archives. "When the administration of Iwan Kostow passed a 'law for access to the files of the former State Security' in 1997, which briefly opened a small window of access to the archives, many former informants started to worry that their past could be revealed. In fact, one of the regulations established that the secret service could rehire a spy from the former regime, thus extending the protection of the law over his past. In this way, archival information was turned into operational information. Not only former agents took advantage of this regulation; many old informers also asked their former directing officers to take them back. And thus gangsters, too, were rehired and protected from justice. That is one reason why not a single Mafia boss has been convicted to this day."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 05.08.2006

Cuban dissident Oswaldo Jose Paya Sardinas describes the "Todos Cubanos" initiative (in Spanish here), which the Cuban government persecutes with terror and which Cuban exiles from Miami try to sabotage. "Why? Because this programme created in Cuba recommends a referendum to institutionalize human rights, keep health and education services free of charge, respect the social and economic rights of Cubans; so that Cubans do not remain shut out of their own land, and that laws can be introduced for establishing a constitutional state. And all this without foreign intervention and without sinking into rampant capitalism. 'Todos Cubanos' recommends a process that reflects the wishes of all Cubans."