Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29.08.2006

Bernd Eichinger is the best-known German film producer, with offices in Munich and Los Angeles. It took 15 years before he could secure the film rights to Patrick Süskind's novel "Perfume". He talks to Verena Lueken and Michael Althen about the film, which will come out in Germany on September 15, directed by Tom Tykwer and starring Dustin Hoffman. "'Perfume' confronted us with a huge mountain of problems, and we had to break every rule of filmmaking to solve them. There's no fight between good and evil. There's no protagonist fighting for the good side. There's no love story, in fact you could almost say there's not even a story, as there are no conflicts. The worst thing for a film is when the hero doesn't learn anything. And as opposed to 99 percent of other films, ours can't work with identification, only something like fascination. We thought for a long time about whether any other film has such a dark lead role, someone with no friends or social surroundings, a hero who's impenetrable because he has no feelings."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 29.08.2006

Fifty years after the death of Bertolt Brecht on August 14, 1956, the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin, where Brecht worked, is holding a three-week Brecht Festival ending September 2. Peter Laudenbach takes stock of the theatre, writing that despite the radical pretensions of the Brechtian tradition, it now verges on the conservative. "Nowhere are the class-war ideals painted in such loving colours as at the Berliner Ensemble. Under director Claus Peymann, the BE is once more what it was in its heyday: an ideological Disneyland in which the impertinences of a complex reality are washed spic and span."


Der Tagesspiegel, 29.08.2006

Bernard Schulz says farewell to the building director of the Berlin senate Hans Stimmann, who is retiring in September after fifteen years in office and who leaves behind a legacy of well-ordered architecture. "It wasn't long before the term 'stony Berlin' was being used to characterise - if not castigate - Stimmann's relentless planning regulations: the maintenance of building lines and thus the old city layout plan, limitation of the eves height to 22 metres, stone façades with upright windows, division of the building front into foundation, main zone and roof closure. This was incomprehensible to proponents of the vibrant megacity. Stimmann, the man from Lübeck, a trained mason with a PhD in engineering, remained steely or perhaps just stubborn and was able to enforce his position most if not all of the time."


Die Tageszeitung, 29.08.2006

The Russian artist Ekaterina Beliaeva writes that since she left Russia, her old friends there have all become successful while she's vegetated in Berlin. "Only when I got here did it come home to me who I am. For 16 years I've had to answer the questions on a daily basis: 'Where are you from?' 'Russia.' 'Where in Russia?' 'Moscow.' 'Right in Moscow?' 'Yes.' 'And what are you doing here?' 'I live here.' And the whole time I had to stand up for Russia: 'What are you doing to Chechnya again?' Or 'with that poor Khodorkovsky?' With every putsch attempt in Moscow, with every crash of a Russian plane, every time talk got around to looted art, and with every environmental catastrophe in Sibiria, I was also to blame. At one point I asked myself: what am I doing here, if I come from there? So I've decided to go back. Added to that, each time I went back there I had to see how my fellow students and friends from those days were a little more successful, inviting me to increasingly expensive restaurants, while I hid from them the truth of my life in Berlin. The things I was proud of – a penthouse apartment in Mitte district, my bicycle, belonging to the Russian art scene – all lost their worth right across the border. I didn't have my apartment, I had no driver's license, no car, no savings account and no 'secure job'."


Die Welt, 29.08.2006

Eckhard Fuhr is impressed by the exhibition "Arme Schweine" (poor pigs) in Schloss Neuhardenberg. On display is a private collection of pig-related objects, many of which are depictions of piggy people, or human-like pigs. "It's hard to say whether this tendency to personify the pig, even among people who deal directly with pigs, comes from a sense of familiarity or foreignness. The inclination to direct transformation is not as strong with other domestic animals, even those that are kept closer to people. People keep pigs for only one reason: to be slaughtered and eaten. And in front of the butcher, we find a happy, well-fed sow holding knife and fork, inviting the customer to a big meat plate, from which the eater can pig out. Savouring it is something close to a taboo - the physical similarity of pig and man is undeniable – and there's something a bit scary about the appetite for a sausage. Religions that value order, such as Judaism and Islam, don't allow their followers to enter into such dubious terrain."