Die Berliner Zeitung, 30.08.2006

Member of parliament Monika Grütters, slated to be Berlin's next cultural senator should the CDU win the upcoming municipal election, explains in an interview what she would do were she to land the position: put more money into universities and culture. It should come "for example from the cultural economy, which has no priority in this city. Culture is without question the most important tourism factor but remains almost overlooked. What to do with the fact that Berlin is not home to industry or services? London invested in creative industries in the 1980s, which encompassed not just the arts but also advertising, fashion and design. Today every third job is in one of these areas. Vienna imitated and for Berlin too, this would be an extraordinary development motor."


Die Tageszeitung, 30.08.2006

Markus Joch has read Günter Grass' novel "Cat and Mouse" in an attempt to glean "new information about Grass' relationship" to this part of the Danzig trilogy, written 1961, and to show how the author fictionally encoded the "insane machismo of his young years" in it. The fact that Grass tried to make his hero Joachim Mahlke "ridiculous, to shove his heroes' outlook away from his own, reflects the creative principle of of the entire story. The author gave his character a series of not-identical features, estranged him, in order to make the almost identical non-threatening – the alienation effect with security measures."

Christina Nord reports from the Biennale in Venice, whose profile has become clearer under the last three years of Marco Müller's directorship. "Müller is opting for a mix that is risky, but, if things go right, almost perfect. On the Lido, the selection extends from spectacle and mainstream cinema from Asia and Hollywood on the one hand, to non-narrative, experimental art cinema on the other. Instead of placing the former out of competition, in other words on safe terrain, and banning the latter to the famous-infamous marginal programmes, he wants them to clash directly in the competition."


Die Welt, 30.08.2006

Sven Felix Kellerhoff reports that Romania is planning on building a memorial to victims of the Holocaust. Under the dictator Ion Antonescu, head of the country between 1940 and 1944, Romania persecuted the Jews without any German intervention. "During this time, anti-Jewish laws were also common among other allies of the Third Reich. For example, there was massive discrimination against the Jews in Italy and Hungary even before the German occupation in 1943/44. But in no other country did the local forces take part in such wide-scale persecution of the Jews as in Romania."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 30.08.2006

Gottfried Knapp is absolutely thrilled at the re-inauguration of the "wonder of the world," the Green Vault displaying the Saxon royal treasures, in Dresden's Royal Palace. Apart from the "staggering richness of the first-class handicraft masterpieces," a major attraction is "the halls themselves, which can now be admired for the first time in their full, elite individual glory." Knapp warns emphatically of the dangers lurking in the show of the Saxon crown jewels: They "blast the observer with thousands of brilliant, coloured flashes. People had long thought the old myths of the 'Green Vault' were a thing of the past. But anyone who doesn't take cover will end up succumbing to their charms."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 30.08.2006

Christian Thomas comments on the speech given Sunday at the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp by Hermann Schäfer, deputy minister of state for cultural affairs (news story). In his speech to a crowd comprising many camp survivors, Schäfer concentrated to a large part on the theme of German expellees. For Thomas, the debacle shows clearly that "the representatives of Germans expelled from territories in Eastern Europe are active in effecting a shift in the focus in the German politics of remembrance. For decades, the expellees' associations have seen their own policy of remembrance as a 'competition among victims.' And in doing so, they have demonstrated a dogged, 'jealous aggressiveness', in presenting the causes of the National Socialist crimes as harmless, relative, deniable. They have long been attempting to operate a politics of suppression, not only of historical responsibility, but also vis-à-vis their competitors in remembrance."