Die Welt, 01.09.2006

Yesterday was a historic day, and Hendrik Werner was there. "This is the beginning of what should become a media revolution. Since Wednesday, the book search website of the Californian Internet service Google has been offering thousands of downloadable books at no cost. For the first time, complete books whose copyright have expired – according to American law, titles that were published before 1923 – can be downloaded in pdf format on your own hard drive." Almost all the books come from the Anglo-American realm; European publishing houses that defended themselves against the scan, some with legal action, now consider Google the devil. "Speaking of devil, do you know him already? 'Since Thou, O Lord, dost condescend once more / To ask how we are getting on below.'? That is the infamous speech from the first part of Mephistopheles – in an edition of Faust 1 from the London publishing house Ollivier from the year 1847. But flipping through this book online is downright tiring, because the philological commentary is about as voluminous as the text itself."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 01.09.2006

Mauritius is going to great lengths to be a Cyber Island. "The national computer authorities launched a comprehensive education project at the end of July. Every year, 100,000 Mauritanians will receive basic computer training free of charge, which will end with an internationally recognised certificate. 400,000 people will be educated, that's almost a third of the population. In addition, a new course in information and communication technology is being introduced. Because not only English and French, but also Hindi and Urdu are spoken on Mauritius, the country will be able to play a mediation role between India and Africa."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 01.09.2006

The Polish author Pawel Huelle complains that Polish politicians are trying to capitalise on the Günter Grass case (more here). In the last elections, the national conservative party Law and Justice (PiS), led by the Kaczynski brothers, successfully discredited Donald Tusk, the candidate of the Civic Platform, whose Kashubian grandfather was forced to serve in the Wehrmacht. Now it's got Pawel Adamowowicz, the mayor of Gdansk, in its sights. He is up for re-election and recently defended Grass' position. "It's typical. The people who've never lifted a finger for Polish-German reconciliation are now the self-appointed prosecutors of an eminent German – an outstanding writer and a true friend of Poland. Right up to the elections this autumn, Grass - along with Lech Walesa - will be the most famous honorary citizen of Gdansk to be vilified by politicians." See our interview with Pawel Huelle here.

Maren Preiss reports from Palermo, on the "borghesia mafiosa" and how the Mafia has become a respectable enterprise in recent years. "The Mafia boss of today is well-off, educated, well-dressed. Politically he identifies with the centre-right parties UDC and Forza Italia. Ethically he respects bourgeois values like success, riches and power. He's got something to show for himself, he's a man of action. A model for the young. Because no one knows the market like he does. He knows that waste management is profitable because there are no laws governing environmental protection in Sicily. He knows that the state-run water supply is insufficient, and that it can prolong your life to be treated in a private clinic. And he knows that aside from big profits, the private health business has an additional advantage: doctors are already bound by professional secrecy... The estimated yearly turnover of the Mafia Ltd. is 75 billion euros. A business like Telecom Italia has a turnover of just one tenth that sum."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 01.09.2006

Richard Kämmerlings talks with Wolf Haas, the Austrian author and inventor of Inspector Brenner, about his much-awaited new novel "Das Wetter vor 15 Jahren" (The weather 15 years ago). Complicating things is the fact that the book is not presented in the form of a novel, but as an interview about a novel. Haas says about interviews: "They're always the first thing I read in the papers. It's almost a physical pleasure: you take a long sip of coffee and read an interview – the most digestible thing in the paper. There's this holy world of question and answer. And at the heart of every interview is the naive assumption that you can somehow come closer to the truth. That's a strange thing to want to do, especially for books: Ok, you've written a book, now tell us what it's really like."


Frankfurter Rundschau, 01.09.2006

The Belgian artist Francis Alys, who has an exhibition opening in Frankfurt tonight, talks in an interview about his new film, "an attempt to catch the Fata Morgana. In short: it's an image for how Latin American countries are trying to maintain a certain kind of modernity with development programmes. And it seems that every time they're about to arrive, they disappear. What I want to say is that finality means modernity. I am more interested in this state of almost-there-but-not-quite-arrived. And in what kind of a society develops out of this phenomena of always being almost there."