Monday 4 September, 2006

Die Zeit, 04.09.2006

In his blog, Jörg Lau looks into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the release of Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo. After four months in the notorious Evin Prison, the opposition figure made an odd avowal in an interview: "In this interview, Jahanbegloo said that secret service agents of antagonistic states had taken part in seminars he'd given abroad, with the intention of using him and his expertise on Iran for hostile purposes. He said that a study comparing civil society in Eastern Europe and Iran that he'd been working on for the transatlantic German Marshall Fund think-tank was meant to be used to plan the overthrow of the regime in Iran." Lau's assessment: "The transcript of Ramin Jahanbegloo's 'avowal' leaves no doubt that we are witness to the public (self-) destruction of an outstanding intellectual."


Die Welt, 04.09.2006

Mariam Lau portrays the lawyer and feminist Seyran Ates, who has closed her law practice in Berlin after being attacked by the husband of one of her clients. Ates sees violence against women in the Turkish community as a consequence of the social stigmatisation of Turkish immigrants. "'My brothers didn't beat me in Turkey,' she remembers. "We knew poverty, but not violence. My father was raised with the idea that you don't hit women or children, and he passed that on to us. In a situation where he himself was humiliated as a Gastarbeiter, he was all the more keen to protect his family in evil Germany. In Turkey the problem of domestic violence is often discussed.' Young women are more successful in Germany, and so people take revenge on them." (Here an article by Seyran Ates on the double standard by which women's rights are measured for Muslims.)


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 04.09.2006

A bewildered Barbara Villiger watched the carryings-on in Berlin's Schaubühne where the Thomas Ostermeier and Constanza Macras co-production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was being staged. More than anything she was confused by the sober state of her fellow critics. "The German critics who attended the premiere of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" mash-up in Piraus at the end of June (see our feature "The animal in you") must have been well and truly sozzled on ouzo. Otherwise it's hard to explain why hopping from superlative to superlative in an ecstasy of writing they hoisted to Olympic heights a production which on sober observation is more conducive to speechless jaw-dropping. A familiar phenomenon: the key to enjoying a party is to get drunk with everyone else."


Saturday 2 September, 2006

Die Welt, 02.09.2006

Elmar Krekeler assesses the state of literature since September 11, and concludes that it has "reclaimed its status as a medium for world analysis." "History is being made and experienced again in the German novel. Sometimes like in the news tickers on Bloomberg TV, little bites of real history run through the prose pieces. People experience themselves in them as historical beings. And social ones. Writers like Thomas Hettche and Katharina Hacker go boldly and coolly into the core of society and their generation. And they show, with no trace of western self-hatred or fashionable capitalist-bashing, how hollow it has become in recent decades, and that it is high time to fill this centre before society implodes of its own accord, without the help of bombs being thrown in from outside." (See our feature by Thomas Hettche "A St. Moritz pilgrimage.")

Director Tom Tykwer talks with Hanns-Georg Rodek about why it was a cathartic experience for him to make the film adaptation of Patrick Süskind's "Perfume", which will come out in Germany in mid-September, and what fascinated him about the murderer Grenouille: "For me the central theme is man's 'Geworfenheit' or state of being 'thrown' into this Moloch of a world. Unimaginably much is demanded of us, and our – for the most part somewhat twisted – egos are easily overstrained. This is the story of someone who tries to rise to the occasion, but who has precious little experience of how to deal with his situation. Grenouille resorts to strategies of masquerade and seduction that we're all familiar with; he just chooses the wrong weapons. But his desire to be noticed, to be loved, is completely understandable.... Every morning we go out into the world, we look into the mirror and think: I'm not attractive enough, not interesting enough, not intelligent enough. How can I prevent people from seeing this right away?"


Berliner Zeitung, 02.09.2006

Four years after his article "The obligation to love Israel," Italian journalist and former left-wing radical Adriano Sofri calls for Israel to forgo atomic weapons – for peace's sake. "People talk of times when the Israeli government debated whether it might be an opportune moment to use nuclear force – in Golda Meir's kitchen in 1973 for example. The Cuban Crisis aside, this was the moment when we were closest to nuclear war. Perhaps it was the balance of horrors that prevented a third world war. Perhaps Israel's nuclear arsenal stopped the country's sworn enemies, the rows of tyrants and bandits for whom the destruction of the Zionist state is top of the agenda. Perhaps. But what protection can atomic bombs offer today, when their deployment would mean nothing less than Israel's suicide and collapse under the responsibility for nuclear apocalypse? What protection can they offer when the neighbouring Iranian apocalypse-monger is engaged in filling his own nuclear arsenal – and opening the way for a proliferation of atomic weapons from which no Arab nation wants to be excluded?"


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 02.09.2006

At the Venice Film Festival, Susan Vahabzadeh watched director Paul Verhoeven's hotly anticipated film "Black Book" and was suitably gobsmacked. "Paul Verhoeven has sought out for this film a story from Nazi-occupied Holland. And he tells it basically like 'Showgirls'. His fans will forgive him. 'Black Book' bears an uncanny resemblance to a seventies B-catastrophe movie, and as such is a melodrama more than anything else. It's crazy to talk about the Third Reich like this. But it's not heartless. A sadness that can be conveyed, or a moment of exuberance in a dead-end situation which one truly understands – that is still the most real thing that cinema can offer."