Frankfurter Rundschau, 06.09.2006

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany's most popular and most controversial literary critic, talks in an interview with Ina Hartwig about the political engagement of writers. "For a long time now I've thought this sort of engagement accomplishes very little, perhaps nothing at all. For most writers turning away from literature to politics is an escape, one that debases literature and does nothing for politics." By its very personal, autobiographical nature, literature is already a deep form of engagement, Reich-Ranicki stresses. "There is no other form of novel than the autobiographical. Everything else is superfluous. Novels are either 'Buddenbrooks' or 'Doktor Faustus.' Either they embrace all of society or they're highly personal." See our feature "Are you done? I've go things to do," an interview with Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

The Kurdish singer Sivan Perwer, who lives in exile in Germany and Sweden, expresses an entirely different point of view in a discussion with Arne Löffel. "When I'm in Kurdistan I talk with many fathers who tell me that their sons were hung because of my music. It's difficult to give them an answer. But my songs are the truth, and they have to be told."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 06.09.2006

Joachim Fest, Hitler biographer and former cultural editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has now written his memoirs "Ich nicht" (not me). Gustav Seibt celebrates them as a "moving and unfortunately hopelessly isolated counter-image to the shattered German normality." "The German Bildungsroman has been unable to extol the virtues of family tradition for over fifty years, because even the most heartfelt family love and the most pleasing bourgeois culture has seemed devalued and poisoned by the collapse of humanity after 1933. Education, decorum, tradition, the spirit of culture that flows from one generation to the next, had proved worthless. Why should one have to listen to fathers who had made compromises or even been involved? At least two generations of Germans were forced to grow up as moral Kaspar Hausers, anything else was almost impossible."

H. G. Pflaum has seen Valeska Grisebach's second feature film "Sehnsucht" (Longing - see our review from the Berlin Film Festival here), which starts in Germany tomorrow. "Markus is a volunteer firefighter. His squad gets together and goes out to the local town, where they sit at the bar, exchange gifts, tell stories and sing songs. These are real faces, right down to the bit parts, and we watch as the beer and schnapps slowly but steadily rise to their sweaty faces. It would be impossible to show the transition from a sense of security to one of provincial constriction in a better way. The men begin to dance, also among themselves as there aren't enough women. Markus, also far from sober, joins them without a partner, dancing just for himself. He moves to Robbie Williams' 'Feel' as if in a trance, lost and oblivious, as if he could dive into a place hidden far behind the melancholy reality. The next morning he wakes up in the bed of a woman, not his wife, who is making breakfast in the best of moods. That night, back in the bar, he asks his colleagues: "What was the waitress' name again?"


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 06.09.2006

India being the guest country at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair in October, Martin Kämpchen recommends Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian", a collection of essays on the India that has not been swept up in the shining IT boom. "Although he is delighted at the successes, Sen is angry that there is no trickle-down effect to the population as a whole. The old inequalities of class and caste are not dissolving but becoming more rigidly entrenched. And this has long made itself felt in all areas of life. "The same people are poor, in terms of income and wealth, they are illiterate, work for disproportional wages, have no influence on political events, cannot seize social or economic opportunities, and are treated brutally by the police.' He complains about a deep rift which divides society and is having an enduring impact on the societal, economic, and political self-image."