Die Tageszeitung, 13.09.2006

Alexander Cammann writes an obituary for Joachim Fest, former co-publisher and Feuilleton editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who died on Monday aged 79. For Cammann, Fest was Germany's "most influential conservative intellectual, who embodied bourgeois attitudes after 1945 like no one else.... Fest had an immense share in the politicisation of the German Feuilletons, and in their consequent valorisation. In his role as editor and publisher of the FAZ, he had a profound influence on German intellectual debate for two decades. The 1986 'Historikerstreit' on the comparability of National Socialism and Stalinism (more here) is the best example. It flared up as a result of Ernst Nolte's essay in Fest's Feuilleton, which Jürgen Habermas then attacked in Die Zeit. Even today you can read in the liberal Die Zeit that 'a little dash of Nolte wouldn't do any harm' (Götz Aly)."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13.09.2006

Almost the entire Feuilleton section of the paper is dedicated to the death of Joachim Fest. Frank Schirrmacher, Fest's successor as Feuilleton editor, describes his predecessor as "the interior designer of the open society. On its cupola he painted the intellectual and aesthetic possibilities that stood open to it, if it only sought to attain them. His essays – on Richard Wagner and Horst Janssen, on Winston Churchill, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, on Claus von Stauffenberg and the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944 – are the mosaics in the cupola, premonitions of how to think the world in all its beauty, and consequently of how to live in it as well."

Martin Wilkening has heard composer Jonathan Harvey's major work "Madonna of Winter and Spring" at the Philharmonie in Berlin. The piece for orchestra, synthesizers and live electronics has had to wait 20 years for its German premiere. "Two quadrophonic loudspeaker systems were installed above the audience at various levels. Harvey uses them to open up the hall's lofty heights, along with its depths. These he populates with figures of sound, like frescoes on a church ceiling. The result is an almost otherworldly effect in the broad expanses of the Philharmonie, especially as Harvey resolutely avoids effects for effects' sake. When after several minutes the sound of the orchestra reverberates for the first time through the speakers, the hall metamorphoses within seconds, and the audience is taken with a feeling of lightness, almost of flying."


Die Welt, 13.09.2006

Michael Pilz recalls the rapper Tupac Shakur (fansite), who was killed ten years ago. "The reduction to a violence-inciting, misogynistic, big-mouthed spoken worder is complemented by an incomprehensible reverence. It's seems like an almost religious desire for redemption that is often reflected on sprayed walls. Tupac financed help hotlines. Thus, hiding behind the maxim 'Thug Life', gangsterdom is the emotional acronym 'The Hate U Gave Little Infants Fucks Everybody.' Those who sow seeds of hatred in children damage society. In his raps, Tupac blames the system when kids take drugs, steal, murder and get pregnant. Sometimes he performed with the stage name Makaveli. As the Machiavelli of race and class wars, trustworthy moral apostle and since 1996 as martyr."


Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13.09.2006

In a detailed interview, the painter Neo Rauch talks about his most recent pictures, and admits that the beauty of ageing is "that, at some point, nothing is embarrassing anymore": "I think that to bring something new of substance to art, you have to eliminate the feeling of embarrassment as fast as possible – embarrassing in artistic terms, I should add. There are the great masters who have shown us the way heroically... The opposite is the mouth-pursedness of the critically chastened, those who believe that they have to defend some kind of a temple, that of concrete art, for example, or of club-oriented pop abstraction."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13.09.2006

"It's not just the artists and writers who are turning their backs to Manhattan. There's been a dramatic demographic change in the last five years on the island of the monied," writes Andrea Köhler about the transformation of the city, in the course of which the middle class has been forced to leave. "According to the latest demographic surveys, 57 percent of today's inhabitants of Manhattan have a university education; the majority is of course white. To maintain their living standards, a family that elsewhere would be able to live on 60,000 dollars a year has to spend more than double the amount, exactly 137.9% of the national average. On top of that, 100,000 dollars go into living alone. While neighbourhoods like the West Village have become yuppy enclaves and venerable institutions like the Plaza Hotel have been converted into luxury apartments, the social gap is taking on a third world character. It looks as if the heart of New York is moving to the periphery."