Monday 25 September, 2006

Die Welt, 25.09.2006

Reinhard Wengierek likes his plays bloody, and he finds Michael Thalheimer's version of Aeschylus' "Oresteia" (summary) in Berlin's Deutsches Theater sufficiently sanguinary. "In a gory gesture, Constanze Becker dumps a canister of blood over her head. It is the blood of her daughter Iphigenia, who was sacrificed ten years ago by her father Agamemnon in a ceremony of prayer for good weather as he set off to wage war against Troy. Consumed by a mother's pangs, Clytemnestra smokes a cigarette and cools her mind with a can of beer. Then she receives the victorious warrior (Henning Vogt) with false joy as he returns with his trophy, the seer Cassandra (played by an unforgettable Katharina Schmalenberg, whose mute despair is just as shrill as her screeching)."


Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25.09.2006

Richard Kämmerlings has wandered through the Berlin Popkomm music trade fair, which ended on Friday (see our feature "Faith, pop and charity") and sees in it a perfect example of Chris Anderson's theory of the "long tail" economy. "Bestsellers, blockbusters and mega-hits are losing their significance, while the new, unlimited offer is met with an equally unlimited demand. That is the 'long tail' of the sales curve. Of the roughly one million songs available on Apple's I-tunes, 98 percent are in fact downloaded at least once by someone somewhere. Popkomm was an impressive illustration of this thesis: there were hardly any stars, but a good two thousand artists all found their own – albeit often tiny – audience."


Die Tageszeitung, 25.09.2006

In a conversation with Jörg Magenau, sociologist Wolf Lepenies (more) grants intellectuals in Eastern Europe no more than a political half-life. "The fact that the 'moralists', with a few exceptions, disappeared so quickly from the political stage on which they had played the main role has to do with what Max Weber called the 'routinisation of charisma' (more). As a rule, the intellectual heroes only lasted in politics for one legislative period. Then routine set in. With 'normality', the communists – sometimes disguised behind new party names – returned to power. Pragmatism was called for. The 'heroes' became traders. And the time of the moralists was up."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 25.09.2006

Fakhri Saleh reports on a major conflict in Egypt over the admissibility of a Koranic interpretation. The Islamic scholar Hassan Hanafi demanded at a symposium of religious leaders, "not to limit your reading of the Koran to its literal meaning." According to Saleh, this suggestion "landed on deaf ears. Instead, attention was paid to Abd as-Sabur Shahin, an instructor at Cairo University, who took part in the badgering of the progressive teacher Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid in 1990. He told Egyptian newspapers and television that he hadn't read the text of Hanafi's lecture but what he knew was enough to constitute blasphemy and sowing seeds of doubt in the hearts of the believers. He accused Hanafi of exercising critique of the Koran and arbitrarily tearing divine attributes from the holy texts. In the same vein, Sheikh Yusuf al-Badri, another rival of Abu Zaid's who demands that he be forced to divorce his wife, expressed his regret that this law no longer applied, otherwise it could have been applied to Hanafi."


Saturday 23 September, 2006

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 23.09.2006

At the end of April, the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo was arrested. Bahman Nirumand describes how Jahanbegloo gave an interview to the news service ISNA shortly after his release in which he accused himself, "of having fallen into the grips of the American and Zionistic secret services and being used for their goals and against the national interests of Iran. Jahanbegloo told how he had been invited to many congresses and conferences, granted scholarships for his academic projects and commissioned with a comparative study of intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Iran. He was supposed, he said, to research whether Iranian intellectuals would be in a position to initiate a 'gentle revolution' similar to those of the Eastern European states." It's possible that nobody believes in the authenticity of these statements, but the message for Nirumand is clear: "Behind every foreign offer to write an article, to participate in a conference, to give an interview, to accept funding for an academic project, there hides a secret service trap, and as a result, all foreign contacts are a betrayal of national interests."


Die Welt, 23.09.2006

Mariam Lau highly recommends Ayaan Hirsi Ali's latest book "Mein Leben, Meine Freiheit" (My life, my freedom): "Every immigration politician should read her book. It's all here: how Somali refugees took social assistance from the Netherlands, a country for which they had only contempt; how feminists ducked when it came to the conflict between women's and immigrant's rights; how politicians, claiming 'pragmatism', wanted to avoid debating values, and rather saw immigration as an endless socio-economic problem."


Die Tageszeitung, 23.09.2006

Ralph Bollmann reports from the 46th German Historians' Conference in Konstanz, where one name was on everybody's lips: Guido Knopp, who for most historians is "evil incarnate." Knopp is producer of a historical series on ZDF television, and historians tend to look askance at his productions, many of which have dealt with Hitler and World War II. A session at the conference was dedicated to Knopp's method, which one professional termend "historical pornography." "For three days everyone was talking about 'Herr K.' – and they weren't referring to Bertolt Brecht, who wrote 'The Stories of Mr. Keuner.' Rather, it was a reference to the historian Golo Mann, in whose 'German History' Adolf Hitler is always just called 'H.' This branded Knopp in two ways. First, as author of television's biggest conceivable breach of civilisation, and secondly for his almost manic fixation on the Nazi era."