“Sounding out boundaries, revealing limitations and questioning ingrained concepts: the Vienna Independent Shorts film festival is showing its more militant side in 2012 – from the special programme feature Pushing the boundaries to the festival theme.” >full text (c) wieninternational.at, 2012
‘The imagined community of millions seems more real
as a team of eleven named people.” Eric Hobsbawm
“IT MUST, in many ways, be annoying for Dr Merkel and the Germans to have to hear the whingeing of the Portuguese, Irish, Greeks and Spaniards. For the Germans have come through problems unimaginable to most nations. Defeat in two world wars, hyperinflation in the 1920s, dictatorship and a divided country. One item in the litany of German disaster in the 20th century is often overlooked – reparations inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after the first World War.” >Text (c) IRISH TIMES, 2012
“Spain has frittered away its chances for economic development for the second time. The first was after it discovered the Americas in 1492, and the second was after it joined the European Union in 1986. The anti-economic thinking that has dominated Spain is rooted in its history and culture.” >Excerpts from an article published by Süddeutsche Zeitung (c) presseurop.eu, 2012
“On the right bank of the Danube in district V is Petržalka, which has about 115,000 inhabitants, one quarter of Bratislava’s entire population. Fifty years ago this region was famous for its fruit orchards, forests and rural character. In the 1970s it became the symbol of the city’s growth and today contains the largest prefabricated housing estate in Central Europe.” >text (c) wieninternational.at, 2012
Is the renowned German art exhibition documenta in Kassel censoring (other) art?
“Amidst fervent interest and speculation regarding the artist list of the upcoming 13th edition of the exhibtion, which has the art world looking for any clues possible to upset the traditionally secret document, documenta artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and the catholic church have exchanged blows over a sculpture installed on the spire of Kassel’s St. Elizabeth’s Church. The work, Stephan Balkenhol’s “Man in the Tower” (2012), is a rough-hewn wooden rendering of a male figure dressed in a white shirt and grey trousers, with arms outstretched as if on a crucifix.” > text (c) ARTINFO, 2012
> website documenta 13
Stadt ohne Juden(“City without Jews”) was the title of a 1922 best-selling novel by the Jewish Viennese author Hugo Bettauer who was assassinated by an Austrian Nazi three years later; it is available in print again (see the review in the German section of my blog). It is an disturbingly prophetic piece of fiction about a Viennese mayor who expels the jews from ‘his’ city (although everything comes to a happy ending eventually; unfortunately is subscribes to some stereotypes about Jews as well).
“HHhH is Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘butcher of Prague’, a man who physically and ideologically embodied the Nazi regime. His immediate superior was Heinrich Himmler, and rumours were whispered in the shadows of the Third Reich that ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’ – in German, Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, or HHhH.
The book traces the planning, execution and aftermath of Operation Anthropoid, the resistance’s successful plot to assassinate Heydrich in Prague, the city he commanded as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. The two heroes of the novel are Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, the almost unbearably brave assassins, but Heydrich, in all his horror, is the central character. “All the characters are real. All the events depicted are true,” asserts the book’s cover. And hence Binet’s dilemma.” Read the full review in THE IRISH TIMES, 2012
PS. Heydrich was assassinated exactly 70 years ago.
>Another review (guardian.co.uk)
“The aftermath of the so-called ‘death match’ between the Kiev football team ‘Start’ and a team of Nazi soldiers during World War Two has been hotly debated for decades. Continue reading
“The slogan Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu! was a Yugoslav Partisan motto, afterward accepted as the official slogan of the entire resistance movement, and was often quoted in post-war Yugoslavia. It was also used as a greeting formula among the movement members both in official and unofficial correspondence during the war and for a few subsequent years, often abbreviated as “SFSN!”. (…) Continue reading
delirium clemens 