Reviewing the Venice Biennale in its totality is impossible, writes Barabra Fässler, who approaches the critic’s monumental task by selecting three specific motifs: the problem of light, the notion of nation and the principle of interaction.
A decade after the destruction of the Twin Towers, we need to resolve that “Islam”, as a singular noun, or “Muslims” as a collectivity are simply not good things to think with or about, let alone for or against. Stephen Howe tracks the tremors after 9/11.
Faced with the costs of the splintering of the euro, EU governments will, however reluctantly, have to agree to deepen not weaken integration, writes John Palmer, former European editor of “The Guardian”. And most voters will agree.
Today’s literary and political climate in Hungary reminds László Garaczi of the communist 1980s. In an atmosphere compulsively and perversely imbued with politics, it is difficult to speak intelligently about the issues of the community.
The concentration camp is still popularly viewed as a distinctly national-socialist phenomenon. The focus on Germany has prevented a broader analysis of the prevailing ‘camp culture’ in the first half of the twentieth century, argues Richard Overy. Camps were widespread geographically and began well before the coming of the Third Reich. They reflected abrupt changes in mass politics, ethnic conflict and ideological confrontation following the dislocations caused by the Great War and became an expedient (and cheap) way of isolating those deemed to be biological, social or political outsiders. The perpetrators in all countries with camps saw themselves as heroic defenders of a threatened system. Victims need to be given a more positive historical narrative, to be better able to understand the traumatic consequences of exclusion and incarceration.
Were the riots in the UK a political upheaval of the poor? No, says Kenan Malik, the riots were not protests in any way. Instead they revealed that a second kind of poverty stalks Britain: moral poverty. The UK has become a nation of isolated individuals.
Can Europe really break apart? Yes, of course it can, writes José Ignacio Torreblanca. Few times in the past has the European project been so questioned and its disgraces so publicly exposed as now. It’s time to stop looking the other way.
Provincial life is typically seen in Polish literature as the antithesis of culture. Paradoxically, writes Malgorzata Litwinowicz, the Polish magic realist tradition derives precisely from the small town and the image of the shtetl as centre of the universe.
Its identity located somewhere between nostalgia and commerce, the dilapidated and the gentrified, the Central European city mixes languages, words and signs to form a style best described as radical eclecticism, writes Levente Polyák.
Bratislava, formerly Pressburg or Prespork, was historically a multi-national and multi-confessional city. When much of the old town was destroyed in the 1970s, the city’s cultural heritage was lost with it, regrets dissident, poet and writer Juraj Spitzer in a posthumously published article.
Poets abound in Brno’s literary history, but a prose monument to the Moravian capital has yet to be written. Two neglected stories by native son Milan Kundera, set in post-war Czechoslovakia, fill the gap, writes Jirí Trávnícek.
Could Obama have let the US default? Given that the debt ceiling compromise merely postpones the political conflict, providing a stopgap rather than a solution, the unthinkable might not have been so bad an option, conjectures George Blecher.
Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue funds: is there still a future for a common Europe? In a discussion in Eurozine’s series “Europe talks to Europe”, prominent intellectuals and opinion makers from western and eastern Europe diagnosed causes for the current malaise of the EU.
Lasting peace agreements after wars and civil wars were for a long time considered to be conditional upon damnatio memoriae – the deliberate and reciprocal forgetting of violence and injustice. However, the established amnesty clause is only realistic where certain rules were not broken during war. The First World War is beyond its scope of applicability, the extermination war of the National Socialists even more so. Where forgetting is impossible, remembering is all that remains. Such remembrance is inextricably and paradoxically linked to forgetting: only what has been remembered can actively be forgotten.