Pillar of UK theatre criticism Michael Billington and Portuguese director and critic Jorge Silva Melo met in early June 2008 to talk about plays, playwrights, and theatre critics. “For me, Billington is the definition of a theatre critic: alert, sharp, informed, more than an enthusiast”, writes Melo.
From the Eurozine archive: Antonin J. Liehm, founder of Lettre Internationale and former editor of the Czechoslovak journal ‘Literární noviny’, discusses the role of a European cultural journal before and after 1989 and explains why it is as important as ever to organize a concerted defence of culture.
The continuing repression of the independent media exposes the Belarusian government’s concessions to “European standards” for what they are: window dressing on a regime that has no intention of releasing its stranglehold on society any time soon.
For young Polish Jews, the historical injury of the Holocaust is often complicated by their grandparents’ participation in the communist project. Many of the twenty-somethings interviewed by Marci Shore reappropriated their Jewish identity after 1989, and grapple deeply with questions of inner-Jewish politics and their relations with non-Jewish Poles. Affection, hostility, passion… one thing emerges above all: contradiction.
Coming from a thoroughly secular Soviet background, the Russian-British novelist Zinovy Zinik first became aware of his “Jewishness” when he emigrated to Israel in the 1970s. In this autobiographical essay, Zinik describes how an unheimliche experience in Berlin thirty years later led him to investigate the enigmatic and chequered past of his Russian-born grandfather. An exploration of “assumed identity” in twentieth-century Jewish experience.
When it comes to the economy, the moral leadership Obama promised is conspicuously lacking. Will the US president and his economic advisors be willing to regulate a financial sector to which, for some, they are worryingly close?
Attempts to compensate for Belarusian lack of national pride by turning the country into a fortress and uniting nationality and religion are “insane”, says Rashed Chowdury. “Belarus can be a Christian country, but it must never be a country for Christians.”
The language of morality has been hijacked by the religious Right – yet however shabbily its partisans may behave, argues Susan Neiman, they offer a public conception of goodness the Left forgot how to defend.
Analysing the political and social conflicts in post-war Italy, Francesco M. Biscione recognizes the seeds of civil war that “without interruption, have cast a shadow over our collective life”. An “underground Italy” far removed from the principles of the republican constitution can be found at every social level throughout the post-war period. These classes have finally found their political home in the movement conceived and led by Silvio Berlusconi.
EU member-states are rejecting integration just when national sovereignty worldwide is entering a new period of relativity. National governments blame Europe for the problems of the moment and lay claim to the successes resulting from action at the European level. The result of this obsession with the nation? The EU is politically impotent on the international stage.
Over the last thousand years, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have had multiple identities and been members of several empires. Now, writes Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, “we should be looking to create identities that go beyond those that history and others have foisted upon us”.
While the Nordic countries cannot compare with France, the Netherlands, or Great Britain when it comes to classical colonialism, this is no reason not to discuss their colonial past. An understanding of northern colonialism must start with Nordic culture’s view of nature and the myth of the “first man”, writes Stefan Jonsson.
If we concentrate on Auschwitz and the Gulag – generally taken to be adequate or even final symbols of the evil of mass slaughter – we fail to notice that over a period of twelve years, between 1933 and 1944, some 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass killing policies perished in a particular region of Europe, one defined more or less by today’s Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia.
By adopting the language of human rights, a new UN proposal condemning “defamation of religion” cements oppressive governments’ control of free speech while still sounding compatible with the advanced multiculturalism of liberal democracies, writes Miklós Haraszti.
Despite the horror-stories circulating in the world press, Hungary’s budget deficit at 3 per cent of GDP and its public debt at just above 70 per cent do not fare too badly in a global comparison. “So what’s our problem?”, asks Zoltán Farkas.
“Undoubtedly, leftwingers exist who can find excuses for the Soviet penal universe. But I don’t regularly discuss matters with them”. The Hungarian political scientist Gáspár Miklós Tamás responds to Romanian philosopher Andrei Plesu’s assertion in “Dilema veche” 243 (2008) that “The Left […] hides the Gulag behind a veil of intelligence, nuance, and ‘historical necessity’.”