faces of zeit

Zeit is "time" in german. and "Die Zeit" is a weekly newspaper. i picked up the latest issue yesterday in town. it comes with an extra magazine this time: a Zeit Literature. with summer reads. and with Marylin on the cover. the sight felt kind of subtly coincidental: Marylin between all those Michael Jackson magazine covers. what a painful parallel.

but back to the Zeit: one of the main international news features is Iran. that's also where the photo next to Marylin is coming from. and strangely, one of the most interesting literature articles wasn't part of the Literature Magazine, but part of the feature pages: Iranian author Mahmud Doulatabadi writing about these times. -- and about writing.

"Die Einsamkeit ist das Los eines jeden Schriftstellers." -
"Solitude is the fate of each writer."

another photo from Iran, in between his lines, showed Neda, the student who was shot during a demonstration. again, a photo that felt subtly coincidental - some pages further, in the national main news, there is a photo of a demonstration in Germany: students going on strike for better education. in the collage, that's the news snippet in the right upper corner: the young woman with the flower. it looks so peaceful, this demonstration. but it made me wonder where the line is. and it made me think of the student's in 68, here in germany. back then, the demonstrations went violent. and a young man was shot. Rudi Dutschke. not much later, some students turned into terrorists, and founded the RAF. which then lead to endless tragedies.

from holding roses to throwing bombs. odd, maybe, to think: but maybe sometimes, the way is frighteningly short from R to B.

another oddity: just some weeks ago, some files were found that tell another story. Rudi Dutschke, the student who became a symbol of student's protest, and of state violence - it seems he was shot by a policeman who now turns out to be an agent of Eastern Germany. which moves the whole history of that time in another light.

(and maybe i got an overdose of news today, after those lake days. but somehow, all those newsbits keep spinning in my head. together with the story of Dubai, where the mega-building-hype seems to have gone bust. where construction sites are on hold, and investment plans fall to pieces. where people lose jobs in fast forward, which translates into losing ones visa. or worse: into prison time, as that's the verdict for being unable to pay ones debts. that's the newsbit in the lower left corner- luxury turning to chains.)

what a Zeit.

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