The German journalist Bettina Gaus in her recent book „Auf der Suche nach Amerika - Begegnungen mit einem fremden Land” (Eichbornverlag) has shown us how our prejudices differ from the present reality in the United States in many ways.
We’d be happy to get your impressions!
Music is generally considered an international language, but isn’t it the internationality of the global organisation of the media that produces a wrong impression of universality for commercial reasons?
Globalization mostly brought wealth to Germany, the world champion of exportation. Now the international banking crisis seems to spare no nation. But didn’t the worldwide economic imbalance disadvantage whole continents before as a consequence of different cultures?
Research at City University of New York found out a positive development of the integration of minority kids in education, whereas religious and ethnic confrontations and a disastrous unemployment rate of Turkish, Kurdish and Arab youths here in Berlin forward a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington), only to be stopped with great political efforts.
Where, in your eyes, do the reasons lie for such a difference?
To start, Julian wrote an article about his opinion - you can read that here.
Why did you become a musician?
First of all I come from a background in which music has always played a predominant role. My parents were both very famous musicians as well, and as it turned out I already developed a great passion for music when I was about 5 years old. I was also intensely tutored from a very early age onwards.
View full interview »Intercultural Times No. 19
The renascence of our electronic newspaper shall mean a change in content as well as in format. Globalization has progressed with all its tensions as nobody would have expected at the end of the past century, and clashes within cultures have opened even where similarity seemed guaranteed by history as in the relationship between the European Union and the United States of America.
The forebodings of the Presidential election reveal cultural differences in fields of religion and education. On the other hand India and China have westernized. And their large metropolitan areas look like Manhattan.
Berlin seems even small and neat in comparison to Shanghai and Shenzhen. On the other hand it gets more and more appreciated by the New Yorkers culturally. And Big Apple despite its size and economic power, its traffic and noise shows some similarity in its old-fashioned snugness and metropolitan outspokenness. But some differences lie deeper and may tell us about our own multicultural drawbacks.
Though the cultural tensions within our city have increased since 1998, there is also a positive development in the fields of intercultural music, literature and art, which has even caused The New York Times to praise Berlin as “the most cultured city in Europe”.
A change of format has certainly to do with the development of the Internet. The technical possibilities have not only enhanced the speed of information, but also the mutually balanced exchange of opinions via chats and blogs.
September 2008