“We Have to Be Awake”: Interview with Vaclav Havel

Twenty years after he led the Velvet Revolution, paving the way for the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe, Václav Havel, a playwright and dissident who became free Czechoslovakia’s first president, sat down in Berlin with NEWSWEEK’s Michael Levitin to discuss fear of Russia, the importance of NATO, and why some of his countrymen still feel nostalgic for the communist era.

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Rescuing Mendelssohn from the Nazi Smear Campaign

When the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, it caused a national sensation. In those days, when a composer died his contemporaries stopped playing him and his music died as well. But Mendelssohn, a brilliant composer, pianist and conductor who felt indebted to Bach, broke with tradition and performed the work for an audience that included the philosopher Hegel, the King of Prussia and the poet Heinrich Heine. It was the first time the piece had been played since Bach’s death in 1750, and it ignited an era of rediscovery that turned the baroque composer back into a household name. Without Mendelssohn, the Nazis might never have embraced Bach a century later as an exemplary Aryan composer, calling him “the most German of all Germans.” But in a cruel twist of history, Mendelssohn’s role in rescuing Bach didn’t stop the Third Reich from banning his works and destroying his legacy because he was a Jew.

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The Greening Of The Stimulus

Sir David King has been a climate guru since the earliest days of global warming. The director of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and the former chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair, King was instrumental in developing Britain‘s new $1.5 billion Energy Technologies Institute for clean power. He sat down in Aarhus, Denmark, with writer Michael Levitin to discuss Britain’s nonpartisan approach to environmentalism, American leadership and the coming U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. Excerpts:

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Taking a Slug of America

When Paul Auster presented his film, “The Inner Life of Martin Frost,” at the Babylon cinema in Berlin last fall, his presence whipped up an almost rock star atmosphere. Hundreds crowded into seats and lined the walls of the historic theater, enduring a forgettable performance to savor the author-turned-filmmaker’s literary and political quips in the Q&A afterward, in which he confessed that “between writing books I’m half-alive and half-dead” and that “Bush has been the worst disaster of my lifetime.”

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No Celluloid Escape

In “The Yes Men Fix The World,” a man posing as an Exxon executive shows up at an oil conference in Calgary and unveils the company’s breakthrough energy source: Vivoleum, a new biofuel product made of human bodies. He also dupes 300 million viewers when he poses as a Dow Chemical representative on TV, announcing that his company will clean up India’s toxic Bhopal plant and compensate all of the victims. Before he’s through, the eco-stuntman interviews scientists and families in New Orleans, where he dresses as a U.S. government spokesperson and promises – to a believing Mayor Ray Nagin, among others – to reopen public housing and force Exxon to pay $12 billion to restore the region’s wetlands.

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