Not even the poet sunk in water helped. The incensed Icelanders threw a bust of Weimar's privy councillor into the North Sea, but it could not revoke the closure of Goethe Institute in their capital (to save 350,000 DM a year). "If the state don't want to do it any more," now says the concept artist Wolfgang Müller (41) from Berlin, "then you have to do it yourself - and founds "the first private Geothe Institute in the world" in Reykjavík. Together with an Icelandic colleague, he collects books, videos and art and promises sexual studies and elf studies, along with German lessons. The original Goethe Institute in Munich welcomes the art action. Müller's cultural-geographical special interest will be supported by his new "German-Icelandic Book About Blue Tits" (Verlag Martin Schmitz, Kassel & Berlin, 56DM), which will pose, among others, the question: "Damp squib on the Polar Circle, or hot sex with elves under the midnight sun?"

(Der Spiegel, "Culture" section, No. 32, 1998")