Sign and Sight points the way to lively debates on Europe

WorldView: The European Union's method of dealing with crises runs like a well-rehearsed fire drill. EU officials and national leaders feign surprise, talk of a great setback for the European project and call for a "period of reflection" and "greater dialogue".

This never happens, of course. Instead, after an unspecified length of time - like those pondering minutes in the pew after emerging from the confessional - these same people pick themselves up and continue as before.

Brussels correspondents enjoy talking among themselves and get paid handsomely for doing so. But where is the real European dialogue among real people? The British and the Irish live in their English-speaking bubble.

Anglophobe French refuse to talk to anyone in anything except French. The Germans are only too happy to dump deutsch despite it being the most spoken language in the EU. And nobody can honestly imagine talking to the Poles, Hungarians or any of the other new EU member states in their mother tongues.

Without this dialogue, there can be little hope of overcoming the mortifying ignorance of our European neighbours.

This ignorance is even more curious considering there is a European dialogue every day in European newspapers. But, as they stand, these are national dialogues rather than one big European dialogue. We have a common European currency but no common European discourse.

The language rows driven by national egos still get in the way and, unless everyone learns Esperanto, this conversation constipation will persist. That's why the German website Sign and Sight is so fascinating (www.signandsight.com).

It is an English-language portal to the Feuilleton pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche Zeitung and other European newspapers and magazines. The Feuilleton pages are a curious collection of cultural reportage, intellectual think-pieces, reviews and rants that do not really exist in mainstream English-language newspapers.

Like the Feuilleton pages, however, the website is much more than just a new forum for old German thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Günther Grass. Germany's Feuilleton pages are viewed in central European countries as the portal to the west: it was here that Hungarian author Imre Kertesz first came to the wider European attention that led to the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Sign and Sight provides an English-language forum for the Feuilleton's lively debates and discussions from central and eastern Europe on themes that are of interest to us all but which, because of the language barrier, might as well not be taking place for someone in Dublin.

"The English-language sphere is very exciting, but there's a lot happening outside this, which is just as exciting," says Gabriella Gönczy of Sign and Sight. The internet is the perfect place for Sign and Sight.

Publishing online keeps costs low and topicality high, and allows it to reach far-flung intellectuals as well as bored office workers. As an offshoot of the German online culture magazine Perlentaucher (Pearlfisher), it has a three-year grant from the federal government and, just a few months after its launch, has already hit its stride.

The website is a wonderful resource of absorbing articles, from German politics to literature, immigration and integration to music and cinema. But it goes beyond that to offer a diverse collection of articles on the European constitution, a profile of the "pope of literature" Marcel Reich-Ranicki and Polish reflections on the end of the war by Adam Krzeminski.

Sign and Sight brings the Feuilleton pages beyond the German language barrier and the other barrier, the fact that most German newspaper websites are subscription-only.

In the process, it also performs a wonderful service to these articles which are often weighed down by their own worthiness and written by arrogant authors who favour woolliness over clarity.

Sign and Sight cuts through all this with snappy summaries and clear translations, as well as regular reviews of new books and magazines from around Europe. Its no-nonsense house style reflects the pragmatism of the project itself: rather than talk in circles, as the French do, about English-language dominance of European thought, Sign and Sight has turned English around, to Germany's advantage.

"We don't expect the rest of the world to learn German. But what you lose in translation you gain in debate," says Lucy Powell, a Sign and Sight editor.

Sign and Sight challenges what passes for European debate these days: the prepackaged clarion calls from academics like Anthony Giddens, syndicated in a dozen European newspapers at once.

Of course, there is a place for these articles, but they are flawed from the start because such attempts to open a debate often come across as top-down monologues from British, French or German intellectuals to the rest of Europe.

"Have you ever seen a similar article by a Polish intellectual appearing in 10 newspapers across Europe?" asks Anja Seeliger, one of the founders of Perlentaucher and Sign and Sight.

For people looking for a different view of Europe and the world, Sign and Sight is one of a growing number of German-language websites that do just that, including Spiegel Online (www.spiegelinternational.de) and Deutsche Welle (www.dw-world.de).

Sign and Sight is a pragmatic and innovative attempt to stimulate real European debate, and it is appropriate that its name is a pun on German philosopher Martin Heidegger's "Sein und Zeit" - Being and Time.