New audio book
​For Easter Outings and Other Opportunities

At the moment, many people enjoy going for long and frequent walks. It’s a good opportunity to learn about new audiobooks. For some of our recommendations, a short stroll around the block is sufficient, others can also provide entertainment for long hikes.

By Marit Borcherding

Now that we’re forced to keep a distance from other people, it seems logical that animals are getting increased attention. They’ve always been popular in children’s books. Mountain gorilla Rille has what it takes to land at the top of any list of favourite animals. In the story Rille. Die Dschungelfreunde sind los! Fee Krämer has the job of transporting him from the Leipzig Zoo to South America when she suddenly finds herself in the middle of the jungle. Adventures are inevitable – with new animal companions: an armadillo, a macaw, a jaguar. It was a challenge for the speaker Andreas Fröhlich, who usually lends his voice to the three ???. The SWR is very satisfied, calling the book “A great, amazing pleasure!”

NEws from mice and donkeys

The clever mouse Berti is also on the move, not in the woods, but through space and time. His dream destination is a cheese festival in Bern, Switzerland, for which Berti unfortunately arrives too late. This cheese feast should ideally never end – at least it has to be possible to turn back time! Berti pulls out all the stops and with the help of a Swiss watchmaker’s mouse gets to the Bern patent office. Someone works there who might be able to help: Albert Einstein, future Nobel Prize winner and inventor of the theory of relativity. Can he catapult Berti back to the cheese paradise? In the audio book suitable for both mice and children Einstein. Die fantastische Reise einer Maus durch Raum und Zeit, written by Torben Kuhlmann, Bastian Pastewka, known from film, radio and television, takes on all the roles in this fantastic journey of a mouse through space and time. He does an outstanding job, too, receiving first place in hr2’s audiobooks for kids in January 2021.
 
We go from a very small to a larger four-legged friend: a donkey. Stubborn, stupid, lazy – the pack animal doesn’t exactly have the best reputation. The journalist and cultural scientist Jutta Person entertainingly refutes all the clichés in Esel. Ein Portrait. We learn that donkeys have played important roles time and again in religion and philosophy. And we learn something about donkey character, about donkey types and donkey breeding. Frank Arnold, who was awarded the German Audiobook Prize for Best Interpreter in 2014, provides all this valuable knowledge. In addition, “he can be heard several times with ee-aaahhh sounds rising from the depths of his chest” (third place on the hr2 best audio book list of December 2020).

HEroines

Anna Seghers was one of the many writers who suffered persecution under the Nazi regime and whose books were banned and burned. In 1941 she managed to leave Germany with her husband and daughter and finally flee into exile in Mexico. In Brennendes Licht the literary critic and author Volker Weidermann, who has often dealt with persecuted writers in his books, tells about Anna Seghers’s years in Mexico that were particularly formative for her. There she was able to experience the great success of her novel The Seventh Cross and she also met famous contemporaries such as Frida Kahlo and Pablo Neruda as well as other German communists in exile. This mixture of biography and history book is read by the renowned actor Burkhart Klaußner. He “always creates moments that make you breathless,” assessed WDR aptly.

Life in exile is also a theme in Christian Berkel’s family novel Ada. The well-known actor and writer tells of his Jewish mother Sala and her fictional daughter Ada, who fled to Argentina immediately after the end of the war and returned to Berlin in 1955 – to a country in which there was great silence about the monstrous crimes of the Nazi era. Ada defends herself against this authoritarian environment with rebellion and a thirst for freedom. In the 1960s she joined the rebellious students and found shelter in a hippie commune. Christian Berkel, who was awarded the German Audiobook Prize in 2020 as best interpreter, reads his partly fictional, partly authenticated family story.

The writer Anne Weber created an impressive literary monument to a heroine whose name hardly anyone in this country knew until recently in Annette, ein Heldinnenepos. The focus of this work, written in verse, is the French Anne Beaumanoir, known as Annette. She was born in 1923, raised in ordinary circumstances in Brittany and became of member of the Communist Resistance as a young woman. During the occupation of France by the Germans, she saved two Jewish children from being murdered. She later became a neurologist and was involved with the Algerian independence movement. In 1959 she was sentenced to ten years in prison. After an adventurous escape, Annette finally helped set up the Algerian health system. Anne Weber received the German Book Prize in 2020 for this uniquely-told life story of the French resistance fighter. The experienced speaker Christina Puciata reads “with a warm, slightly gravelly voice,” which earned the work second place on the hr2 best audio book list in January 2021.