Latest Audiobooks
New Listening Pleasures

The magical voices of the narrators, an unusual interpretation of the subject matter: Audiobooks promise unique pleasures. This selection is about yearning for departures and works that never grow old.

By Marit Borcherding

The sport of jogging has experienced unforeseen popularity during the coronavirus restrictions. Parks and green areas swarmed with runners trying to physically and mentally counteract the forced standstill. Laufen, Isabel Bogdan’s novel about running is also about existentially coping with a crisis as the narrator, literally step by step, reconquers her life after a painful loss. The film and theatre actress Johanna Wokalek takes on the role of the long-distance runner. “Her voice gives the work a physically perceptible rhythm: She combines the breathlessness of jogging and the reverberation of the breaks with a laconic quality, wit and a sense of reality.” This performance brought her a nomination for the 2020 German Audiobook Award for Best Interpretation.

The publicist, book author and film producer Roger Willemsen travelled often all over the world, longingly seeking foreign parts. The world citizen who died so young was also a great lover of music and jazz in particular. So it’s only logical that the audiobook Unterwegs (On the Go) combines these two passions in the most entertaining way. The live recording from 2010 combines Willemsen’s travel descriptions with suitable songs selected by him ranging from Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus to Pat Matheny. BR, on behalf of the audience, raves, “One would have been all too happy to have tagged along for even more of these rousing and enthusiastic globetrots.” The work was on the longlist of the 2020 German Audiobook Award in the Best Entertainment category.

BETTERING THE WORLD

The global coronavirus pandemic has sidelined the Fridays for Future movement and its efforts to battle climate change from the public awareness. But the issue of global warming and all its destructive consequences continue to exist, of course. So there can never be enough climate activists of all ages. The audiobook Unsere Zukunft ist jetzt! Kämpfe wie Greta Thunberg fürs Klima (Our Future Is Now! Fight for the Climate like Greta Thunberg) specifically aims at a younger audience and offers “plenty of ideas that are easy to understand and implement even for eight-year-olds. Hans Löw and Muriel Bielenberg read with great dedication to the good cause.” (Third place in the hr2’s children’s/youth audiobook of the month of March 2020)
 
Sadly, animals are tortured and disregarded far too often. Perhaps this would change if people had more knowledge of animals’ amazing abilities and their nuanced emotional lives. The audiobook by marine biologist and behavioural scientist Karsten Brensing Wie Tiere denken und fühlen (How Animals Think and Feel) offers just that. How many people are aware that ants recognise themselves in the mirror and that rats like to share a good laugh? According to kinderbuch-couch.de, the reading makes one thing particularly clear: “The differences between humans and animals are much, much smaller than generally thought.” The printed edition was the 2019 Knowledge Book of the Year in the “Perspective” category.

timeless

The rise of right-wing radicalism is being observed in many places around the world. It is a terrifying phenomenon that, sadly, has never completely disappeared. Otherwise the great philosopher and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno would not have felt it necessary to hold a lecture at the University of Vienna in 1967 called Aspekte des neuen Rechtsradikalismus (Aspects of the New Right-Wing Radicalism). In it, Adorno examines the goals, means and tactics of right-wing radicalism of the 1960s and addresses the reasons why – not long after the end of the Second World War – parts of the West German population still or again felt drawn to it. In the Frankfurter Rundschau, Arno Widmann emphasises the timelessness of the analysis, noting, “You pick up the article, more than 50 years old, and after a few sentences you are alarmed by the topicality of the aspects picked out by Adorno.” (No. 1 on the hr2 best audiobooks list for November 2019)
 
Four hours of poems – from Goethe to Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Hölderlin to Rainer Maria Rilke – recited by the “King of Readers” as the ZEIT once christened the actor and speaker Gert Westphal who lent his voice to so many important audio productions. In Die schönsten deutschen Gedichte (The Most Beautiful German Poems), lyrical masterpieces from various eras are compiled and presented in an expressive and varied manner. Those yearning to hear the classic poems again or to rediscover famous verses for themselves will certainly be delighted with this stimulating and compact selection. In a brief discussion of the audiobook, hr2 presents two poems, one by Joseph von Eichendorff and one by Theodor Fontane.