Free Thinking5 Feb 2020

Mocking power past and present.

The German joker Tyll Ulenspiegel. Anne McElvoy with best selling novelist Daniel Kehlmann plus Prof Karen Leeder who has been looking at changing versions of the Dresden bombing.

Daniel Kehlmann's new book is called Tyll, translated by Ross Benjamin. A Netflix TV series has been commissioned. His book Measuring The World about mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and German geographer Alexander von Humboldt became the world's second best-selling novel in 2006. Professor Karen Leeder teaches at the University of Oxford. She has translated Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt by Durs Grünbein, coming out as Durs Grünbein, Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City and has been reading a new history of Dresden by Sinclair Mackay called Dresden: The Fire and the Darkness. You can hear her contributing to a discussion on Radio 3's The Verb about German poetry after the Fall of the Berlin Wall https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b7x0

You can find Anne McElvoy talking to Susan Neimann about tolerance, censorship and free speech and lessons from German history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0008hvz to novelists Florian Huber and Sophie Hardach about New angles on post war German history https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx to Neil McGregor about Germany https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b079mcgf

Dr Tom Smith lectures in German at the University of St Andrews. Dr Dina Rezk lectures on Middle East History at the University of Reading. They are both New Generation Thinkers on the scheme run by the BBC in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council to work with academics to share their research on radio. You can find more examples of their work on the Free Thinking programme website.

Producer: Paula McGinley

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1526)

The Ethics of Knowledge

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledg...

10 Jul 56min

Trade and Traffic

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material th...

3 Jul 56min

The Child's Eye View

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI to living through war and the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherine...

26 Jun 56min

Eccentrics & Outsiders

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a re-r...

19 Jun 56min

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an a...

12 Jun 56min

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Jun 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Mai 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Mai 56min