Countries that have ceased to exist hold a certain fascination. Especially when this has happened to a neighbouring country within one’s own lifetime. Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall” tells the story of the GDR – the short-lived attempt to create …
The iconic musician David Bowie (1947–2016) was a true original. But ironically difficult to describe without resorting to worn-out clichés about the “chameleon” who “reinvented himself.” It is therefore refreshing that Brett Morgen’s Bowie film “Moonage Daydream” does not employ …
Describing the indescribable – “Moonage Daydream” Læs mere »
In the early 80s, I stumbled upon a peculiar album cover in a record store in my home town in Denmark. Five men stood in a row wearing plastic uniforms and red geometric lampshades on their heads. 40 years later, they’d become a part of my life – and I finally watched them performing live in Berlin.
If you’re at all interested in the evolution of human civilization, Graeber and Wengrow’s book is a thought-provoking read. Based on recent archeological evidence, the two authors set out to question – often to the point of debunking – many of our preconceptions about the past.
At its release in 1985, this was praised as the ultimate biography of the infamous German terror organization, Rote Armee Fraktion. And to this day, I can’t imagine a more perfect telling of this traumatic story.
In the academic discipline of “Big History,” historians and thinkers attempt to draw the grand lines of human history. And it’s no wonder that Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” has become many people’s first encounter with …
Frankenstein on the shoulders of Gilgamesh – Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens” Læs mere »
Biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky’s project is astoundingly ambitious: He wants to try to map out why humans behave the way we do. And not unexpectedly, the answer is quite complex.
1361 CE In Western musical tradition, the piano-type keyboard with black and white keys has achieved a status of iconic recognizability – from ancient harpsichords to modern pianos and synthesizers. The keyboard is a rather old invention, seemingly appearing for the …
Eternity turns a corner: John Cage in Halberstadt Læs mere »
Will Self’s novel “Great Apes” is both deeply unsettling and darkly hilarious – an uncomfortably precise satire on the nature of civilisation.
Night after night, a man stands by his elevator with a suitcase, waiting for the secret police to take him away and punish him for his crimes.The man is the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, the setting is Stalin’s Soviet Union, and the crime is his music.