Kim Bülow Bonfils
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 a socialist republic in East Germany. Historian and journalist Hoyer was born and raised in the GDR herself and has...
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 a didactic, pedagogical narrator but chooses to present Bowie’s life and work in a fragmented, impressionistic form. The question remains...
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.
Jack White’s creativity is so vibrant and untamed that there’s a new surprise waiting for the listener around every corner. And on “Fear of the Dawn,” White has found a balance again, so even the craziest ideas still have their feet firmly planted in an intelligible song structure.
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 this discipline. He writes in an easily readable style with a lot of humour – and his arguments strike a...
There are two kinds of extraordinary musical experiences: One is hearing something unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. The other is not being bored for a single moment. It’s rare that I can tick both boxes. But when David Thomas visited Jazzhouse in Copenhagen, I could.
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.
