BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking on 4th February 2020 takes as its cue the most recent incarnation of the arch German prankster Tyll Ulenspiegel, who has been resurrected from the Middle Ages in the midst of the Thirty Years War in best-selling novelist Daniel Kehlmann’ s 2017 Tyll, now published in English in the translation by Ross Benjamin.
This brilliantly (laugh-out-loud) satirical romp through one of the most devastating and yet little-known European wars of modern times explores how the joker can hold truth to power in a situation which has alarming parallels to today. A long war where religion and power have utterly failed but the people suffer endlessly makes us think, inevitably, of Syria. But this was also the moment when competing systems of thought vied for dominance: enlightenment and the scientific method setting itself against older superstitions. This moment also saw the birth of a new media: print and a plethora of pamphlets and tracts struggling to establish various truths. Not a giant leap to the newly imperilled status of reason and truth today and the rise of another new media with fake news ever more an issue. Kehlmann is one of the most exciting German novelists today and well worth listening to. A Netflix TV series has been commissioned. His previous 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.
On the back of this the programme explores the role of humour in the Arab Spring; the emergence of LGBTQ consciousness from the strictures of East Germany in 1989; and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Allied bombing of Dresden.
Daniel Kehlmann joins Anne presenter McElvoy, new generation thinkers Dr Dina Rezk and Dr Tom Smith along with Professor Karen Leeder who also reads some of her new translation of Durs Grünbein’s powerful evocation of one of the great symbolic tragedies of twentieth-century warfare: Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City, Seagull Books (2020): https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dzww