New angles on post-war Germany and Austria

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Anne McElvoy and new ways of understanding post-war Germany and Austria through history, film and literature with Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Adam Scovell and Tom Smith.

Florian Huber Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself explores a little understood wave of suicides across Germany towards the end of the Third Reich Sophie Hardach's latest novel called Confession with Blue Horses follows a family living in East Berlin who try to escape to the West. Adam Scovell is a film critic and author whose new novella is called Mothlight and blogs at Celluloid Wicker Man Tom Smith teaches German at the University of St Andrews and is a 2019 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select academics who can turn their research into radio. You can hear an Essay about the Stasi persecution of queer soldiers recorded at the York Festival of Idea here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07dgydc

Producer: Jacqueline Smith

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps
0:21.2	it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream
0:26.1	van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anne McAlvoy.
0:39.1	Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion programme,
0:43.6	bringing together leading artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate.
0:48.4	If you enjoy what you hear, do subscribe.
0:51.3	Search for the Arts and Ideas podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're
0:56.4	there, please do rate and review us. It'll help other people to find us. Hi, I'm Tom Service from BBC
1:02.4	Radio 3. Now, if you love music, all kinds of music, then you want to know a bit more about how it all
1:08.8	works, about why it is, it has this magical power over
1:12.2	each and every one of us. Well, I'm here with just the podcast for you. The listening service
1:18.5	gets right under the skin and straight to the beating heart of the music that we all love,
1:24.3	whatever it is. So come with me and take a closer look. It's not the
1:28.4	slightest bit gory, I promise. I mean, except we're strictly necessary. Search for the
1:33.7	listening service on BBC Sound, subscribe and never miss an episode.
1:39.4	Suicide is not an easy subject, but tonight we talk to the author of a new history book in which it takes centre stage.
1:47.0	Take one account. It's 1945 a month before the end of the war in Europe.
1:52.5	The journalist, wandering the bombed-out wastes of Berlin, comes across a small crowd surrounding a tree where a man has just hanged himself in broad daylight.
2:03.0	Not many people watch the spectacle and the few who do watch in silence. The event leaves
2:09.0	no particularly deep impression on them. Day by day, night by night, so many suicides take
2:15.1	place in this falling city that one more or less makes no difference.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.