AreaRead the video transcript expand here
Elke Heidenreich, author and book critic
Well, now it's over, the summer and my summer break too.
And don't say that I read during the holidays, but now I can't do it again.
Please come along now.
Reading is part of life and I also have a huge stack of new books.
But today I'll only do two.
Let's start small, I don't want to overwhelm you.
One is by Christian Baron »Schön ist die Nacht«.
And what is on the front page?
This book is a novel.
Although I used the life stories of my grandfathers and other family members in it, all the characters in this text are fictitious.
Yes, the characters do, but the circumstances, I don't think so.
And these circumstances are, as they always say, precarious.
We are dealing with people who come from very humble backgrounds.
Two boys, Horst and Willi.
And we accompany them in the last years of the war, 1945, through these years, through the seventies, the eighties, up to the year 2010. And they make every effort, but they can't get out of these precarious circumstances.
They come from families where the father beats, where the mother drinks liquor, where there are too many children, the apartments are too small,
Willy always tries to become or remain a good person and Horst is fine with any dirty thing to somehow make money.
He tricks, he cheats, he borrows money.
He beats.
And both come up with no green branch.
Neither being good nor not being good somehow works and the friendship also gets cracks.
But it lasts a lifetime because they simply live close together and cobble the jobs together.
And today we talk so much about racism, about sexual orientation, about all sorts of topics, all of which are important.
But what we forgot is class.
Origin, what class you come from.
And there are people who never overcome this class.
We have read Tove Ditlevsen, Didier Eribon, Annie Ernaux in recent years.
You all made it.
And they wrote about what it's like to get a job as a working-class child, to graduate from high school, to go to university.
But many just don't make it and Horst and Willy don't make it.
And Willy once said, we're just the bastards for the students, we're the ones who just always drink a few beers too many.
Yes, but it's the ones who hold society together, the ones who are at the bottom, but work, toil, toil, so that everything runs smoothly.
And that's what Christian Baron described, with so much anger, with rage, with love, with wit and melancholy.
It's just great reading and I highly recommend you
delve into this book.
You will laugh and you will cry.
He has a particularly wonderful way of writing and saying that you can change everything that people have made, people can change it too.
He already got that from Karl Marx.
And how he describes it: he has such a straight posture and I also have to explain the title, because »Schön ist die Nacht« doesn't really fit a topic like this at all.
But "The night is beautiful" is the text from a tango that Willi once danced with his wife Rosi.
And now Rosi is dying.
She dies very miserably of cancer and he sits by her bed and cries and listens to the old record again.
The night is beautiful and has that old tango again.
And actually in this life is not nice at all.
And how Christian Baron describes it, we should really read and know.
And you know, I like to do an old book and a new one, and the old one is now new too.
But it's from the fifties.
It's a story by Tania Blixen, that's the one with »Beyond Africa«.
And it's always been called "Babette's party."
It has now been retranslated by Ulrich Sonnenberg and is called "Babette's Banquet" by Manesse, published in a very nice edition, also plays in small proportions, but not in such precarious ones.
We are in Northern Norway in a small town and next to the sisters Martin and Philippa.
They are named after Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon because their father was a devout provost of the community.
He died.
And these two girls, though very beautiful and very smart, have vowed to live simply,
And one day, one night, you have to say, on a rainy night, her doorbell rings and there is a French woman named Babette with a letter, one of the former lovers who the girls have not followed, who lives in Paris and is famous has become.
And he writes, please take care of Babette.
Her husband and son were shot.
She has nothing to go to.
She got caught up in these revolutionary conflicts in France, in Paris, and she urgently needs shelter.
And the last sentence is: Babette can cook.
And they take in Babette.
And Babette has been cooking cod and boiled potatoes in this poor, poor household for 14 years now.
And one day she wins 10,000 francs with a permanent ticket in the French lottery.
That was an awful lot of money back then.
And what is she doing?
She says,
I would like to cook something different.
And the girls agree, although luxury isn't really what's needed.
But they say good because they don't know what to expect.
And twelve people from the village are invited.
Some of these are very old Hageprouds who have been at odds with each other for years and don't even talk to each other.
People who know Babette and Philippa and Martin.
And there is a banquet.
And weeks in advance she has damask tablecloths, crystal glasses, quail, figs, Bordeaux wines, truffles, caviar sent from France.
You can't even imagine what's to come.
Some of these are very old Hageprouds who have been at odds with each other for years and don't even talk to each other.
People who know Babette and Philippa and Martin.
And there is a banquet.
And weeks in advance she has damask tablecloths, crystal glasses, quail, figs, Bordeaux wines, truffles, caviar sent from France.
You can't even imagine what's to come.
Some of these are very old Hageprouds who have been at odds with each other for years and don't even talk to each other.
People who know Babette and Philippa and Martin.
And there is a banquet.
And weeks in advance she has damask tablecloths, crystal glasses, quail, figs, Bordeaux wines, truffles, caviar sent from France.
You can't even imagine what's to come.
And she cooks and cooks and cooks a meal the likes of which the world has never seen.
And certainly not this place in northern Norway.
And everyone hugs, makes up, is full of love.
And then it turns out Babette was a chef in the finest restaurants in Paris.
And she says I've been silent for years, but I'm an artist.
I'm a culinary artist and this isn't a story about cooking or about food, it's an artist's story because it says, an artist, I think I have to quote that verbatim, this is where my notes fly away from me.
I'll quote that verbatim because it's so beautiful, she says: »A long cry goes through the world from the hearts of the artists.
Give me permission, give me the opportunity to do my very best.
« For once in her life, Babbette delivers her very best for all her money.
And that is, says Eric Fossnes Hansen, who, to this small story, the wonderful Norwegian writer, wrote an almost as long afterword to this small story.
This, despite hating canons and classifications, is one of the top ten short stories in the world.
And I think so too.
And read that and then enjoy it.
And now let's see what's happening on the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
And read that and then enjoy it.
And now let's see what's happening on the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
And read that and then enjoy it.
And now let's see what's happening on the SPIEGEL bestseller list.
---
A true bestseller heavyweight in tenth place this week: Nicholas Sparks invents a new variant of his narrative motif »Redemption through Love« in the current novel »Im Traum bin ich bei Dir«.
This time, too, his novel takes place in his native North Carolina.
There, a young farmer falls in love with a singer, another young woman flees from her abusive husband - and, as expected, the fates of the three protagonists are skilfully interwoven.
Werner Herzog climbed a total of eight places up the list.
Just in time for his 80th birthday, the great filmmaker presents his memoirs under the title »Everyone for himself and God against everyone«.
The memoir bears the same title as his famous 1974 feature film about Kaspar Hauser, but it is about his own life in 36 short segments of scenes and images: including memories of Kinski's yelling and bloody shooting.
This week on the nine.
And, beware, the next two places go to one and the same author: The bestseller regular guest Susanne Abel.
First of all the novel "What I never said": This is the continuation of the family story "Stay away from Gretchen" - and continues the story of the huge success, with some new twists.
We find this in seventh place.
Present on this list for 77 weeks now, we remember, the story about the presenter Tom and his mother's secrets.
If you don't know what it's all about, you haven't paid much attention to the past bestseller lists - please look them up!
Heinz Strunk has been convincing the buying readership for at least 14 weeks.
In his novel A Summer in Niendorf, the lawyer-slash-writer named Roth goes to the petit-bourgeois Baltic Sea resort of Niendorf for a break, where he wants to write an important book, a settlement with his family.
He goes through various male crises.
A summer reading that is also good as a description of misery after the summer.
This week on the six.
The great Chilean-American author Isabel Allende slips from three to five this week.
She also recently celebrated her 80th birthday.
Apparently, and fortunately, ageism has no place on the bestseller list.
With »Violeta« she once again presents a powerful historical novel, this time about the 100-year-old Violeta, who reviews an entire decade of her life in letters.
Unchanged on the four this week: "All Kinds of Grief" by the Cologne writer Marianna Leky.
It is not a novel, but a collection of literary columns that first appeared in the journal
Psychologie Heut
e.
Although we're already on the subject: It's about emotional states, from claustrophobia to general sadness.
The reviewers agree that the little stories about grief have an overall happy effect.
»A Question of Chemistry« by the American Bonnie Garmus has been at the top of the list for 24 weeks.
Her acclaimed debut novel, about the astute chemist Elizabeth Zott, who thrives on thriving in a male-dominated world in 1960s America, slips down one spot to number three this week.
A new entry on the two: "The Deep Black Heart" by Robert Galbraith.
The best-selling author Galbraith, as we know, is actually the Harry Potter inventor JK Rowling, who is now publishing her sixth adult detective novel under the pseudonym.
This leads the investigative duo Robin Ellacott and Cormoran Strike into what is said to be an »opaque online world«.
The co-creator of a cult animated series is terrorized by a mysterious fan - shortly afterwards she is found dead.
And unchanged on the one this week: »Afternoon« by Ferdinand Schirach.
As in his earlier works, the lawyer and writer also shines here with the small form: the volume of stories summarizes observations, encounters and site visits in 26 sketches and notes.
The episodes are linked by a first-person narrator who is closely based on the real author.
Whether it's about wrong decisions or the ephemerality of happiness, Schirach's stories are always shot through with sadness.
Apparently a winning formula for the fall.
