From the good old days of radio

Created: 09/30/2022, 11:02 am

By: Andrea Graepel

Scientist and teacher: Thomas Kraft.

© C. Hess

It's an ode to the early days of radio, to The Last DJs, as Dr.

Thomas Kraft entitled his latest book.

Conversations with 40 people from the German DJ scene, with Fritz Egner or Elke Heidenreich.

And with a foreword by Thomas Gottschalk.

Herrsching

– 40 is a magic number for Dr.

Thomas Kraft from Herrsching.

"The American Top 40, the charts." That's how the 63-year-old grew up.

He chose 40 interlocutors, more or less well-known – depending on which federal state the radio was on.

Kraft lets them look back to the heyday of radio and lets them tell their stories.

Through his friendship with Fritz Egner, it was "the short way" that Thomas Gottschalk wrote the foreword to Kraft's latest work.

Kraft has lived in Herrsching with his family since 2005.

He is a literary scholar, was a literary critic for many years and taught at universities.

In Herrsching, his name became known with the founding of the cultural association, of which he was the founding chairman.

He was born in Bamberg, in a time of rock'n'roll, to which he has dedicated several books with rock, beat and punk stories.

In 2013 his first novel "Alles Camouflage" was published, a walk through Kraft's Franconian hometown that is as poetic as it is rocking.

Music, like literature, plays an important role in Kraft's life, who at some point was no longer able to support his family from literary criticism alone.

As an organizer of readings and festivals, he has networked his passions and himself with them – with numerous fellow authors and musicians.

With the beginning of the pandemic there was no longer any bread to earn.

Like many other academics, Kraft followed the Ministry of Education's call for teachers in 2020 and went to school.

Since then he has been teaching German, history and social studies at the high school in Icking - now in a permanent position.

"It was a bit of a change," admits the 63-year-old, "but I really enjoy it."

"The Last DJs" should have been released half a year ago.

It was a long birth anyway, because he had researched for a few years.

Recently, it was the shortage of paper that slowed down the printing.

Today the time has come, as of today the 492-page book, published by Starfruit Verlag, is available in stores for 32 euros.

Meanwhile, Kraft is already working in the background on the next projects - one about poet friendships in literary history, the other project is called "Schattenkanon" - a selection of authors he believes have been wrongly forgotten, of course his "Top 40" again.

When he finishes this work he will soon have published 40 books.

"Then it's over," he says.

At least he intends to stay true to his magic number.