Literatur Radio Hörbahn

This is a German-language literature program built on a single reliable move: something is read aloud, and only then does anyone start talking about it. The readings are long enough to establish their own weather. What follows is conversation rather than commentary — open questions, a summarized bit of context, then space for the guest to keep going. The show announces itself as being away from the mainstream, and its subject choices back that up. Karl May's Winnetou trilogy gets treated as a technical problem in an essay by Michael Andermatt, read by Uwe Kulnick, about how suspense is raised and then deliberately retarded by digressions, sermons and jokes. The essay is unsentimental about it: May earned money through tension and paid the reader back in instruction. A different episode, framed as a relaxed discussion with Udo, argues that science fiction and gothic horror share ancestors in the shudder-literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with no clean border between them. That conversation runs through zombie apocalypse as a negative future, vampires as a successor species, and the last man discovering he is the anomaly. Then the program turns and does something else entirely. An episode by Gertrud Graf and Eugen Michelberger reconstructs the murders of Polish prisoners of war in the Lake Constance region in 1941 and 1942, opening on the day word travelled house to house in Oberteuringen that a hanging could be watched. It names Gestapo officers arriving with a collapsible gallows, women imprisoned for so-called moral offences, and the ordinary resistance of passing food to forced labourers. Its closing point is about the present: decades on, families still fear the shame attached to those names. The crime fiction strand, presented by Heike Stepprath, introduces the shortlist for a stipend from the Mörderische Schwestern. Silke Heimes reads from a thriller manuscript about a mother with a screaming baby and a husband she wants to protect the child from, then talks about pitching it, about domestic violence figures, and about opening a newspaper to find reality had arrived ahead of her novel. Interviews also travel outside literature. Anna and Veronika describe Working in Projects, an initiative in Munich's Werksviertel Mitte that uses art, culture and social solidarity to open rooms to people of very different backgrounds — and the conversation presses on the practical strain of funding applications, unpaid time and the rule that a paying job always comes first. Across all of it the register stays composed. Serious material is handled gravely but not coldly, and lighter material is not inflated. Episodes close plainly, with thanks and an invitation to stay curious. Roughly a thousand entries deep, the archive is a substantial run of readings, essays and unhurried talk.