The AIDS deniers – Christine Maggiore’s fatal error
Most people probably won’t remember January 14, 2000. Foo Fighter-Fans may have, because that day Dave Grohl’s band played a concert in Los Angeles – and offered the woman a stage that… The AIDS deniers The main role is played by: Christine Maggiore. She is HIV-positive but denies AIDS, and she draws not only other sufferers into her madness, but also artists and politicians. By telling their story, the podcast traces the different phases of social and political perception of AIDS in the USA, but also in Germany and South Africa around the turn of the millennium. As a listener, you not only better understand the disease (as a political issue), but also the culture war associated with it. Interviews from the 1990s with those affected are touching, alternative opinions from celebrities are irritating, and the conspiracy stories surrounding illness, treatment and healing are a painful reminder of a pandemic that has only just ended. Sometimes you want to slam your smartphone against the wall when the denial argument is repeated again and again, but with good classification and scientific refutation this feeling goes away. The fifth and final episode ends with the death of Maggiore in 2008 – a sixth to deal with the many deaths of the denial narrative would not have hurt. Still an absolute recommendation! Christina Lopinski
Katharina Thalbach meets the masters of humor
Well, of course everything would be even nicer if Katharina Thalbach had also met masters of humor. There are supposed to be some of them, i.e. women who have a gift for humor and can also write. Even in the time period covered in this podcast between the mid-19th and 20th centuries: Irmgard Keun, for example, Mascha Kaléko, they are said to have been quite funny. Nevertheless, the four-part series Katharina Thalbach meets masters of humor extremely entertaining. Thalbach meets and interprets texts by Joachim Ringelnatz, Kurt Tucholsky, Wilhelm Busch and Christian Morgenstern. Short stories, poems, the smallest scenes. It is particularly the piece Night talk recommended by Kurt Tucholsky. In it, a couple lying in bed fantasizes about a possible remarriage of the woman to a rich man and, imagining how the woman would cheat on the man with the chauffeur, gets into a purely hypothetical argument. Katharina Thalbach creaks and whirls and scratches and babbles in such an inimitable way that you at least have to grin. To fully enjoy the episodes, it’s best to listen to the episodes with headphones, then it sounds as if you have a cheeky little Thalbach imp in your ear. Christiane Lutz
GRËUL – 2nd season
Middle Ages, a remote valley in the Alps. Inhabited by pagan farmers and craftsmen. There is a monastery in the neighborhood, which the villagers view with skepticism and even hostility. In the first season there were stories about a mysterious, evil, murderous creature, the Grëul. In the first season of their fantasy radio play, the authors Stuart Kummer and Edgar Linscheid cleverly left in the balance whether it was just a superstition that the churchmen use for their power and intrigue games or whether it was actually the Greul gives. In the four new episodes, this question is clarified and the conflicts come to a head: between the long-self-sufficient monastic community and the bishop in Salzburg, between the monks and the villagers, the factions in the village among themselves – and in the middle of it all, a few people who completely… pursue your own, private agenda. The noise landscape in GRAUL is captivating, the story exciting. And the cast is first-class: Julia Koschitz, Bjarne Mädel, Friedrich Mücke, Rainer Bock, Anton von Lucke, Lena Klenke, Robert Dölle, Emma Bading… Stefan Fischer
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