Lieben & (nicht) lieben lassen
What do the chief detective inspector and the forensic expert from the ZDF crime series SOKO Stuttgart do when they are not solving murders? Actress Astrid Fünderich and her colleague Mike Zaka Sommerfeldt have taken on a famous deceased person: Erich Kästner - although already 50 years underground, still remarkably lively!
What we often cannot make sense of - Mr. Kästner can. Promise! The way he says it, we have not heard it before. But surely we have felt it many times. Some more often than we liked. And some we would have liked more often.
Heart palpitations, butterflies in the stomach, or a pulling sensation in the abdomen - Dr. Kästner has something in his medicine cabinet for all ailments. Prescription-free!
Experience the man with the hat (who would have been alive for 125 years this year if he had not died 50 years ago), light & heavy girls, disappointed women & excited youths, young love & old couples, presented by Astrid Fünderich & Mike Zaka Sommerfeldt, who will step out of their roles in SOKO Stuttgart for this evening and stand together on stage for the first time.
Are you curious? - So are we!
What drives men & women together and apart again, as well as what they do with each other in the meantime - has been sung or told since the beginning of humanity.
Kästner does this in his way, and it will surprise many how fresh & modern his approach to these topics was back then and still is today.
The content ranges from romantic infatuation to the cooling of a "pragmatic romance," from being loved to not being able to love, from pleasurable enjoyment to the selling of the (female) body.
This evening provides an opportunity for both declared Kästner fans and people who have only known him from a distance & perhaps mainly as a children's book author to discover different sides of this versatile author & man.
Biographical aspects will also be hinted at: When "a man provides information, interesting and contradictory things can be found - between indestructible motherly love and a fragile love triangle...
"Erich Kästner is a wistful satirist and a winking skeptic...
He, the author of dark and bitter poems, was in reality Germany's most hopeful pessimist and the German literature's most positive negation adviser. He quickly became famous and was never fully recognized. Whether in verses or prose - he always expressed himself simply and lightly. So, people feared he was simple and insignificant. What he had to say was always very clear. So, depth was missed. He was funny, so he was not taken entirely seriously. He had grace and charm. So, he was considered somewhat unserious. He was very successful, yes he became - like his contemporaries Tucholsky and Ringelnatz, Fallada and Zuckmayer - a typical popular writer. So, people distrusted him..." (Marcel Reich-Ranicki)