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Ralf Caspary is a radio producer who regularly invites well-known academics from various different disciplines to take part in his programme Aula für Kinder (‘Lecture theatre for children’), where they explain their specialism in a highly unconventional and ‘unacademic’ sort of way. The object of the exercise is to make the talk exciting, entertaining and informative — in order to grab the children’s attention and awaken their curiosity. For this non-fiction book for younger readers Caspary has selected and edited ten of the most interesting talks, and the outcome is an informative and richly varied book for young people that opens doors to many different areas of knowledge and encourages both thought and further research.
The titles of the essays are all in the form of questions, such as ‘Can we travel to other stars?’, ‘Is the earth getting warmer and warmer?’ and ‘Is the biblical story of Israel correct?’ Science fiction films, climate change and biblical texts are all things that young people will already have come across in their ordinary lives, and here they serve as the departure point for opening up further perspectives. What this subtly implies is that knowledge doesn’t exist in an ivory tower: it comes into being whenever we ask questions about everyday phenomena, and it is driven by curiosity and our urge to understand the world. And for Caspary, this is precisely the point at which the interests of children and academics intersect. For children are by nature curious — and it is this curiosity that the book seeks to encourage.
Caspary’s Aula seeks to make it easier for young readers to enter a world of knowledge that is generally considered the preserve of adults. ‘Communication of knowledge’ is the key concept here; the message is that learning is exciting, and not merely a dreary process imposed by others. And the experts included here really do know how to make their topics appealing to young readers — not least by virtue of the fact that their enthusiasm for their subject really shines through.
‘Can we travel to other stars?’ is the question posed by astrophysicist Harald Lesch. Thanks to science fiction films young people know all about space ships, beaming up and cosmic wars — but are such things actually possible? The first step towards answering this question is to establish what the physical properties of space are. Space is ‘empty’, explains Lesch, and the planets therefore revolve around the sun along paths that never vary. But what exactly does that mean? ‘Just imagine that the planets had to travel through honey. Honey is viscous, and any object passing through it would experience friction. This means that if a planet had to fight its way through honey, the friction involved would immediately cause it to lose speed; it would move more and more slowly.’
In this empty cosmos distances are so unimaginably huge that they can’t be traversed within a feasible period of time even at the speed of light. To get a pizza order from Earth to somewhere at the other end of the Milky Way would take one hundred thousand years. ‘When Commander Kirk, the legendary skipper of the equally legendary Starship Enterprise, makes contact from time to time with the inhabitants of other galaxies and talks to them as though they lived around the corner, so to speak, then I have to say that that’s not possible, the distances are simply too great.’ Thus does our astrophysicist succeed in getting across some fundamental concepts concerning the complex physical laws of the universe.
The anthropologist Volker Sommer poses a very different question: ‘Are apes really good at lying?’ But what actually is a lie? Is an insect ‘lying’ when it disguises itself and makes its enemies think that it’s part of a tree? No, says Sommer. For a deception to be a lie, it has to be done consciously. For instance, a young baboon named Paul would often go and sit next to an older baboon who had just dug up a particularly tasty morsel and start howling loudly. His mother would then invariably come rushing up in the belief that the older animal was out to do her son some harm. She would chase him away, and Paul could then get stuck in to the tasty morsel himself. Lucky Paul. Or clever Paul? In order to decide whether Paul really was lying, we would need to know whether Paul had consciously stage-managed the entire episode. That in its turn would be evidence of a high level of intelligence — and as such would support the idea of a close kinship between apes and humans. And Volker Sommer did in fact manage to prove that a chimpanzee had lied...
The book also includes an essay by the Germanist and writer Burkhard Spinnen: ‘Can you learn how to be an author?’ This is the gist of most of the questions addressed to him by his readers, such as ‘How did you actually become a writer?’, ‘Dear Mr Author, how do you actually think up your stories?’, ‘Can you actually earn a living from your writing?’ Spinnen describes his vocation unpretentiously but vividly, and it soon becomes clear that it doesn’t so much fill his wallet as fulfil him as a person. And what then is the answer to the initial question: can you learn how to be an author? No, you can’t. An author is someone who publishes a book that people read. It is thus the reader who, after reading the book, decides that ‘yes, that’s probably literature, so whoever wrote it must be an author. It’s as if an engineer were only truly an engineer once he’d built a bridge that plainly doesn’t collapse even when heavy vehicles trundle across it.’
What is impressive about this book is the authors’ passion for their subject. The reader can sense the delight they take in opening up their specialisms to others — specialisms which, in addition to those already mentioned, include maths, neurology, linguistics, developmental psychology, meteorology, theology/archaeology and cultural studies. All the essays offer deep and informative insights into their respective fields — insights that even adults often find quite breathtaking. If we look at the book as a whole, it is easy to see what its essential purpose is — namely to encourage its young readers to take even more delight in being thoughtful and inquisitive. For hidden behind numerous things that we take completely for granted there are exciting realms of knowledge that are crying out to be discovered through questions born of curiosity.
Eva Kaufmann
December 2008
[Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby]
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