Portuguese seafarer Luís Vaz de Camōens was shipwrecked while returning from Goa to Macau. It is said that he saved the manuscript of his epic, The Lusiads, from sinking while swimming with his left arm held high above the water. The book became Portugal's national classic and the anniversay of Camōen's death became a national holiday. The poet, who was refused a pension for his work by King Sebastian I, probably died on June 10, 1580, during a plague epidemic. The burial place is unknown.
In Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote de la Mancha, the hero loses his mind reading chivalric romances. But the author gradually restores reason to him – out of respect for his fictional creature, as Thomas Mann remarked. Thus with books one can both lose one’s mind and regain it.
"Anyone who has two pairs of trousers, cash one in and buy this book," recommended Georg Friedrich Lichtenberg. Did he thereby – because he wanted to be read – take his readers seriously or even regarded them as grown-ups? Because, he argues: "Whoever reads thinks with someone else's head!". And if nevertheless you do it, you have to ask yourself: "If a head and a book collide and it sounds hollow, is this always in the book?"
In 1928, in the “Threepenny Opera”, Bertolt Brecht had the beggar king Peachum, in the Ballad of the Inadequacy of Human Striving, reason about “humans and lice”:
A man lives by his head,
His head plus something else,
Scratch a moment your own skull
Reigns uppermost – a louse.
And in The Ballad of the Comfortable Life he ironizes the "hunger artist" who sacrifices himself for his work:
They now praise the life of the great spirits
Those who live with a book and an empty stomach
In a hut at which the rats are gnawing
Stay away from me with such blather!
What good is freedom? It is not comfortable.
Only the wealthy live in comfort.
Is that perhaps why Brecht later sacrificed his youthful poetic flights of fancy to Marxist ideology?
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing believed – or at least hoped – with his The Education of the Human Race he could improve the world. Other poets pursued literary creation as "art for art's sake". L'art pour l'art was the aesthetic credo of Charles Baudelaire, Stefan George or Oscar Wilde, who bluntly claimed that "all art is completely useless".
So what can and should literature achieve in an apocalyptic world threatened by epidemics, war and climate change? What's the point of literature? And what's the point of audio books, not to mention Buch UND Hörbuch?
Even if the Buch UND Hörbuch does not wish to or even cannot improve the world: if it stimulates reflection, imparts knowledge and brings some joy, its existence seems more than justified, even in – according to Hölderlin – "austere times".
(Note: All productions called Buch UND Hörbuch of Sinus-Verlag are in German language.)