LESUNG | Lothar Müller: "Spinnen. Ein Porträt"

The spider, this eight-legged, hairy creature that has lived in caves and on trees for over 300 million years, has taken up residence deep in our real and imaginary cellars and attics - and not least in our unconscious.

In his richly associative portrait, Lothar Müller weaves a dense web of illuminating and obscure interpretations of these strange and yet omnipresent animals: from Kierkegaard's existential questions to Spiderman, who never quite becomes a spider, from Marx's labor theory of value in the context of the "Spinning Jenny" to the Arachne myth as the origin of narrative as resistance and to Louise Bourgeois' monumental spiders as protective figures. Using the example of Maria Sibylla Merian's long underestimated discovery of the tarantula, Müller also sheds light on male prejudices in science.

Lothar Müller, born in Dortmund in 1954, is a journalist and literary scholar. He writes for the feature pages of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Deutschlandfunk, among others, and has been an honorary professor at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2010.

The reading is part of the "Naturkunden" series edited by Judith Schalansky, in which authors talk knowledgeably about animals, plants and other natural phenomena, and a long-standing series of events at Schloss Benrath.

Moderator: Michael Serrer (Literaturbüro NRW).

Duration: 90 minutes