The spark of life 369,- Available for download and listening
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The spark of life
Audiobook version of Erich Maria Remarque's war novel The Spark of Life
The former resistance journalist, who is being held in Germany's Mellern concentration camp, has not spoken his name for years. He can only hear on the number 509, which helps this impoverished thirty-kilogram skeleton to endure the inhuman torment on body and soul. But in the spring of 1945, as the guns from the front thunder in the distance, suddenly even the ruthless guards here are frightened because the Americans have crossed the Rhine and a raging Hitler has condemned Germany to death. The situation in the camp is becoming more tense every day and prisoner 509 has no choice but to believe in a glimmer of hope that he will be freed. How to strengthen it?
He could have earned better food at the surgery, but there are always beastly experiments going on. He could sell an unregistered gold tooth or gamble on the myth that he used to have an account in Switzerland to be taken under the protection of a greedy guard. But who knows. Above all, he will have to endure the last weeks of hell to bear witness to it...
They wrote about the audiobook Spark of Life
"The author did not portray the extreme environment of the concentration camp as a priori black and white Evil. In the changing perspective of the haunting stories of the enslaved victims and their guards and torturers, we feel the power of belonging, the unquenchable need for humanity. That is the strongest impression I take away from this reading."
Martin Myšička
Erich Maria Remarque
The son of a bookbinder from Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, he was sent from the teacher's institute to the trenches of the First World War, where he was soon seriously wounded and spent the rest of the fighting in an infirmary. For a long time the trauma of the front did not allow him to participate fully in the post-war Weimar Republic, and so he alternated between different professions and interests. He memorably captured the feelings of the post-war "lost generation", of which he represents the key German writer, in his novels On the Western Front Quiet (1929), The Way Back (1931) and The Black Obelisk (1956). After the rise of Nazism in 1933, he found himself on the list of banned authors for his humanist convictions and his books were burned. The persecution of the author escalated after the Dutch publication of Three Friends (1938), when he was branded a Jewish traitor by the regime. A year later, he emigrated to the USA, where he acquired American citizenship, which unfortunately did not happen to his sister, whose cruel concentration camp fate prompted Remarque to write his novel The Spark of Life (1952). He also depicted the horrors of Nazism in his prose works Love Thy Neighbour (1941), Arc de Triomphe (1946) and Night in Lisbon (1962).
Martin Myšička
A native of Příbram region, he simultaneously studied drama acting at the DAMU in Prague and MFF UK in the field of subnuclear physics. While still a student, he guest-starred at the National Theatre, the Na zábradlí Theatre and Studio Ypsilon, and a year before graduating he won the Alfréd Radok Award for Talent of the Year 1994 (for his role as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's drama The Idiot). Since 1997, he has been permanently engaged at the Dejvice Theatre, where he has been artistic director since 2017. Film audiences know him, among others. from Whisper (1996), One Hand Does Not Clap (2003), Karamazovi (2008), Protector (2009), Citizenship Card (2010), Hole near Hanušovice (2014), Lost in Munich (2015) and The Case of the Dead Dead Man (2020); TV fans from the series Black Barons (2003), The Fourth Star (2014), Murder in the Circle (2015), Five dead dogs, Kosmo (both 2016), Dabing Street (2018), The Destruction of Dejvice Theatre or Without Consciousness (both 2019).
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