Olbia, presentation of the book “Animal Brothers” Wednesday 22 May at 5.30pm in the Simpliciana Library in Olbia.
“Animal brothers. Considerations on an ethical life” (libreriauniversitaria.it Edizioni), a work written by Edgar Kupfer-KoberwitzGerman author who survived the concentration camps and lived for more than twenty years in Sardinia, in San Teodoro, and translated and edited by Giannella Biddau. He will dialogue with the curator Cristina Ricci, president of the ACIT-Italian-German Cultural Association and honorary consul of the Netherlands.
Kupfer wrote the short philosophical essay “Animal Brothers” in secret, during the last months of his imprisonment in the Dachau camp. The treatise, which addresses issues that are now very current but were absolutely cutting-edge at the time, uses an epistolary narrative form and simple, discursive language to describe the pain of animals, but also the relationship between violence against animals and war.
The Italian version is contextualized by research on the author’s thought and life and is accompanied by a section dedicated to the role of school and university in the development of an empathetic attitude towards animals and the need for a pedagogy that educate to consider animals moral subjects.
“Animal Brothers” also reached the first position of the best-selling books and the first of the most read books in the section ‘Environment, transport and planning’ of Italian scientific publishing houses, thus becoming a bestseller.
Let’s see some information on the original author and on Giannella Biddau, who brought the work back to life.
Kupfer was born in 1906 in Koberwitz, a small Polish village from which his stage name derives. In 1940 he was interned in Dachau because he had expressed himself against the Nazi-fascist regime; He also survived thanks to a job in a factory that allowed him less harsh living conditions than the other prisoners. Together with his letters on the animal issue, he managed to secretly write an account of the war and reflections on the atrocious living conditions in the concentration camp. At the beginning of the Sixties he moved to Italy, and then died in Germany in 1991.
Giannella Biddau she is a teacher of English and German in high schools and a PhD in Languages, literatures and cultures of the modern and contemporary age at the University of Sassari, where she taught and was an expert on the subject in teaching. For many years you organized the reading meetings of “Le chat tigré literary café”, a traveling initiative dedicated to the classics of modern and contemporary literature. He wrote the novel Viola Amélie’s wings and the scientific text Constructivism and experientialism for learning Italian as a second language during museum visits, articles on empathy for animals and how this can be developed through constructivist teaching. She is also the editor of the column “Ethical words rediscovered“. It promotes biocentrism through school projects and conferences. In this regard he has created a website entitled “Anti-speciesist teaching laboratory”, in which it makes material on animal ethics available to teachers free of charge.
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