Whether it is the fear of snakes, the loathing of vultures or the disgust of spiders – the human relationship to many animals is characterized by deep rejection. Their origins go back to mythical prehistoric times, when man believed he had renounced the animal world, not least through storytelling and fable.
Stephan Wunsch portrays ten of these ill-named, even disreputable animals. His forays lead him into the shadowy realm of malicious natural history – and into the abysses of the human psyche. For a bestiary of disreputable animals is a catalog of our fears, a mirror of our inadequacies, a survey of open wounds – in short, a cryptic and hilarious study of human nature, from vulture to false snake, from deceitful hyena to vampiric bat.
"Every animal, especially the dubious and obscure, is a challenge to the human mind and to the human imagination."
Nonfiction
Stephan Wunsch, born in 1968, studied philosophy and literature. He has been working as a puppeteer, figure designer and director in Aachen since 2002. Projects about bird creatures, the Cambrian and the deep sea are a focus of his work.
"The most beautiful thing about this book are not the wild associations that Stephan Wunsch imposes on his beasts, nor the entertaining literary and cultural stories with which he recaptures them, no, the most beautiful thing about this bestiary is its tone; this alternation of pathos and laconicism, this meaningful growl, which at times sounds as if Captain Ahab had choked on the FAZ feuilleton of the sixties, and which despite everything spits out the most precise phenomenological observation." – Bayrischer Rundfunk
