Affen

Whether we make a monkey of ourselves, are bitten by a wild ape or someone is lapped by a monkey - it is not only the rich metaphors that connect the lives of other primates with ours, but the eternal constants: Living and eating, socialising and sex, rearing young and inevitable death. Volker Sommer shows the striking variance that evolution has created in his animal portrait, which is as humorous as it is knowledgeable and deliberately not devoted to the great apes. Rather, it is the lemurs, the lorikeets, the tarsiers and the old and new world apes from which we learn that there is nothing that does not exist: Polyandrousness or eternal fidelity, solo sex and females ensnaring each other, mistreatment of babies by mothers or self-sacrificing care of fathers, plus unusual dietary habits, wakes or strict nocturnal activity. As individually as we encounter the apes here, as Madame Berthes mouse macaque, crested macaque or white-nosed guenon, it is also clear that there is one ape that threatens them all: Homo sapiens.