Dogs can often help when a psychiatrist has failed. They can make elderly people laugh and earn their trust. Animals and their owners help with therapy in retirement homes - and elderly people enjoy it!

There might not be any scientific evidence to prove that animal-assisted therapy is effective in treating mental and social illnesses in the long term. But pets are generally acknowledged to be good for your health. Studies show that having a pet cat or dog helps people to handle stress. Cats and dogs are healthy companions!

Pets don't judge our behaviour - unlike human friends, psychiatrists say. They can raise children's self-esteem and make it easier for them to express themselves. Dog-assisted therapy is often used with handicapped children, for instance in Russia.

Riding therapy is basically just riding lessons adapted for people with special needs. The picture shows a handicapped child in India on horseback. The gentle movement is supposed to help with the therapy.

Llamas are a more exotic form of therapy. Some farms in Germany offer it, for example the Orenda Ranch in Burglauer, Bavaria. "Llamas are good campanions for anxious people. The animals sense if someone feels insecure," says Birgit Appel-Wimschneider, founder of the ranch. Llamas are said to be very curious and to approach people easily.

The Rzeszow University of Information Technology in Poland even imported 38 alpacas from Chile to use them in therapy for children. You hardly need scientific evidence to know whether it works: just looking at them makes most people feel better.

Once a month, therapists in Hanover take psychiatry patients on a trip to a local wildlife centre, the "Serengeti Park", where they can feed giraffes and other animals. Researchers at Hanover Medical School say these visits help with the patients' therapy.

At "Serengeti Park", patients can also feed and pet lemurs from Madagascar. Researchers are accompanying the patients on their visits as part of a five-year study, to find out whether cute exotic animals can really help with psychiatric disorders - or if it is just a temporary effect.

Another animal-assisted therapy often talked about is swimming with dolphins. It is popular with children, but comes in for a lot of criticism. Psychologists say it does not actually benefit the patients. Animal-rights activists warn that the dolphins are often taken from Japan, where they were captured when the dolphin's family was slaughtered. This means the animals are traumatised.

Swimming with beluga whales might be a very special experience for humans. But animal-rights activists say this form of therapy should be banned. They say these Arctic animals cannot stand the warm water used in therapy and die before their time.

There are dogs and cats everywhere - and most of them enjoy human companionship. So why go looking for dolphins and whales with the ideal "therapists" so close at hand?

It took 20 years before Patrick Süskind's 1985 bestselling historical fantasy novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was finally turned into a movie. Director Tom Tykwer carried it off magnificently, with entertaining, sumptuous scenes starring Ben Whishaw and Karoline Herfurth.

"One of the greatest war films made," said the critics. German director Wolfgang Petersen's 1981 filming of the novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim is set in the faithful replica of a World War II German submarine. The film was Petersen's breakthrough to Hollywood and was nominated for six Oscars, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award.

The 1959 novel earned Günter Grass the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1979 came the film adaptation, starring the 13-year-old actor David Bennent as Oscar Matzerath, the boy who at age three decides to stop growing. Director Völker Schlöndorff's film was the first German production to take the Oscar for best foreign language film.

Timur Vermes' 2012 debut novel, Look Who's Back, was a smash hit in Germany. His satire featured a character Germans tend not to take lightly: Adolf Hitler. The dictator wakes up in a park in Berlin in this millennium — and everyone believes he is an actor. David Wnendt adapted the book into a movie in 2016.

The movie In Times of Fading Light was released in 2017, six years after Eugen Ruge's novel tracing the life of a family in East Germany hit the bookstores. Another example of a well-done adaptation of literature, director Matti Geschonneck's satirical movie explores the last days of the East German regime with humor and tragic depth.

In 1975, two years before leftist Red Army Faction insurgents started making headlines in Germany with kidnappings and murders, Volker Schlöndorff adapted Heinrich Böll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum for the screen. The novel gives a detailed description of the social atmosphere in West Germany at the time. Schlöndorff cut right to the chase and hit the mark.

A best-selling book turned into a successful film: that's the exception rather than the rule, in particular if the book touches on a difficult topic. Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader looks at the repercussions of the Nazi era in Germany, and how the country deals with its past. Stephen Daldry's 2008 adaptation was a strong film also thanks to the superb actors, Kate Winslet and David Kross.

This film from the early days of sound movies is an excellent example of an arresting movie adaptation of a literary work. US director Lewis Milestone brought the horrors of WWI to the screen in 1930, based on Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The Nazis made sure the movie was rarely shown in Germany.

In 1971, Italian director Luchino Visconti surprised the world with his film adaptation of German author Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, Death in Venice. Visconti's movie is very close to the narrative tone of the original. The film starring Dirk Bogarde is ponderous, melancholy — and stunningly beautiful.