by Paul Cronin
When the night sinks,
The face dies.
Rain never falls upward.
So zeigt sich der Nutzen der Fenster:
Ach, und hier, hier wächst ja ein
Bäumchen am Dach, und hier, im
Zwanzigsten Stock zeigt sich Gebüsch!
Vor einem Wald hat man alle Reden
Noch einmal gehalten.
In allen Gesichtern hat man geforscht
Jeden Stein umgedreht, dem Gelb
Selbst misstraut.
Lieber sich gar nicht mehr umsehen!
Da sind nur Gesichter im Kreis.
Hier, vor einem Kreidestrich
Geraten seltene Tiere ins Stocken.
Auch von den Hühnern in unserem Topf
Wissen wir wenig.
So, in this way, the use of windows reveals itself:
Ah, and here grows a
Little tree on the roof, and here on
The twentieth floor there is a bush!
In front of a forest they gave all the speeches
Once again.
In all the faces they searched,
Turned every stone, mistrusted
The colour yellow itself.
Better not to look around any longer!
There are only faces in a circle.
Here, in front of a chalk line
Rare animals come to a standstill.
And of the chickens in our pot
We also know little.
RAIN-IN-THE-FACE
Mit zweiundsiebzig, nach einem Joghurt
Legte mein Grossvater den Löffel beiseite
Und verlor den Verstand.
Im Garten sang er Lieder für Käfer
Und nannte sich Rudolf der Bär.
Er lernte sanfte Bärenlieder.
Früher trug er Anzug und Stock
Und trat oft für Recht und Ordnung ein.
Seine Kollegen hiessen nämlich
Nagel, Illemann, Muhr.
Zu der Zeit lebte schon mein
Liebster Indianer nicht mehr.
Er hiess Rain-in-the-Face
Und starb am Little Big Horn.
Sein Vater heiss Tretender Bär
Und seine Mutter Weisse-Kuh-Sieht.
RAIN-IN-THE-FACE
At age seventy-two, after eating a yogurt
My grandfather put aside his spoon
And lost his mind.
In the garden he sang songs for the beetles
And called himself Rudolf the Bear.
He learned sweet bear songs.
Before he had a suit and cane
And often stood up for law and order.
His colleagues were called
Nagel, Illemann, Muhr.
At that time my favourite Indian
Was no longer alive.
He was called Rain-in-the-Face
And died at Little Big Horn.
His father was named Kicking Bear
And his mother White Cow Sees.
Gestern Nacht wurde es
Ganz plötzlich still.
Under dem allerschwärzensten
Reglosen Himmel standen
Reglos die Bäume.
Nur unser Hund benagte leise
Die Fransen des Teppichs.
Am nächsten Morgen
Lag überall Reif.
Last night, all of a sudden,
it became utterly silent.
Under the blackest
Motionless sky, the
Trees stood dead still.
Only our dog nibbled quietly
On the frayed edges of the carpet.
The next morning
The land was covered with hoarfrost.
Thinking about Germany
by Werner Herzog
SACHRANG, 15 JUNE 1982
From the Mount of Olives chapel, just by the customs post, went the path through beautiful, tall, damp forest towards Sachrang, which I rapidly lost sight of as I climbed up via Mitterleiten. A construction machine was grinding heavy gravel next to the shell of a brick house they will never finish building. At Mitterleiten, I was overtaken by a farmer on his motorcycle. I knew who he was, but he didn’t recognise me when I greeted him. Only hesitantly and with difficulty did I manage the first few strides. At the spot where the builders’ rubbish was being dumped in the forest, where the lorries drive in over a bed of crushed roofing tiles between the trees, where the damp wind threatens to wrench off to the mountain plastic tarpaulins, held down by stones and looking like plundered corpses, where timid ducks fled before me from the ugly gravel ponds of the never fully completed building site, at this spot – after wandering around my past in my thoughts for a long time – I took leave of my beloved Sachrang, the scene of my childhood, and set off in great haste in the cool rain and through the dripping grass and yarrow up the mountainside. The fields smelt of mown grass, and I cast a glance across the valley at the Geigelstein, via which I would return after my long journey on foot. At this moment, I was filled with a sense of courage and certainty, stretching from border to border and from horizon to horizon. As I climbed up to the Spitzstein mountain hut, a loneliness increasingly settled on the countryside below me, very gently, much as a big strong animal might settle on the ground. For almost a whole hour, the innkeeper of the hut stared fixedly at me through a big telescope as I climbed the slopes towards him.
*
Steep descent to the Bavarian Alps. Several ugly alpine houses in an insignificant basin. This is the start of the woodland track to Wildbad Kreuth. At a stroke, after it had started to rain for a while on the way down, darkness descended as if heralding something biblical. For safety’s sake I took refuge on a bench under the projecting roof of a hut, and didn’t have long to wait before a violent storm arose, raging along the narrow valley and sweeping white and grey patches of mist in amongst the groaning trees. When it got worse and worse and I thought the rainstorm was at its most violent, something else occurred that made what had happened so far seem like a paltry beginning. Everywhere foaming white cataracts came rushing down from the steep wall opposite, then everything was shrouded in raging white clouds. These clouds broke up, revealing the treetops, and then fled away along the slopes in panic-stricken files. Like a curtain, the whole scene was then torn open, making visible raging cataracts of white foam and rivulets that hadn’t existed before. The rain struck me just as a divine punishment strikes evil-doers. Waiting a long time until the worst was over, I gazed into this strange frenzy, knowing that no one else was witness to it apart from me. Given the curiously depressed state of mind I found myself in, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the border and going down into some inhabited place in the valley, so I elected to head west and then steeply uphill in a somewhat southerly direction into the massif, though the rain had not ceased but merely stopped coming down at full force. The steep ascent took me at first alongside a raging waterfall. The stony path itself had been transformed into a swollen stream that got worse and worse further up. I was soon totally surrounded by cloud. When I arrived up on the Wild Man’s col, the whole horizon suddenly opened up before me, permeated with a yellowish-orange glow in the rain. Deep into the heart of the massif, I could see mountaintops, valleys and forests shining for one glorious fleeting moment. It was like a sign of great promise for a whole thirsting nation. Meanwhile, behind me a billowing white curtain of mist was shooting upwards from the abyss, immediately afterwards closing off the scene behind me with a theatrical gesture. Then, by the side of an alpine hut marked by the ravages of time, I came upon two shiny, brand-new signs, one for the free state of Bavaria, the other for the Federal Republic of Germany. The Austrian sign was badly dented and merely said: “Attention, National Border.”
I spent the evening up in the hut in conversation with the nineteen-fifties German champion in canoeing and wild-water racing, who told me about his life as a sportsman in the post-war period. He had often been so hungry, he said, that he had cried. On arrival in Wildbad Kreuth next mornin
g I was tempted to go as far as the house of F. J. Strauss and invite myself in for a sandwich to keep me going. But then I simply didn’t have the nerve to sit there chewing food in his company, with Germany’s core ripped apart by barbaric absurdities. A farmer in rubber boots had tied a limping bull to the back of his tractor and was pulling it behind him along the main road. The bull was advancing reluctantly, snorting as it went, and when I looked upwards I saw the mountain peaks quite clearly bow to him.
*
The solemn sound of church bells from the valley. The fighting, strangling and murdering action of the forests also proceeds with silent solemnity. A pensioner, sitting on a bench, was asleep in the afternoon sun. “Good, good,” he said in his sleep, and a little later, “Oh yes, good.” On a sign next to the bench, indicating the border, written in felt pen and already almost worn away by the elements, stood the words: “Germany is bigger than the Federal Republic.” In the forest the birds were starting to curse the forest. In the hut at the top of the Krinner Kofl I talked for a long time to a retired teacher from the Münster area. In response to my enquiries, he told me how the war had ended for him. In Holland, when the Canadians were advancing with their tanks and were only a few hundred feet away, he had – acting under orders – been taking prisoners at a farm beyond the advancing line of enemy tanks. By turning his weapon against his own superior officer, he’d prevented him from having the prisoners shot in the Dutch farmhouse. Then, together with the Dutch captives and the superior officer he’d now also taken prisoner, he had so to speak followed the enemy current, below the level of the raised road along which the Canadian tanks were advancing, under the cover of just a few bushes. But in attempting to overtake the enemy and get back to his own lines, he himself had been captured, together with his prisoners.
The innkeeper of the hut had mounted the silhouette of a chamois made of plywood up on the rock face, and it stood out against the sheer walls of the Karwendel range that were glowing in the rays of the setting sun. Lots of tourists, he told me, took it to be real. In an enclosure next to the hut there is a tame stag. A tourist, sitting only a hundred feet away, enjoying his afternoon coffee and cakes in the cafe for day trippers, picked it up in the viewfinder of his telescope and shouted to his wife, “Mum, Mum, look, there is a deer!” Taking the telescope from him, his wife, after studying the beast for some time, ticked him off, saying, “Egon, that’s not a deer, it’s a buck.” The mentally retarded son of the forester living in the house near by came up and, emitting peculiar sounds from deep within his strange being, started to tug at me and then at a clever-looking hunting dog. The two of us patiently let him have his way. Later the boy followed me across to the hut of the alpine club, where I was just collecting my belongings together, and helped himself to my last piece of chocolate. I let him have it because he was making a move as if to take my binoculars and notebook too. As I had sacrificed such a small portion of my worldly goods without putting up any resistance, he seemed clearly content to put an end to his thieving spree there, merely lying down on the other articles which he would certainly have liked to have.
Just before Mittenwald, I saw a woman sitting on a bench by the educational nature trail and weeping. At a loss as to how to get myself past her, I greeted her cautiously. Looking at me through her tears, she returned my greeting without interrupting her weeping. Then I came to the barbed-wire fence of the Alpine Regiment’s barracks, which seemed to go on for ever. There were signs warning of shooting practice. I left Mittenwald almost at a run. I never saw such commercial exploitation of the countryside anywhere. Paths spread with sand as in the grand parks of spa towns, educational nature trails and, walking on them, people who were themselves just as stunted. The Watzmann stood there in the wan light of evening, its rocks appearing to get colder and colder with their whitishgrey hues. It’s a dogged mountain, the Watzmann. The woods became quite still, without a breath of wind. Two wild ducks were floating on a marshy pond, silently, like primeval dreams. Above them, doggedly, towered the Watzmann, while beyond the trees, the mountain slopes and the rocky crevices reigned an immense, quite transparent stillness. Walking around a large game fence, I came upon a big, almost factory-like site for the feeding of game animals, with great rakes for hay, salt licks, observation stands and one of those unimaginative huts too. In the field towards the forest two young deer were grazing together with a hind. When I appeared, they observed me closely for a while, trying to sniff out who this was that had come. “Herzog’s my name,” I said quietly and confidentially, and they set off at a majestically springy trot, disappearing into the wood.
Yesterday I lost an election I had put myself forward for as a candidate with no hope of winning. The whole thing took place in Hamburg, the victor being Leisler-Kiep, which struck me as strange. The various losing candidates, all members of parties except for me, were invited out onto a balcony high above the Elbe harbour. The balcony, though totally frozen over, had been deemed an appropriate enough backdrop for the television broadcast because of the spectacular view it afforded of the arctic ice fields stretching from here to the icy peaks of Spitzbergen. When it came to the congratulations, I, as the only non-party candidate, was last in line, waiting for the moment when the cameras would be switched off, and I had to hurry because the election winner was already turning to go. In the process I lost my footing, slid under the handrail of the frozen balcony and plunged into the yawning depths of the glacial tongues that fell away abruptly before me into the river Elbe. Filled with a sudden horror, I realised this was the end of me, but I had the presence of mind while still in the air to spread out my arms like a parachute jumper drifting diagonally into formation with his comrades below him, and thus to steer my fall in such a way that I plunged into the icy water of the river hundreds of feet downstream, just beyond the sharp edge of the broken-off ice floes. And since on this day the river was one of mercury, not water, this helped to cushion my breakneck fall. For a long time, presumably unconscious, I lay on the shore of the iced-up Elbe, and my memories of the subsequent period are only blurred. I can recall seeing a big ocean liner turn away after giving up the search for me. I can see the colour of the water it left in its churned-up, icy wake, a broad ribbon disappearing into the depths of the Spitzbergen archipelago. Lightning flashes in the distance brought some comfort. A band of rain lay firmly and resolutely over Germany. In an abandoned lift shaft there dwelt only despair beyond measure. On the ground, between rain-soaked nettles and in the fragments of broken tiles, a new faith in Germany begins to grow. I took out the tiny mouth organ I had been given, only the size of a thumbnail. It only has four notes, not enough to play the national anthem.
*
In Balderschwang people had set up their garden swing chair precisely so as to get the best view of the meadow. So there they sat, as on a summer holiday, taking a look at the cows. I climbed to the right, higher and higher into the mountains. It was already late, and light rain set in. Two cows followed me for a long time, as if expecting to hear the message to end all messages from me. “You’re no cows,” I said to them, “you’re princesses,” but even that didn’t stop them. Only when I crossed a rain-soaked, blotchy snow field did they stay behind. On top, by the cable-car station, I had a vast, far-reaching view over Germany. Stretching out as far as the hazy, orange-tinted horizon I could see valleys and hills, becoming gentler and dotted with farms and hamlets as the land grew flatter in the far distance. To the west, bathed in a silver that slowly turned to reddish gold, lay Lake Constance. Pale, stormladen clouds hovered over the whole scene, and far to the west, as in Old Master paintings, oblique reddish-orange rays of the setting sun were breaking through shafts of rain. Without casting a shadow, a subdued light settled evenly on silvery dark woods and silvery bright fields. In this shadow-free sheen, Germany looked as if it were submerged under water. It was a submissive country. I sat down. In chaotic flight, swallows were darting just above the hilltop away into the evening light. As if numbed, Germany
lay there indecisively. In concert halls, you get this second of indecisiveness and silence when, listening to some little-known orchestral work, nobody is quite sure whether the piece has ended or not. In a whole hall full of people, everyone is waiting for everyone else, until the applause starts, bringing release to the audience. It is just such a second of dread, of fearful, frozen expectation, only extended over a long period lasting for decades, that Germany is inescapably caught up in. There it lay, this un-land, just as things unlucky and unloved exist; this un-territory, then, that clings tight with its broken limbs to the name Germany. It lay before me, visible from frontier to frontier.
A big bough came crashing down to the ground from a tall tree. My country lay there in the middle of Europe, of all countries the only one that had remained in the very core of its being barbaric. A country filled with longing, lost amidst aims that were not identifiable, unredeemed, obliged to admit that it had become homeless within its own territory. Having eaten their fill, people were going to bed. On Lake Constance, a swan was swimming from this shore to that.
Germany has given away all its secrets in two world wars.
*
Everywhere there is the smell of hay. The countryside is heavy with cherries. In Stein am Rhein elderly women, a whole busload of them, were passing through the city gate from a car park outside it and advancing in the direction of the town hall. “About turn, about turn,” shouted a tour guide, wearing a small, brightly coloured checked hat, and since the file of women had already spread out considerably, the command was passed only hesitantly down the line, before eventually even those at the very front turned round in order to take photos of the half-timbered gateway from the inside. Beyond the town, I took a look at the Rhine’s strong current, the swans, the wooden rowing boats. What I was looking at was another century. I dipped my arms deep into the water, bent over it and drank. You can drink the Rhine. I ate some bread with it. On the paths there are either brusque commands addressed to walkers, such as, “Keep out! Mortal danger!” “No entry, automatic firing devices!” or the most stupid of verses involving spoonerisms. There appears to be no kind of language in between. By the Freiwald chapel there is the start of a wildlife reserve. The sign saying so would, in fact, be enough, but underneath it you then have the following on a plaque: “Bear in mind, walker, that you’re passing through nature, where there lives many a poor creature. We therefore entreat you to remain on the marked paths, for in order to live the dear animals need their peace. Do your bit to help protect both wildlife and woods. Please stick to the paths.”
