6

Along the Border

All that’s left of my notes are a few excerpts that exist in a fair copy I happened to make some time ago. The rest of the original disappeared somewhere along the way. I started on my long march on June 15, 1982; thereafter the manuscript contains no dates.

From the Ölberg Chapel next to the customs post, I walked through the beautiful, lofty woods toward Sachrang, which was soon lost from view as I climbed quickly up past Mitterleiten. A construction machine was grinding gravel. Next to it was a brick structure that will never be completed. At Mitterleiten I was overtaken by a local on a motorbike; I knew who he was, but he didn’t recognize me when I said hello. I climbed quickly, but my heart was heavy. At the place where builders’ rubble was dumped into the woods; where the trucks drive their loads of crushed roof tiles through the trees; where the storm wind tugs at the great sheets of plastic, but they are held down like dead bodies by stones; where timid ducks, who must have been through some experiences in the ugly little gravel pool of the never-completed excavation, flew away from me; at that point, after long blundering about in my past, I left my beloved Sachrang, where I had grown up, and climbed in cool rain now and greater haste uphill through dripping grass and yarrow. The meadows smelled of hay, and I looked across the valley in the direction of the Geigelstein, where, much later, I hoped to be returning. Then I was seized by a confident conviction that reached from border to border and horizon to horizon. Siegel Hans was blaring on his trumpet and quickening my step. His trumpet was a slender wisp of a thing, incredibly valuable—over decades of labor, it had been cut by a master craftsman from a rock face that wasn’t rock but a mighty emerald.

As I climbed higher toward the alpine hut on the Spitzstein, a solitude seemed to embrace the land very gently, perhaps in the way that a large and powerful animal carefully lies down. The landlord watched me through his binoculars for the better part of an hour as I climbed toward him—an exotic creature—me—an inhabitant of another galactic world.

I left Mittenwald almost at a jog-trot. I have never seen such a degradation of landscape. Level sanded footpaths as in city parks, confected nature trails, signs pointing out dangers with the inevitable footnote that the community takes no responsibility for anything. The Watzmann peak stood in pale evening light, its rocks seeming to cool by the minute. The Watzmann is an insistent mountain. Silence descended on the woods. On a pond in the moor, two wild ducks swam like ancient dreams. Walking beside a tall deer fence, I suddenly ran into an almost industrial site for deer, with great cribs full of hay, salt licks, observation posts, and a somewhat crude hut. On a meadow in front of the woods, two young stags and a female were grazing; they looked and sniffed appraisingly for a moment. Who was this then? Stranger that I was, even to myself, they didn’t know. Herzog, I introduced myself, at your service, whereupon in a few majestic bounds they vanished into the woods.

I saw fields of ice stretching out ahead of me as far as the glaciers and the icy points of the Svalbard archipelago. They came closer and turned into actual reality. I slipped, skidded under the rails of the iced balcony of a baroque palais, and fell into the yawning depths of glacier tongues, which suddenly broke off in front of me into the Elbe. It was the Elbe, or it was the Siberian Yenisei, I couldn’t be sure. With the sudden shock, I saw my fall as my death, but tumbling through the air, I still had the presence of mind to spread my arms like a parachutist following the others of his unit so, by directing my fall some hundreds of yards farther on, I avoided the sharp edge of the ice and fell instead into the icy waters of the Elbe, which unfortunately carried no water but . . .

There were bells ringing in the depths. The mountains are full of silent ceremony. On a bench sat an old man asleep in the afternoon sun. “Well . . . well,” he was saying in his sleep, and a little later, “No, really . . . well.” germany is bigger than any federal republic was written in felt tip, almost worn away by the weather, on a sign next to the sleeper’s bench that had been put there to mark the frontier.

In the Krinner-Kofler hut, I spent a long time talking to a retired schoolmaster from Münsterland. In answer to my questions, he told me how the war had ended for him. I wanted to hear about its final moments. In Holland, he told me, the Canadians were advancing with armor a mere hundred yards away. In accordance with his orders, and by now behind the line of enemy tanks—they had passed him already on the road—he had just taken some Dutch prisoners on a farm. He had to level his sidearm at his superior; it was the only way of preventing the man from shooting them. Then, with his Dutch prisoners, and his superior, and with just a few bushes between him and the Canadians rolling along the paved road, he had to rough it back to his own fortifications before the enemy arrived. And there he and his prisoners were finally captured.

The feebleminded son of the forester in the lodge next door turned up, and with strange noises from his strange insides, he first tugged at me, then at a clever-looking hunting dog. We both let him do it. Later on, the boy followed me over to the hut of the Alpine Club, where I was just getting my few things together, and he helped himself to my last chocolate bar. I let him take it, as he had his eyes on my field glasses and notebook as well, and since I had let him help himself to a small sample of my possessions without fuss, evidently sufficiently pleased with his acquisitions, he contented himself with lying down on the things he would surely have liked to take.

Steep descent to the Bayer Alp, several squalid houses in a small hollow. This marks the beginning of the forest path to Wildbad Kreuth. All at once, after it had been raining for quite some time on my descent, it got pitch-dark, as though a storm of biblical dimensions were on its way. I took shelter on a bench under the overhanging roof of an empty hut and didn’t have long to wait before a violent tempest raced up the narrow valley, sweeping gray and white shreds of mist into the tossing trees. When it got worse, and I supposed the tempest was at its height, something else came that made everything else look like a trivial beginning. From the sheer cliff face opposite, foaming white waterfalls came down, and everything was swaddled in white racing clouds that shredded and briefly showed the tops of trees then sped away in panic flight along the slope. Like a curtain tearing itself to shreds, the view was opened onto frothing and furious white waterfalls and streams of water that a moment ago had not existed. The storm struck like the rage of God on an infidel. I had to wait a long time for the worst to be over, staring into the incredible fury and knowing that I was the only witness to it. In the strangely depressed state in which I found myself, the idea of going down into the valley, away from my border, and into human habitation seemed unendurable, so I chose the way west, steeply up into the mountains, even though the rain had not yet abated. I started the daunting ascent alongside a raging torrent. The path had turned into a waterfall that got heavier the more I climbed. Before long, I found myself surrounded by clouds. Up at the Wildermann col, the horizon suddenly cracked open, irradiated by yellow-orange rainlight. Vales and peaks and woods appeared looking strangely vulnerable far into the mountains, like a great promise held out to a thirsting people, while behind me an uncertain white sheet of fog boiled up out of the depths. Then, with impeccable theatricality, the stage closed behind me. I spent the evening in the hut talking to the multiple white-water champion of Germany in the fifties, who told me about his life as an athlete in the postwar era. When he was in training, and on his own, he would often cry from hunger.

Balderschwang. I left the holidaymakers behind me with their swing seats and pergolas, and climbed higher into the mountains; it was late already; a drizzle set in. Where to sleep? I was hiking with very little in the way of baggage, no tent or sleeping bag. For a long time, two cows pursued me through the paddocks, as though they hoped to hear something to their advantage. “You are no cows,” I said to them. “You are princesses.” But that wasn’t enough for them; they wanted to hear more. Not until I crossed a rainy, spotty, snowy field did they finally give up. Up at the ski lift, the view of Germany was vast and somehow monstrous. The valleys and foothills with farms and occasional hamlets receded deep into the flattening landscape against a haze of distant orange. To the west, in mild silver light slowly turning to reddish gold, lay Lake Constance. Looming above everything, pale storm clouds, and far in the west, as in old paintings, angled reddish beams of the declining sun piercing through streaks of rain. A pallid, shadowless light now settled indifferently over dark silver woods and light silver fields. In that level gleam, Germany looked to me as though it were under water. It was a submissive sort of country. I sat down. Hunting swallows jagged here and there. Germany seemed undecided, frozen perhaps, as though the performance of a new composition had just ended and the audience doesn’t trust themselves to applaud because no one is quite certain that it is the end. I could feel the moment, but it felt as though it were spread out over decades and Germany inextricably tangled up in it. There it was under me, this un-place, just as there is uncouthness and unavailingness. Could it be that my own country felt homeless within its own boundaries but was still clinging on to the name Germany?

Lake Constance. People went well sated to bed. A swan crossed from here to there. In two world wars, Germany exposed all its secrets. I wished I could be in the company of monks at vespers, a godless guest.

Stein am Rhine. Behind the town I saw the powerful river, the swans, the wooden barges; I was in another century. I plunged both arms into the water, leaned down, and drank. You can drink the Rhine, you know. I ate some bread.

Strasbourg. In Strasbourg I sat on a bench; after a while, a polite Algerian sat next to me. A little later, a second Algerian came with a white plastic bag; he shook hands with his friend, then, of course, with me as well. I was stirred. I had crossed into France. Across the Rhine was Germany, like a figment of someone’s imagination. In Strasbourg Cathedral, silent motorcyclists walked down the silent nave, only their leathers creaking. They carried their helmets under their arms like medieval knights. At night, the cows I shared my field with moaned in their dreams.

In the morning, very early, I woke with a start. I could feel nothing, Germany was gone, everything was gone, it was as though I had suddenly lost something that had been entrusted to me the evening before—or as though someone who was standing watch for an entire army suddenly turned out to have been blinded and the army is unprotected. Everything was gone, and I felt completely blank, without pain or pleasure or desire. Nothing was left. I was like a castle that had no knights in it. The shock did me good. Purple imaginings settled over me.

I can’t remember passing through Wrede, although I know I must have done. I found a flattened Coke can, which must have already been through a couple of winters because it was ivory instead of red. All over, heavy curtains had been drawn; no one was looking for change or liberation. The latest thing to happen was this: a ladies’ group had decided in their ripe old age to learn the trade of butchery, and to prove they were serious, they set a moped on fire outside the nearest bar. From the border, where I was standing, I looked across the hills to Germany, which seemed to bear the silence in cramped and painful but barely perceptible twitchings. The moon was supposed to have risen, but it was nowhere to be seen. The world seemed immense, measured against itself. I lit my lighter, and in my unease, I wrote my own name on the inside of my watch strap. I slept on a hillside under the stars. A few hours later, still night, I got up, troubled by the lights down in the valley and the stars overhead, and vomited. In the small hours, I fell asleep, but then it started to get light. The sun was about to rise. Overhead, on a bough, I could hear a bird shaking itself out and tidying its plumage. After that, it started singing. I got up. Germany before dawn looked unredeemed, its torn fields staring up at the expressionless sky.

I never completed my walk around my country. After more than one thousand kilometers, I got sick and had to go to the hospital for a few days. Today, with hindsight, I realize I would never have been allowed to walk around the GDR because the police wouldn’t let you walk along the Baltic shore. There were too many fugitives setting off for Sweden or Denmark in rowboats and inner tubes. The fall of the Berlin Wall, which I took to be the signal for reunification, is indelibly etched in my memory. I was filming in Patagonia at the time, working on my film Scream of Stone. We were in a remote spot far from any form of civilization, but a mountaineer had got wind of the happening on his shortwave radio a few days after and told me the news in the middle of the filming. I can still feel my deep sense of joy. We ended the shoot early, and I drank Chilean wine with the team. For me, Germany and Bavaria are only a seeming contradiction. First, Germany was never shaped in the crucible of history, and second, Bavaria isn’t anything my family has been associated with over the generations. But even if my family has other roots in Europe, in terms of culture, I am a Bavarian. Bavarian is my first language; the landscape is my landscape, and I know where home is.

On foot, and often barefoot at that, I was always on the go in Sachrang and the mountains around. Later on, that acquired a different quality with my conversion to Catholicism and my hiking with a group of religiously minded contemporaries on the border of then Yugoslavia and Albania. I will have more to say on that later. But walking became more important and more explicit in connection with my grandfather Rudolf, my father’s father; I had the sense of walking in his landscapes. I was closer to him than to my actual father. I think it all had to do with the way the turn-of-the-century generation had deeper historical roots than the generation of my parents, who quit the continuum of European culture when they opted for National Socialism. They descended into a vague Germano-mystical archaism and went under with it. Perhaps I am being too subjectively concentrated on my own family here. Families are strange creatures, and mine is no exception. In addition, there is the circumstance that I knew my grandfather only when he was already insane.