The horrors of ice and darkness

The horrors of ice and darkness is a novel by Christoph Ransmayr .

It tells the story of the Austro-Hungarian Payer-Weyprecht expedition from 1872 to 1874, in the course of which the northernmost part of Eurasia, the Franz Joseph Land , was discovered, and is a mixture of a classic documentary novel and fiction .

The book was published by Christian Brandstätter Verlag in 1984 with an edition of only 4,000 and initially went unnoticed. It was not until the success of Ransmayr Ovid novel The Last World and the publisher change to a large trade publisher helped the Roman international breakthrough.

content

The planning and execution of the expedition is assembled as an experience report from a variety of historical sources . In alternation with these facts, the fate of Joseph Mazzini is pursued, a descendant of one of the Italian sailors and the son of an upholsterer and a miniature draftsman from Trieste , who 100 years later is caught up in this ancestral story and finally disappears in the ice of Spitsbergen .

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Composition and language

A large number of sources are brought together here: original reports and diaries of the Austro-Hungarian polar expedition from 1872 to 1874 ( cited in detail and with names in italics ), tourist information, biblical quotations , geographical and nautical tables and historical synopses . There are also digressions on the search for the Northeast Passage , the alternative to the southern route around Africa, and on entering the North Pole from national and personal vanities. In addition, 23 images from contemporary publications are used. This source work supports the impression of cosmopolitanism and the report , for which it also uses a language of short sentences, abbreviated sentence breaks and the change from the past tense to the present tense after the first quarter of the novel.

The work is a large report, a “report”, but which breaks through the form of a complex report in many places through selective fantasy and then through the figure of Mazzini to the form of the novel. With this figure and some pointers from the narrator about the limits of his knowledge of this figure ("... I don't know ..."), he expressly leaves the territory of historical facts and enters the realm of invention. With the alternation of sections between fact and fiction, which is held up to the end, the novel explores this borderland - and probably also the border crossing of the reporter Ransmayr to the novelist. However, it is astonishing how poetic the language of the historical sources is even without the later reshaping by Ransmayr.

For Ransmayr, the story of the North Pole journeys is more hubris than heroism, and he agrees with Weyprecht , the naval commander of the Austro-Hungarian expedition, that the only sensible purpose of these expeditions could be to expand knowledge about the earth, to “destroy the myths of the open polar sea, the myths of paradise in the ice. "

interpretation

With the figure of Mazzini, a descendant of one of the Italian sailors, the invention appears alongside the facts: about a hundred years later, Mazzini follows in the footsteps of the first expedition and has the motive to confirm his ideas of adventure based on reality. This addresses the sub-theme of the repetition of extreme situations in the footsteps of others, which determines the novel from the first page on. The "adventures" that can be booked online today are juxtaposed with real adventures, which Roald Amundsen said that for the professional explorer they were mostly just "errors in his calculations" that would then be paid for with frozen and bleeding cheeks and ears.

The figure of Mazzini, who gets caught up in this story and finally disappears with a team of dogs in the ice of Spitsbergen, appears less like a similar repetition and more like a tragic farce, more a careful suicide than even the beginning of self-knowledge. The “blinking Luna Park” of tourists is a completely different world from the “tension” that real researchers feel when expanding our knowledge.

The Austro-Hungarian polar expedition lost only one (!) Member due to illness, and the main “accidents” of the expedition only began after its end: After their triumphant return, the two commanders broke off their career paths for various reasons and looked for each other new goals, correcting the "mistakes" of their previous life as explorers. The real adventure is not reliving “the horrors of ice and darkness” à la Mazzini, but life itself. And for this greatest of all possible adventures, for this painful path of self-knowledge, as the author thinks, there is an enormous amount Wisdom, cheerfulness and encouragement are the most important baggage.

literature

• Christoph Ransmayr: The horrors of ice and darkness. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-596-25419-1 .
• Audiobook version read by the author. 410 min. Deutsche Grammophon, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-8291-1389-7 .

Web links

• Review notes on The Horrors of Ice and Darkness at perlentaucher.de
• Alfred Pfabigan : Review of the audio book version ( Memento from January 27, 2010 in the Internet Archive )