High latitudes or messages from the border
High latitudes or news from the border is a travel description published in 1969 by Alfred Andersch . The partly essayistic text reports on a trip to the polar zone north of Svalbard and is illustrated with color plates by the painter Gisela Andersch .
History of origin
In 1965 Alfred Andersch led a film expedition of the Hessischer Rundfunk , where he shot the documentary Haakons Hosentaschen together with Martin Bosboom in the Arctic Ocean near the coast of Spitsbergen . From the experiences on board the “Havella” and his reflections and research on border experiences in the inhumane Arctic, the travel report High latitudes or news from the border arose .
content
On the one hand, Andersch reports on his own experiences, on encounters, on the deep-sea cutter “Havella” and her crew, the skipper, the cook and the helmsman, on his trip to the Seven Islands and the pack ice. He describes his geographical, botanical and landscape observations scientifically, including scientific reports, for example about lichens, ocean currents, drifts , polar bears and rock formations as well as expedition memories of well-known polar adventurers and researchers in his report.
On the other hand, the text is also a “disguised essay”, since Andersch uses his observations to make intellectual approximations to the border on the edge of civilization. This zone of untrodden and untouched and of danger casts an almost magical spell on him and his wife (called Åsa in the book).
The painter Gisela Andersch has added color panels to the work, which make the great silence of this “border” visible. Her photographs mostly show empty landscapes as well as close-ups of polar miniatures, for example “Red Lichen Lichen” or “Blades of Grass that have rotated on the horizon as the sun wandered in a circle”.
Quote
“ The sea at the pack ice border was as smooth as an inland lake, and the walls of gray, stony air above it turned to cloud haze that moved freely, no longer driven by any wind. The black, shiny heads of the bullet seals appeared next to the ship. From this transparency we saw that the border was a wild field of debris; only in the distance did it appear to be what we had imagined: a smooth white desert. "
Reception and literary evaluation
The book was discussed in many national newspapers. The writer and humanities scholar Karl Korn wrote a longer review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . He drew attention to the suggestion of the essayistic content in the subtitle and referred to the high latitude around the "linguistic freshness and descriptive power, the originality of thoughts and observations, the sensitivity of perception for the sake of one of the few beautiful books of this year". He wrote about the pictures by the painter Gisela Andersch that they were built like color compositions; the boldness of the photographer would "occasionally go to the extreme reduction of technical means" and contain the great horizontal silence of the "limit".
The Swiss columnist Manuel Gasser said that it was high time “for a great German writer to take up the not neglected, but shabby category of travelogues and make an example here. For this it was necessary that the man devote all his strength and skill to the undertaking; that he took it as seriously as the creation of a novella or a novel ”.
Werner Helwig remarked that there was something so compelling about reading it, "that you think you have never known Arctic Ocean reports" and wrote in the Rheinische Post about the photographs that they were pictures "into which the view expands."
The reviewer of the time , Ernst Nef, however, found that Andersch's book would be a failure. He complained about linguistic inaccuracies, sloppy philosophical utterances ("throbbing thoughts") and saw the report "misguided", the author had "come to the embellished arts and crafts". This did not go unchallenged. The literary critic and writer Rudolf Hartung pointed out in a letter to the editor that only details had been picked out and no attempt had been made to critically assess the whole. Hartung ended with a doctor comparison: "You don't want to fall into the hands of a diagnostician who draws such conclusions."
expenditure
Book editions
- Diogenes, Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-257-21165-1
- Gutenberg Book Guild, Frankfurt am Main, Vienna, Zurich 1982
- Book Club Ex Libris, Zurich 1976
- Diogenes-Verlag, Zurich 1969.
Excerpts in magazines
- High latitudes . In: Mercury . No. 23,1969
- The journey to the seven islands . In: you . No. 29, 1969
literature
- Karl Korn : In the polar zone. Alfred Andersch “News from the Border” . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 3, 1970.
- Ernst Nef: To a failure. Alfred Andersch second report from a trip to the north . In: Die Zeit of November 28, 1969.
- Rudolf Hartung : Thoughtfulness? Letter to the editor on Ernst Nef: "To a failure". In: The time . No. 48/1969
- Werner Helwig : Bitten by the Arctic . In: Rheinische Post .
Individual evidence
- ↑ High latitude or news from the border . First edition 1969, p. 122/123
- ↑ In the polar zone. Alfred Andersch “News from the Border” . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 3, 1970.
- ↑ You / Atlantis . Zurich 1970, ISSN 0012-6837
- ↑ Bitten by the Arctic . In: Rheinische Post '' .
- ↑ To a failure. Alfred Andersch second report from a trip to the north . In: Die Zeit of November 28, 1969.
- ↑ Thoughts? Letter to the editor on Ernst Nef: "To a failure". In: The time . No. 48/1969