“Die Dächer, die du
siehst, sind nicht für dich gebaut. Das Brot, das du riechst, ist nicht für dich gebacken. Und
die Sprache, die du hörst, wird nicht für dich gesprochen.“ – Irmgard Keun, Nach Mitternacht
Recently, I rekindled my decade spanning friendship with public library in my town of Regensburg. Set in a beautiful historic building, it managed to weather the times while continuing to serve everyone, young and old, wealthy and poor.
But what happend to the once prominent section of English language books ? The Hemingways, Steinbecks & Shakespeares that had featured prominently near the central atrium ?
I searched the main floor, climbed some stairs and eventually located a well assorted collection of foreign langugage books, in Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish, Greek, French and Italian. And yes, behind those were also a few colorful paperbacks of recent popular fiction books from England and the US.
I could not find the copy of Somerset Magham’s “A moon and sixpence”, I had borrowed and loved as a teenager, but I can remember the passage that had kept ringing in my mind.
“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.”
For a few decades, I had found a home in England – a modest and peaceful way of life – at least that was what I tried to believe.
But gradually the real England morphed out of its carefully branded surface, unearthing the granite like core of the country, void of values and chillingly cold towards anyone born on the wrong side of a moral scheme based on the military alliances of 1945.
So long then – and back to Beethoven and Schubert, early morning work and most of all the chance to enjoy it all without worrying quaint neighbourhoods that a potentially evil intruder may be on the loose.