Christa Wolf

I just learned that Christa Wolf died. She was 84, so it's not a case if "too young", but I feel sad nonetheless. Some of her books coloured and changed the shape of my thoughts, and even those I didn't feel were as good never failed to make me thinks.

Just one favourite: "Kein Ort, Nirgends", a novella about a fictional meeting between Karoline von Günderode and Heinrich von Kleist, two of our most language-sensitive poets if the early nineteenth century. They both committed suicide, and they did have shared friends, but as far as we know they never met. Wolf writes a novella around a single day in which they do meet, and she does it in such an unsensational, empathic way that it never feels trite or like the literary equivalent of dark fic. Moreover, her dialogue feels so real, feels true to the poets, and this given who they were is an amazing feet of itself. And she leaves them three dimensional, with flaws, instead of going for the future martyr for art approach. It's beautiful to read, and to me is every bit as good as Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway".

May she rest in peace.

Mainz, or A Study in Scarlet

One of my favourite train journeys within Germany is the railroad between Cologne and Mainz, for which you must take the IC, not the faster but duller ICE. It's directly next to the Rhine, sometimes at places where you can't go either by car or on foot, and ridiculously romantic with all the castles, cliffs and vineyards. These days it's also noticable that the Rhine is at an all time low, but there you go.

Mainz, which has not one but two museums devoted to the Romans (featuring among other things the tombstone of Domitian's food taster - worst jov ever y/y?), as well as a Magna Mater/Isis temple, none of which I could visit this time around, is a city devoted to red sandstone. Which looks exceedingly pretty even under grey skies. Proof awaits below the cut.

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