Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt
Ein Rheinbuch
I was born in Boppard on the Rhine, and for many years I lived in Lahnstein (where the Lahn flows into the Rhine), not far from Koblenz (where the Moselle joins the Rhine, at the Deutsches Eck). Today I live in Flörsheim on the Main River. Rivers have always played an important role in my life, especially the Rhine. So it is not surprising that I eventually dedicated a book to this topic. It was my most extensive and complicated project to date. By the time the Rhine Book was finished in 1992, I had spent almost two years working on it, from my initial text research in various libraries to the time-consuming production process. Right from the start, I had resolved to cite only the original editions of all the texts (the first editions, if possible), and not to use any of the countless Rhine anthologies as sources. That included foreign-language texts, which I used in their original versions with only a few exceptions. The book has eleven chapters; each covers a different aspect of the Rhine and/or river theme. Each chapter begins with a black-and-white photograph that takes up a full double spread and has the chapter title printed on it. Some chapters are purely text, and some are illustrated. A blue line runs through the entire book, symbolizing the river. It looks very different in each chapter; it is a typographical element in the text chapters, then an expressive pictorial element again in the chapter Nuit Rhénane, where its blue takes up the entire double spread and represents the nighttime river and the sky above the dark hills. In the chapter Nun schwammen wir in die Gebürge, an undulating azure line stands for the river, which snakes its way through the narrow Middle Rhine Valley. In the chapter Fest steht und treu, which has to do with the neighborly relations between Germany and France in the 19th century, the line disappears entirely. All that remains is an empty space between the polemical texts by Nicolaus Becker and Alfred de Musset, printed in the national colors of each country, irreconcilably facing off against one another on either side of the Rhine. In the next chapter, Die Überfahrt, the river returns in the form of a 4-point line. It poses no hindrance to the text blocks, which describe various river crossings. At the end, after the last chapter and after an extensive table of contents and colophon, the blue line flows into the blue endpaper. When choosing the texts, I had a kind of collage in mind; among other things, it would point out connections and similarities between different texts. If possible, readers were to experience the texts from various sources as one cohesive text (at least within each chapter), so there are no author or source references in the chapters themselves. However, they are given in detail at the end of the book, in the table of contents. Let me give two examples to illustrate this. In the first chapter, Stadt Land Fluß, the texts are arranged geographically; in other words, they follow the flow of the river. The chapter starts in Switzerland and ends in Holland. Although the first two texts do not specifically describe the Swiss Rhine, they come from Swiss writers Gottfried Keller and Urs Widmer. In his Schweizer Geschichten, Widmer describes a balloon flight from Frankfurt to Zurich via Basel. Next comes Gottfried Keller with his Rheinbilder. Gottfried Keller wrote this poem about a hundred years before Urs Widmer’s text. Together, they matched my ambivalent feelings about the concept of homeland, and they seemed like a good, somewhat distanced introduction to the Rhine Book. The second example is from the chapter Nuit Rhénane. Clemens Brentano’s poem from the Rheinmährchen, written around 1812, and Wolfgang Borchert’s text from 1949, Die Elbe, describe the same mood. Whether one is on the Rhine or the Elbe or the Mississippi, the feelings are similar. The inclusion of other cities and other rivers also plays a role in the Rhine Book. Huckleberry Finn’s Mississippi River, for instance, is in the same chapter: The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. With the Rhine Book, I had an interesting experience in the book arts scene. When the book was finished, I got the opportunity to display it in a series of exhibitions along the Rhine, showing all of the original pages of the book spread out in a continuous line along the museum walls. As a rule, it is always a challenge to exhibit books – when you only have one copy of a book, you can only show it from the outside or open the book to one double spread. But I had printed so many extra sheets for the Rhine Book that we were able to show all 240 pages in this unusual exhibition.
240 pages, uncoated paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, cloth-over-board with title labels, 16 x 24.5 cm,
100 numbered and signed copies. Lahnstein 1992.