Even in times of general global warming, we shiver again. But since our childhood dreams, snow and ice have promised true winter joys in addition to the trembling parties. One of the most beautiful (and of course scariest) fairy tales begins with three red drops of blood in the snow. In “Snow White”, the warm juice of life is immediately combined with the cold, radiant white.
In general, all great poetry plays with such contrasts and ambivalences. 220 years ago, Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Half of Life” first evokes summer: “With yellow pears / and full of wild roses / the land hangs in the lake…” To end in the second half: “Woe is me, where do I take it when / it is winter, the flowers and where / the sunshine / and shadow of the earth? / The walls stand / speechless and cold, in the wind / the flags clink.”
The last two verses in particular are among the most visually powerful in winter world literature. Are terribly beautiful, and so comes consolation to sorrow. The cold picture warms at the same time. And even one of the portents of modernity, the sinking of the Titanic, is one of our most enjoyable myths.
While an iceberg slashes the hull of the supposedly unsinkable giant ship like a gigantic knife and the cold masses of water are already flooding people and machines from below, the orchestra is still playing high up in the luxury class, and what flows there is champagne.
Nothing meets the situation between rich and poor, above and below, first and second world – and all in the same boat! -ever better. No wonder that the recently deceased Hans Magnus Enzensberger dedicated what was probably his most beautiful epic to the “Titanic” as an ingenious sense of the spirit of the times.
Now 450 years ago, on January 5, 1523, the Alsatian postman Andreas Egglisperger rode across a snow-covered plain and found out afterwards that he had not crossed safe country but rather the frozen Lake Constance. In the later ballad by Gustav Schwab, when the man learns of his ride over the abyss, his heart beats with fright.
But our hearts keep beating. We’re dancing on the frozen volcano this winter of the 1920’s.
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