I remember my brother calling out to me once, saying that J was watching another one of his mountain climbing films. We knew that J always went into that entranced state when he was watching a Luis Trenker mountain climbing film, his ‘Hölderlin State’ via other means. He thought he knew his stuff when it came to mountain climbing, superlatively, and mountain rescue too, for the mountain rescuers were his heroes. My uncle sat there alone in the living room, gazing fixedly at the Luis Trenker film, hunched forwards into an almost military position of attention, ready for action, as if he too were part of the mountain rescue effort, sitting in the mountain rescue hut at base camp at that very moment, perhaps drinking a robust, hearty Schnapps with his mountain rescue colleagues, all of them with their gazes fixed on the mountain, and in front of him on the living room table was a glass tankard of Henninger with the bottle next to it, half empty. We spied on our spellbound uncle and his alpine ecstasy through the crack in the door for a while, already giggling away (as far as I know he never even saw the mountains in his Rhineland or Wetterau worlds, apart from the Vordertaunus that is), then my brother, twelve years old at the time, would creep into the living room in anticipation of what was about to unfold. In all seriousness and with a straight face, my brother then asked J what he was watching. J explained the film to him, his eyes gleaming. He was a die-hard fan of Luis Trenker. Luis Trenker may have been Italian, but he was from the South Tirol, so for my uncle that practically made him German. Not like someone who might have worked at the post depot with him, not like those dark-haired Spaniards or Italians, even though Luis Trenker did in actual fact have dark hair (so did my uncle, as it happens). Luis Trenker, always alone on the mountain, in stormy weather, in hail, alone in the forest, yet just five minutes later running over the yellow-tinged meadows with the belling stags, and his mother always waiting at home (J had a mother too), and somewhere the girl in the dirndl dress would be waiting too (J didn’t have one of those, even though his later bed-fellow was called Rosl, a name which might as well have been plucked straight from one of those old black-and-white Heimat films). And by then the mountain rescue team was on its way, and Uncle J explained to my brother who, how and where, and precisely in which meadow and for what purpose on which mountain ridge they were on their way, and that they had encountered stormy weather… and that in this stormy weather they couldn’t even bivouac — he said the word bivouac with particular emphasis, stretching out his index finger and wagging it back and forth emphatically. On the screen was a film set, an artificial rock face with snowdrifts in front of it, and the same shot of the valley kept being repeated again and again. Whenever the rock face was shown in close-up, my uncle would cry out, Look! the rock face, a really dangerous rock face, perhaps the most dangerous and most difficult one in existence. Once the mountain rescue team came into the shot, climbing the rock face in their attempt to rescue whomever was stranded in the storm, unable to even bivouac, and once night had fallen in the studio and the floodlights had been turned down, Uncle J’s gaze would start to gleam and an ever increasing tension would seize his body. Then I came into the room too, sitting down without a word as far as possible from J. He stared at the screen, his gaze fixed on the important happenings on the mountain. The happenings were Uncle J’s happenings too, as he sat there in our living room. My parents were away, so my grandmother and J had been appointed to look after us. It must have been at a time when he didn’t stink as much as he did later, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to handle being there in the living room with him. Nor, I imagine, in the house in general. His mother must have forced him to carry out his bodily ablutions; presumably he had gone muttering and hissing down to the shower in his realm, the cellar. A team of five! J called out. On the mountain, the team of five, without the ability to bivouac, and behind them the speedy rescue party, mobile and agile, the mountain rescue team. The team of five was shown on the rock face, while someone from above blew down something that was supposed to look like snow. We found all of this hilarious, even though it wasn’t supposed to be. There they were, the despairing faces, and then the mountain rescue team, making their way further up and up. These were real mountaineers! Why, asked my brother, don’t they go in by helicopter? Why doesn’t the mountain rescue team rescue by helicopter? The film was set in the fifties or sixties, after all, and back then they were already conducting helicopter rescues, my brother knew that much. In a storm like this incredibly dangerous storm, it would be too dangerous for the mountain rescue team to fly so close to the rock face, said my uncle, dreaming himself into every syllable of his sentence as he said it. In Friedberg in the Wetterau, people could say things like that, he could say words like those as he sat there in front of the television, captured by its spelclass="underline" storm… incredibly dangerous… rock face… mountain rescue… And so he sat there in the Wetterau, talking about the mountain, blissfully happy. Why is it too dangerous? asked my brother. It’s a rock face, said my uncle in his expert tone of voice, a really steep rock face, and with the strong wind (see, look how the snowflakes are swirling around!), you can’t steer the helicopter in those conditions, he said, as if he knew all about it. And then another sentence burst out of him, that the mountain rescue team were the real heroes of the modern era. Even his poetry leaned towards the superlative. They were great men, the mountain rescuers, and my uncle understood them, sitting there in front of our television and gazing into it, awestruck by the mountain and its rescue team. My uncle always wanted to, always
had to belong, even here. And he walked into a trap with this longing to belong, as if things could be the same for him as they (perhaps) were for others (the mountain rescuers?). He is probably longing to be on the mountain at this very moment, as he sits there in our living room. Not in the five-man team, but following quickly on their heels, scrambling along in a technically perfect and self-sacrificial manner, heroically grand and oblivious to everyone around him, self-sacrificial like the Wehrmacht had been, for they had only failed in Russia because of the winter, after all — unfortunately they hadn’t had a mountain rescue team — and my uncle could talk about them too, about the JU-52 aviators who had fearlessly fetched the soldiers from the cauldron right in the nick of time. He loved twists like that, he lived and radiated them: total self-sacrifice, right until the very last moment. I’m sure he had fantasies of being an aviator hero, a heroic captain, a tank hero, and Rommel for sure, just like he fantasised about being a stonemason and idolised the crane driver on the company grounds almost as much as he did at the Friedberg policemen — who wore uniforms and had weapons, after all — and as much as the hunters up in Forsthaus Winterstein or in Jagdhaus Ossenheim, where J went all the time. Why are the mountain rescuers the heroes of the modern era? asked my brother, and any person other than my uncle, a man brought into the world by the forceps of fate, would have realised at that moment just what this would lead to after a mere few minutes, namely in him going into a rage and pursuing us to the furthest reaches of the garden fence to beat us for having cheated him out of his film and his mountain rescue. But my uncle, not suspecting a thing, answered just like he always did, with the innocence of a child, without any suspicion. The mountain rescuers are heroes because they rescue people who have fallen victim to a mountain emergency, putting themselves (at this point his voice would become hushed and solemn) in mortal peril. My brother: So the mountain rescuers have to go onto the mountain because some people are stuck there? My uncle: They go and get them, putting themselves in mortal peril. (All the while he was talking, he would stare intently at the screen and the events unfolding on it.) My brother: So if the mountain rescuers are putting themselves in danger because others are putting themselves in danger for no reason at all, why don’t they just forbid them from putting themselves in danger in the first place? My uncle hesitated and wrinkled his forehead. My brother: If people would just ban this crappy mountain climbing business, then there wouldn’t be any need for mountain rescuers, it’s just stupid. Why do people climb mountains anyway, and who pays for the mountain rescue? It’s really dumb, no one needs to do that kind of thing. Already beaten by this point, my uncle could only exclaim: You have no idea! You don’t know a thing about mountain rescue! And he was about to receive the finishing blow. My uncle had stumbled into a severe storm on his mountain, and I too joined in the effort to bring him down. Aha, we asked, but what do you know about mountain rescue? For that matter, what do you know about mountain climbing in general? Or even just about mountains? All you know is the Winterstein. We emphasised the you just like he did his I whenever he had to go down to the cellar to fetch something. (The Winterstein is right on our doorstep, three hundred metres above the level of the town, and it’s a gentle ascent, so there’s no need for mountain rescue; there’s just an inn and a military road built for the tanks.) In short, merciless as we were, we dragged our uncle away from his rock face and back to the reality of his own existence, we robbed him of everything, even the mountain rescue, because we had long since realised what our uncle was and because the concoction of choleric temperament and enthusiasm, when it exploded, for us was no less spectacular than the annual New Year’s fireworks, although to be honest we didn’t even like those anymore and found them boring in comparison. My uncle stood there in the living room, lifting his hand in a threatening fashion, as if about to deliver someone a blow to the ear, red all over, trembling and looking at us with equal quantities of aggression and helplessness, the poor man, and it was our fault, and I had joined in again. J would never have done such a thing back when he was a child, he would never have tormented someone like that. And now that he was an adult, not even we children took him seriously; we didn’t even take him seriously as someone entrusted with looking after us. His adulthood was perhaps the only thing he had left after surviving the Wetterau and the return from his emigration to the Rhineland, but we didn’t even let him have that, and yet I was only seven years old. My brother was already active in a political youth group back then, something connected to the first political party he joined, maybe he was even a junior member already, and he could already debate well at twelve years of age, he had his rhetoric, even though he probably couldn’t actually defeat anyone yet, but when it came to annihilating my uncle he was already perfectly capable (and so was I). We tore him to pieces during his Luis Trenker films just like my grandfather tore the roast duck to pieces at Christmas, and it was just as festive an occasion for us, an expert tearing-to-pieces of the uncle. We were able to do it in all kinds of contexts, for it was easy to see how the dynamite he was made of could easily be ignited. If he was standing out in the garden with us, talking superlatively about the garden which his brother-in-law had just put in, even then my brother would find something to pick on, so to speak, using his words to rob my uncle of his superlative garden. Back then, I wondered whether that might be what people learned to do in the Party. It only occurred to me later that my uncle may have loved our garden just as much as I did, or indeed that he may have loved any of the same things that I did, from the robins and the nightingales to the badger and the women or maybe even all people, in so far as they came into question. That he too, to put it simply, had a life and had been put into this life by God, like everything, from the badger to the mountain rescue to the barrier that stopped him from leaping on his own mother. But by the time it occurred to me it was too late, as is usually the case, and he died soon after. Shortly before his death he was, I believe, legally incapacitated by my family, to safeguard his portion of the inheritance and out of their fear that he might marry Rosl. In the end, he gave what he had to his passion. Rosl spent the last year of her life compulsively buying pots and pans, and these too needed to be paid for and dealt with by us after her death, an apartment full of pots and pans, ordered in catalogues from all over Germany, another passion, and one which remained unquenchable until her last breath. Rosl died in bed next to my uncle, side by side with him. Death came at four in the morning, the doctors said. My uncle hadn’t even realised. He noticed only at around eight, when, clueless as ever, he called his sister: Rosl is dead.