Cornelia Funke tells stories of fairies and mud monsters, of adventurous girls, a gang of children in Venice ? and her stories somewhere between fantasy and adventure are Germany?s most successful literary export at the moment....
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September 15, 2006 was a typical hunting day in the rocky crevices of the upper Val Sumvitg. Having rained the previous day, it was still overcast, mist rising from the valleys hung between the cliffs. It was a question of staying in the cabin, or taking my rifle and going down the mountain. I'll go down, I thought and eventually reached the spot where an old path leads into the Greina Ebene. The fog was evaporating, the weather was improving quicker than expected and it tempted me to go up instead of down the valley. The path leads along the mountain on the right of the Rhine, over a snow bridge and then along the left side of the water. As I approached from behind, I saw that the snow bridge was gone. People had long been used to crossing the river on this natural bridge, and something like that sticks in your mind. But it gave me no further cause for concern.
I'd just have to go through the water. I took off my clothes, stuffed my trousers and socks into my rucksack, hung my shoes and gun round my neck, and feeling my way into the Rhine with a stick, climbed into the water, paraphernalia dangling about me. Step for step I stemmed myself against the river, but it soon became clear, deep into the Rhine 1,950 metres above sea level, that I was no match for this undertaking. I was left with no choice but to turn round.
On that hunting day, standing in the ice-cold Rhine, I felt the consequences of global warming right up to my belly button: the disappearance of avalanche remains that we thought would be there forever - the vadretgs, which had served shepherds and hunters as bridges over ravines and streams. Avalanche remains, slippery snow, solid snow masses, snow bridges, only now that they are gone does the mountain man realise how important they were, for getting into the mountains quickly, for crossing valleys and ravines, or for sliding down and descending the mountain as rapidly as on skis.
Snow in summer and autumn has become a rarity in the mountains. It brought contrast to the landscape, it made orientation easier, helped explain where animals are: "D'you see the wedge-shaped bit of snow up there on the cliff-face above that long field of boulders? On the top right corner, go up the slope to the red rock. There's a chamois lying on top of it."
Had I been been able to cross the Rhine, I could have gone into the valley on a sheep path and up to the Terrihütte. Behind this lodge, separated by a hill, stretches the famous Greina Ebene. There used to be old snow in the middle of the hill. In wet conditions when the sheep clambered up too far into rock slabs, they'd slip sometimes. Then they'd fall down onto the snow and come away in shock instead of falling to their deaths in the stone field. The grass grows ever higher up the mountain, and the animals follow the food. Where once there were glaciers, now moraines and seas of stone have emerged. In this grey area, the sheep can find their way in everywhere and disappear. Oh the glaciers. Gone like the gods. Will they return?
In search of the lost snow, I go round the hill, climb up way above the lodge until I reach the Piz Terri. An old map writes of the ring of mountains in this area: Here are many icebergs, called glaciers, no man has been known to reach them. At the very least, I expect to find a fearful glacier here, its tongue reaching out towards us. Instead I find an ice-eating lake. Its waves hit my ears, the ring of mountains are reflected in its waters.
*
Leo Tuor is a writer who lives in Val Sumvitg. He was a shepherd for many years on the Greina. His most recent book of prose appeared translated into German in 2004, "Onna Maria Tumera oder Die Vorfahren" (Onna Maria Tumera or the ancestors, Limmat publishers).
This article was originally written in Surselvish, and appeared in German in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on March 10, 2007.
Translation from the German: lp
RSS
The headlines were stolen by Charlotte Roche's moist little sex shocker and Jonathan Littell's sprawling SS fantasies but only two books united the critics: one is good and the other, utterly objectionable. There was a flurry of interest in some fabulous comics and a resurgence of the political and the historical novel. A dip into the books published in Germany this spring.
The nonfiction books this spring look into life as a budding president, a kitchen slave, a prophet, a string quartet. They pick apart the world of the elites, of lust and taste and '68.
Travels through the dreams and nightmares of Europe, in a small land of great poets, torn between Balkan catastrophe and Brussels. A reportage on Croatia, this year's partner country at the Leipzig Book Fair. By Gregor Dotzauer 
An SS man reflects on mass murder - and there's a pigeon hole for every vile deed. Novelist Georg Klein on the Holocaust and the enlightened harmony of trivial realism in Jonathan Littell's novel "Les Bienveillantes" which has just been translated into German.
The 400-page German translation of Jonathan Littell's corpse-littered SS novel,"Les Bienveillantes," has put the German-language feuilletons into a critical frenzy, despite the general consensus that the book is bad. We have compiled a selection of the accusations hurled. 
Kurt von Hammerstein was head of the Reichswehr, a grand seigneur, and an implacable opponent of National Socialism. In his new book "Hammerstein oder Der Eigensinn" (Hammerstein or idiosycrasy), Hans Magnus Enzensberger engages in dialogues with the dead to deliver a literary and lunatic precipitate of German history.
This literary autumn belongs to two Russian writers: Vassily Grossmann and Varlam Shalamov, whose epic works have been published in German at long last. But older Germans and German Romantics, Polish queens, Romanian Mannerists, combative atheists, Neopolitan Camorristi, Catalonian knights and a glutton of glorious abandon have also come up trumps.
The literary event of the season is the inexplicably delayed publication of two Russian masterpieces: Vassily Grossmann's historic drama of the 20th century "Life and Fate" and Varlam Shalamov's collection of tales from Kolyma "Durch den Schnee". On the German side, we have seen older novelists flexing their muscles and reaching for the skies, biographers looking up to bygone giants, and the feuilletons rallying to defend religion against the air strikes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. 
The novel is blooming in the Urals, where the children of the former technology elite are letting their imaginations run riot. By Sonja Margolina
Polish author Andrzej Stasiuk's book "Dojczland" is a sophisticated portrait of German-Polish relations with flights of sarcasm and a fine sense of grotesque. Doused heavily in bourbon, it's a controversial bestseller in Poland. By Thomas Urban
Romanian literature is still a tiny niche in the German book
market. Mircea Cartarescu's latest novel to be published here,
"Die Wissenden," shows readers what they are missing. A visit to
Bucharest to meet the man who is probably Romania's most famous author. By Jörg Plath
Come cruising in the park they say is dead. In his
biography of Stefan George, Thomas Karlauf reveals the charismatic German poet's authoritarian practices and the homoerotic core of his work. By Alexander Cammann
Rüdiger Safranski has pulled off the improbable: his book on Romanticism is a genuinely exciting account of German intellectual history. By Ulrich Greiner
Germany's book market is being flooded this autumn by biographies of dead male writers. Ina Hartwig examines the whys, wherefores and potential pitfalls of this latest literary craze.
The German Book Prize 2007, an annual award for the best German language novel, has been awarded to Julia Franck. Read an English excerpt of her book, "Lady Midday", and of the other five on the shortlist.