Reiseblog Inka Parei

The light. The focus it drives into your eyes. I spend six weeks travelling around New Zealand, and even by the end I won’t have got used to it, I’ll ascribe all kinds of characteristics to it in an attempt to understand it. Including in the last few days, when my gazes goes back again to a windy afternoon in Wellington.

A hill rises steeply behind the main road. You can go up it in a cable car and end up at the entrance to a botanical garden. Lovingly tended lawns, trees identified with signs, exotic gardens, on a knoll the white-painted wooden house of a historical observatory. From here, her gaze might have wandered down to the harbour, and from there longingly out to sea.
I imagine her standing in the constant wind, the unsettled, fast-changing weather, the glaring Pacific light. Thinking about the world in which she lives, its inherent constraints and absurdities. Until at some point she realizes how strange it is that the people around her hold on tightly to a way of life with its customs and rituals anchored somewhere else entirely, in a Europe that is 12 000 miles away.

Is there such a thing as German identity, and if so, how can we describe it? Two films and one book have given me important insights into this issue over the past two years: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a film adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan made directly after the war, and the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield’s short story collection In a German Pension.
What they have in common is that they deal with the German character and the German mentality before the Nazi period. And they give me a feeling for the extent to which certain typical German characteristics – a sometimes rather sinister-seeming efficiency and thoroughness, for example, obedience to authority or the need to suppress certain thoughts and memories – are linked to a Germanness that was clearly pronounced long before the Nazis. Why didn’t I see that sooner myself? What are the values and notions that determine my thinking, can I recognize them? And: What does that mean with respect to my country’s recent development, that of the past twenty years?

Mansfield, who I just mentally placed on that hill, was an outsider in her times in a number of ways. She was highly intelligent, educated, ambitious and libertarian. And she wanted to write. For a woman at the beginning of the 20th century, that was an extremely difficult situation, even hopeless. Leaving all the security and conventions of the family behind, she went to Europe, living a short, intensive and restless life in England, Germany and France before she died of tuberculosis at the age of only 34. What’s fascinating even a hundred years later about her stories, which she wrote about Germans but also about other Europeans and about life in New Zealand, is a very special relationship between closeness and distance. Her ability to step up very close to her characters’ everyday lives, to describe them in their routines, with an astounded, almost ethnological approach that always comes from outside, is never involved.
Does a writer have to break with everything to arrive at this incorruptible perspective, or to maintain it? What can we do to keep liberating ourselves from what clouds our view of our own lives? These are questions that went around my mind over and over while I was travelling in the opposite direction, covering the greatest possible distance on earth from my home.



I’d like to thank the Goethe-Institut Wellington for inviting me on this trip, Sally-Ann Spencer in Wellington, Yannick Muellender in Auckland and Antonie Alm in Dunedin for good conversations and readings, Henry Mex for his support and photos, and especially my two translators Katy Derbyshire and Te Tumatakuru O'Connell, who made these notes accessible in English and Te Reo Maori, to my great joy.

They come unexpectedly out of context, like optical illusions, giving me a very brief but delightful moment in which I hear my own language only as sounds, the words not coming together into any meaning.
"Woher kommen Sie? Hatten Sie bisher eine schöne Reise?"
I come across them behind the counter of a baker’s shop, at the desk of the campervan return point or in a small café by the side of the road. We’ve had this shop a couple of years now and it’s going well, tells me a woman with short dark hair and a reserved smile, who I’d never have taken for a German. The only prospects we had in Cologne in the end were as a chain-store bakery. I’m really glad to have turned my back on Germany. There’s no constant pressure to achieve things here like there is in Germany, no discussions over unemployment benefit, and the children can go to school barefoot if they want. And another thing: It’s very easy to get a foot in the door here. I travelled for a few months and I wanted to stay straight away, I felt at home here from the very beginning.
Why do these conversations cause such a feeling of confused irritation in me? Why does it seem to me as if these women – they’re all females – were coming up very close to me, actually rather too close? Perhaps because I only ever hear positive things, in a restrained tone. They don’t come across as unhappy, but neither are they happy. These conversations will be on my mind for a while to come.



Coming across people who don’t come from my country, but have something to do with Germany or have had in the past is exactly the opposite. Getting into conversations apparently by chance. Cautious inching forwards via innocuous subjects, until at some point I find out the reason that triggered the other person’s interest. The older woman with short, iron-grey hair who I come across at a service station between Gisborne and Rotorua, for instance, starts talking to me about her tea, how good it does her to interrupt a long drive with a hot drink. It’s only after a while, once we’ve chatted about warm sweaters and this year’s definitely too-cold New Zealand summer, that I find out she’s a Catholic nun who studied in Rome in the 1970s and once absolved a journey across Germany on a Rhine steamboat.
I left the campervan behind in the South and said goodbye to Henry, who accompanied me for most of my stay. Recently, I’ve been travelling almost exclusively on the buses that head into the larger towns once or twice a day, and are called Intercity – which seems logical enough to me for a country with barely any train lines. The people you meet on this kind of journey are divided into clearly demarcated groups: older ladies who seem very well educated, occasionally older gentlemen. School children, the odd backpacker and a large number of Maori grandmothers with pre-school-age grandchildren. Sometimes there are glowering middle-aged men, who give the impression they’re in the midst of some kind of problem, in which the loss of their car or their driver’s license is only the tip of the iceberg.



Where do angels have their wings? This is another question that arises at a bus stop. I’ve spent a rather desolate day in Napier, a town that was rebuilt in the Art Deco style after major earthquake damage in 1931. It’s a place where you come to understand how many ideas and currents a really lively town has to consist of, how dull and also somehow coercive it comes across as when a single project, one idea, one centrally controlled thought dominates an entire place (East German architecture occasionally gave me a similar sensation, back in the early 1990s when it could still be seen in its pure state all over the former East). And then there she is, standing close beside me. The woman with the most beautiful and unique tattoo I’ve seen in these six weeks. In high-heeled shoes and sheathed in a long, tight, pale blue cotton dress, the hand holding her cigarette nonchalantly resting on the large door of the bus’s trunk, she watches the driver crawling around on all fours inside to heave the cases onto the pavement. Not below her neck or on her shoulders, but in the middle of her shoulder blades is where her magnificent, intricately feathered wings are anchored. She stands there with such elegance! Such trust in the present, and also in the future, is in that stance! She’ll have to wear backless dresses for the rest of her life so as to come to fruition as a work of art. She seems to face this fact with such great serenity.

Driving from island to island. The ferry is running late and doesn’t start moving until dusk sets in. At the bow is a large weather deck, painted dark green. Inside are Pullman seats. A bar with two TV screens. One is showing a report about a rugby match, the other an interview – with a rugby player. I stand by the ship’s rail watching the ship leave the harbour, a slim strait between wooded hills. Later, heavy rain clouds – once again – intensify the dusk. The wind drives them ahead of it, tearing pieces out of them, through which a slightly brighter reflection of the evening sky casts a dull white onto the water, which looks like moonlight.

Our arrival in Wellington is the first contact to a city for weeks. My heart skips with joy and a familiar feeling ascends – how shall I interpret it? I watch with delight as a giant of a man with both arms tattooed from wrist to elbow opens the heavy door to the gangway. Then I stumble outside, stare at a totally unfamiliar harbour – piles of containers, a few cranes and a multi-lane highway wet with ran – as though I were coming home to somewhere.

There are cities you have to conquer first. Berlin would be a good example. Or at least the isolated Berlin of the 1980s that I have in mind, my arrival in the city back then, the tepid atmosphere like in an inland lake, the tough settling in over one long winter in the great grey. Other cities, and Wellington is one of these, come naturally to you right away. Harbour, sea, bridges and squares in a fairly small but lively city centre, new buildings and high-rises alongside old, low, stuccoed houses; fear of earthquakes, I am told, led to a lot of demolition.

In the evenings chatting about my travels, writing for the internet. At home, firmly installed in my study or occasionally in a library, I research into the remnants of things that happened years or decades ago. Here, by contrast, I’m constantly on the move, rarely staying longer than two days in any one place, noting down in the evening what I’ve seen during the day. Despite the speed at which I write here, relatively fast for me, I can’t see myself becoming a blogger; I can’t kick the habit of letting my writing rest for a long period before coming back to it.



Later we end up at a bar. A long counter, on one side of the room a DJ who looks like a young Bruce Willis and plays cover versions of 70s hits, most of them in French, some sung in rather odd-sounding German. Recorded I don’t know where or by whom, but certainly not in the country I come from.
Nightlife characters. After so much nature I can’t get enough of looking at them. A young woman in a dress as thin as snakeskin with a landscape painted on it. She’s occupied with a turban made of thick cloth, which has to be straightened regularly, and with a sack-like, bulging bag that she keeps rummaging through almost like a homeless woman, as she moves restlessly from one table to the next. Her companion follows her, an oddball, very thin with an expressionless face, wearing dark glasses and moving jaggedly and somehow reduced, as if visually impaired or on drugs. A gay couple kiss and eye the empty dancefloor. Women in long, brightly coloured skirts. A bored-looking Japanese woman. Next to the DJ is a small stage, and it’s not until late, only after my third gin & tonic, that a handful of rather young, very thin men pick up their instruments. British guitar rock in garage style rings out – time to go.



A strange moment in the Te Papa Museum the next morning. New Zealand’s nature and history, lovingly and appealingly presented, with wall charts, films and mineral samples. A wobbling house simulating an earthquake. Then comes the corner about settlement by the Europeans. Land Clearing. A terrible phrase, it triggers a similar dislike in me as the German word Kernsanierung – redevelopment of old buildings. In front of a tree sculpture is a face staring straight at the camera out of the 19th century, a tape playing the crackling sounds of slash-and-burn clearance. The hardworking settlers destroyed huge stretches of forest, converted into farmland. The national parks I so much admired on the first leg of my trip: refuges of original nature in inaccessible mountain regions unsuitable for animal husbandry. Whenever I fix my gaze on the landscape of the North Island, on the strangely evenly planted green hills, I’ll have to think of that. And I’ll also be reminded of the woman from the biological security team in the ferry terminal. She asks us painstaking questions about our routes on the South Island, hands us a booklet informing us about a toxic fungus and asks us to treat our shoes with a special formula before we step foot on the other part of the country. Long neglected, nature is now guarded and analysed strictly and, so it seems to me as an outsider, almost with a guilty conscience.

There are subjects that go round and round in your mind but you can’t write about them. I don’t know what the reason for that is with other people, but for me it’s a question of place.
For years now, I’ve been thinking about a short story in which a couple travel to another continent with their child, who has just recovered from a life-threatening disease, and end up in an existential crisis. I’ve been to the place where I want to set the story but I still can’t write it.
I once heard of a writer who spent a while living in the Philippines and then installed a character there in a novel. There are poems by Sarah Kirsch and a novel by Jürgen Becker, which have in common Niederer Fläming, a tiny place an hour and a half south of Berlin by car. There’s a small village there and a castle where a significant number of my German colleagues have stayed on writer’s residencies.

No matter where I’ve been in my life, for long or short stays, my writing can only be set in the Rhine-Main region or in Berlin. Why that is, I really don’t know. The people I think up have to move around their surroundings perfectly naturally – that might be one explanation. And these just happen to be the two places where I can do that myself.

I’m sitting on a beach in Okarito as I write these lines.
Ahead of me, the Pacific throws a swirling white mass of water onto grey rocks several times a minute, and behind me a huge glacier juts into the valley in a gap between two mountains. Over the past few weeks I’ve come across more landscapes than even exist in Germany. I’ve seen fjords with mountains protruding dramatically out of the water, and deserted bays populated by sea lions. I’ve stood at the most varied shores of lakes and seas, and I’ve walked through forests and almost cried with joy at the beauty and diversity of the flora and fauna.

Travelling – that’s my task here. Describing what I see. And I can do that. Because there are no people moving around these places – for me, at least! – who are part of stories.
Perception – slash – categorisation, it says in my notebook, dated from a day last October. Every time I come across this entry I vow to expand on my hastily scribbled note. To set out the sensitive relationship between the two processes. On the one hand we need gauges for evaluating what we see and experience, otherwise what we take in disintegrates, doesn’t stay with us. On the other hand we barely pick up on anything when we bring too much of the baggage along to a new situation that has weighed us down for years.

Ever since I wrote a book about an East German I’ve realised that my interest in such fundamental issues is a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the fact that I lived and grew up in one part of Germany during the 1970s and 80s, something I found artificial, a state of exception in retrospect. What kind of construction was it, that time, that state in which I lived? A place with another place as its prerequisite, and neither of those places exist today. I can never trust my perception as naturally as I did then. I have to examine it, over and over, in my writing. And acknowledge that the end of the division was a rupture for us West Germans too – it’s just that not everyone is willing to admit that.
I’ll be back in Berlin in a while. A character for a novel is waiting for me there. She’s standing in front of a cash machine in a bank on the corner of Bornholmer Strasse and Schönhauser Allee, and she knows that nothing in her life will ever be the way it used to be. Having been away for weeks – very far away, further than ever before – I hope I’ll be able to look at her more impartially.

Having arrived on the west coast we decide to head south again. My craving for places left to themselves has still not been quenched. A ramrod-straight road right along the sea. The forest is less dense here than in the mountains, there are more ferns. A number of trees display a strangely conflicting nature. At their tops they are green, reaching out widely; the spaces between, behind which darker green or the pale of the sky shimmer through, are as finely woven as lace. At their bottoms there is a part just as large, which is rotting away: densely overlapping, limply drooping leaves, pale brown to grey. The tree drags its own decay around with it, during its lifetime. I’m reminded of a report on the native inhabitants of another continent, which I read a few years ago. I think it was about Indios. Their understanding of death called for a special form of burial. They had no graveyard for their dead and nor did they cremate them, instead burying them under the floors of their own huts. They cooked and slept and lived in a room that was simultaneously a grave.

Now and then, a human habitation appears at the side of the road. Spacious properties, usually with small wooden houses on them that could use a lick of paint, with a myriad of sheds and garages. After 50 kilometres the road tails out in a dead end. As the name suggests, the small fishing village of Jackson Bay lies in a bay. A rather aged pier used as a quay, a few houses and a fish wholesaler’s depot – that’s all there is here. We stand outside a small cold-storage house with a veranda. Dented pink plastic tubs are piled up in front of it, still wet from the ice for the last catch. The whole atmosphere of the place is stagnant, windless. Next to the pier is a caravan converted to a snack bar. Sharing a table with two workers and some large seagulls, we eat the most delicious fish and chips of our entire trip so far.



A short hiking path, beyond it a second beach. My guidebook says there are penguins here. Large and small stones, unmoving water, humid air, sandflies. We quickly pull something on over our already richly bitten arms, blinking over at a couple of small rocks. Wasn’t there something black and white moving over there? We pull ourselves together, cast off our lethargic mood and climb briskly over large stones, our eyes fixed on the rock. The way feels longer and longer. The movement repeats itself in a monotonous way but not one that we might decipher. We break out in a sweat. For a while yet, we struggle onwards – and eventually stop, collapsing laughing onto the sand. What we’ve been chasing after was a hole in the rock, washed over by the tide.



On our way back a sign leads us to a cemetery for early immigrants. Some four hundred are said to have settled here in around 1870. The scheme, planned and executed from a desk in London, ended in disaster. The settlers couldn’t cope here for long, the area was too swampy, the rain preyed upon them. We park and walk a little way into the forest. In the middle of the path, interrupting it, is a square of cast-iron fence. Ornately decorated, eaten away by the elements. A few steps onwards we find more squares of fence. Some of them have roughly hewn wooden crosses, and all of them are so small and narrow that they look like bars on a child’s cot. On a broken black stone, I make out the name of a man from Hamburg. He didn’t grow old here.

The third week has begun. Life in a campervan is becoming habitual. Getting up, making coffee, converting the bed into a table, heaving the luggage from its night-time place beneath the driver’s cab back into the storage space under the seats. Topping up the water. Emptying and refilling the tank with the liquid that endows us with the title of "self sustaining" and thus the right to park the van in the midst of nature overnight. The toxic-blue substance, a miracle of chemistry, always has the same colour, the same smell.

In Gore, on the insignificant Highway 94, comes a sudden special moment of happiness. We’re driving towards the town. Horses in mud-splashed blue coats lift their heads momentarily. A small industrial estate passes by the windows, silos and warehouses, whitewashed and riddled with rust. Two teenagers are hanging around in the draughty entrance to a vacant building bearing the faded name of "Atomic Café". A nucleus white on a black background, the outlines of a circling electron. An agricultural machine park. A picturesquely abandoned factory building. A row of severely weathered wooden houses with the typical large signs and canopies over the entrances. In the middle: a shop painted baby blue, brightly lit inside, stuffed full of colourful tins and tubes. The man behind the counter, sitting on a stool with his arms folded, looks outside expressionlessly, with a vacant look, his dark face furrowed.
After two days of tourism highlights I suddenly realize how much I’ve missed being in places that aren’t under the surveillance of countless eyes. Places that only mean something to the people who live there, and perhaps not even to them.



I haven’t yet found out why I’ve been making so many comparisons between the worlds in my time here, much more than on any other trip. Is it because I’m writing about it? Or because everything here is different, but then again not? The cool, rainy South with its herds of animals and crooked, romantic wooden fences reminds me of Scotland or the Pyrenees. And when we’re driving through this very land and spot a pile of fodder covered over with a tarpaulin and old tyres, my brain instantly signalizes: Brandenburg.
Even when I relate places strongly frequented by tourists to dull towns that appear unattractive to most visitors but make me happy, it ultimately has something to do with Berlin, with my life in the centre of East Berlin, where the population has been almost entirely replaced over the past twenty years. To do with the stress and the new lack of intimacy that accompanies a constant coming and going of residents and visitors, people who hardly know the history of the area where they live and have hardly any older neighbours who might tell those stories.



Toppled trunks with exposed roots, finely woven gossamer. Trees shooting up and suddenly thickening at the top, as if someone had stretched a picture sideways. Plants in the most various shapes and shades. Leaves reminiscent of hair. Mosses as rough as stone or as soft as peach fuzz, and more artfully intertwined than one might ever see in a European forest. I will most likely always remember the rain forest we see on the Routeburn Track.

The nearby Milford Sound, however, the dramatic, impressive bay at the most south-westerly point, left a sobered feeling in me despite its just as spectacular nature. As beautiful, as unique as the transition between sea and land is here, you have to mingle with tourist groups to explore the area – unless you have the courage to travel by kayak, much more time and money for an individual boat tour in the less frequented neighbouring bays – or the physical stamina for a three-to-four-day walking tour. A little more exercise wouldn’t do any harm, I think to myself, and I surrender myself humbly to the absurd feeling that rises within me as we sail along the fjords on a tourist boat next to a couple from Berlin-Reinickendorf.

New Zealand is the country where I’ve learned about the importance of grammar, for the first time in a long while. That’s not necessarily what I’d expected.
When I was a child, grammar was rather like mathematics for me. The place where you can quantify language or put it into categories: singular, plural, third person. As the rules got more complicated I was amazed that grammar can also be something more complex, and I grew to love the subjunctive. Through a single change of form, something that otherwise would stand as a fact instantly becomes something merely thought, dreamt or contemplated. And then I’d learned all the rules and suddenly understood that they only describe something that I’d been using almost automatically for many years. Suddenly they seemed unspectacular. And I put them aside for a long time.

The first page of every travel guide reveals that New Zealand is called Aotearoa in the Maori language. Like with all names that go back to mythical roots and are taken for granted because they are mentioned too often, you register it first of all without thinking any more about it.

I once went to Egypt, in the late-1990s. I have very clear memories of a taxi ride in an ancient, dented Opel dating back to the early 70s, from the airport through the Sinai mountains. We broke down twice on the rather long journey. Smoke came pouring out from under the bonnet. The Bedouin who was driving us topped up the coolant or doctored with a few screws. As he did so, I stood on the edge of a dusty road and stared into the bare mountains. On grey-brown stony slopes, the folds of the mountains stood out overly clearly in the hard light, countless lines. Like characters or letters, I thought. And a moment later: like tablets of the law. Since then, I have become much more open to things mythical.
I first saw the long white cloud from the plane. But I didn’t call it that. I thought: a compact, extended cloud layer is floating above the South Island.



After a week and after looking through the first sky photos, I’m certain there are cloud formations here that I’ve never seen before. Clouds that are spread pale blue across a white sky in dots, lines and crumbs. Weighty, almost quadratic blocks that move at speed. Symmetrically ordered lines reminiscent of feathers. And occasionally – perhaps due to the perspective of my origins – I get the impression that certain formations are standing on their head.

More than in other places where I’ve looked at the sky before, they also seem to have a particular depth. Whereas you tend to visualize such formations as something two-dimensional on seashores, despite the extension of the visible horizon, here you see clearly how the different heights and air masses give the light, usually white to pale grey heavenly matter at times a coarse, washed-out, ragged-edged form and then at other times a denser and sharply defined shape. Floating close together but at different distances.

After a long first stop by the sea following our first trip up country, after I’ve stood on the white fine-sanded, yellow coarse-grained or even muddy seashores and raised my head to the sky, in Moeraki, on the Otago Peninsula and finally in the southernmost part of the South Island, the Catlins, I understand for the first time: they are somehow connected. They seem to consist of a single material, part of a whole that keeps extending, stretching in liquefied form, blowing away, clenching together again.
So not many, but really one single cloud.
How do you translate that sentence into Te Reo Maori? Perhaps when I’m in Wellington I’ll get a chance to ask the translator whether you can differentiate between one cloud and several clouds in his language, and if so, whether they fit into one sentence at the same time. As far as I could gather in advance, at least, this language gets by with extremely little grammar, similarly to some Asian languages.



As a person who a moment ago was absent-mindedly counting clouds, gathering them together mentally like sheep, I have stepped back, given the status of the one, the singular, back to the cloud, or even back to nature. One single long cloud and me as one person among many. A tiny difference that becomes large when you realize how much respect for nature lies within it. And even though the intellectual part of me immediately vows to start collecting meteorological facts again, and the words “respect for nature” remind me that it was the Maori after all, the first immigrants to the previously uninhabited islands, who swiftly and ruthlessly exterminated the moa, a large, nourishing flightless bird: I’ve been reminded of the fact that singular and plural is much more than one, or two, or several.

We arrive in Dunedin the next day. Children in kilted school uniforms storm out of a building. I look for my camera but they’ve already disappeared around the next corner. Villas with carved wooden verandas on a hill, a small town centre with an octagonal plaza. Around it, the development soon becomes sparser again, with low-built houses and sheds.

At the first reading in the evening a touching conversation with a professor of German Studies. He asks me whether my representations of forgetting, suppressing and remembering in my latest novel "Die Kältezentrale" are aimed against Freud. I talk about recent findings on processing traumatic experiences. Hearing myself speak, I realize I’m not in that novel with these ideas at all; I’m already in the next one.



And on we go, first to the Otago Peninsula, then to the South, to the Catlins.
Gentle, grassy hills with sheep, a familiar-seeming picture, almost: the hills are planted with a type of tree that has dry grey trunks, some growing higher, some ducked down like bushes or lying prone and round on the slope, shaped like the bodies of fluffy white animals, occasionally bare, with leafless crowns that seem to have gone grey. In the middle of this hinterland a lonely, unguarded campsite with a water and waste connection for the campervan, in a diligently brightly planted garden. The assembly house with its large veranda, empty. A large, old, docile-looking dog comes to welcome us. Next to the water supply is a note to leave a dollar; life can be so simple.

Marvellous beaches. Wide, gigantic. The water a noisy, incomprehensible force. Behind it the coastal woods. Ferns, huge moss-covered trees. Birds that sing in voices I’ve never heard before. How complex the whole world of the forest is. Countless plants small and large, intertwined. The atmosphere they form is so dense that you step into it like walking beneath a giant dome.
How much devoidness of humanity can I take in here, how much strength, how long will it last for the view of the many layers of time, layers of movement of the big city where I usually live?



In Papatowai, a small village, Blair Somerville runs a gallery consisting of a converted bus and a garden full of bizarre works of art and strange bricolages. He makes small and large toy-like sculptures out of wire and other pieces of metal. The observer almost always has to do something, pull a lever, swing a wheel or turn a handle to start off each object’s mechanism. Sometimes it seems just playful and eccentric. When rusty claws sticking out from a hedge are set in motion by a crank and stroke across the leaves in large grabbing sweeps, for example. Or when a complicatedly constructed paddle wheel made of shells plunges into a basin and the water it scoops up flows into an old pair of shoes hanging next to it. I was reminded of Peter Lustig and his caravan in the German children’s TV show "Löwenzahn".

Some of the constructions, however, become more on longer reflection, turn into tangible critique of civilisation. For instance when I work up a sweat pedalling inside a corrugated barrel of metal to power a dynamo, which controls a screen showing ads for a hairstyling set. Here in this region where nature takes precedence, the achievements of civilisation are brought to a stalemate, for a brief moment at least – I have to work hard for what I’m usually constantly exposed to. The land of the long white cloud is shown ironically in a small peep box: fabric clouds float by at the touch of a button and it rains on a small map of New Zealand, plastic coated to keep off the water. And there are poetic or philosophical miniatures too: a small egg lit up from inside, that you can catch a glimpse of through a tiny peephole. Inside, only visible as shadows, are tiny bird feet gently tapping at the walls of their prison. Or, very sober: a square metal plate with four metal rods rising as pillars at each corner. In the middle, a slowly rotating post casts out a thread at regular intervals, which catches on one of the rods and unrolls again – just as you sometimes get entangled in a subject in your mind, encompass it and then drop it again.

As we leave the village the tachometer reads: 1000 kilometres.

Life in a campervan. Constant movement, gliding through a landscape that gradually changes. From dry tussock grass slopes to the humid, rain-grey land behind the sea. Moeraki. Prettily painted wooden houses on green hills. A small bay with almost black rocks scattered idyllically across the beach and protruding craggily out of the water. Golden yellow, lense-shaped grains of sand, brightly shimmering shells, and Keri Hulme. Wouldn’t it be nice if you met a writer in this country, the organizers of my journey suggest, and they tell me her name, and as I had started reading the now famous novel "The Bone People" just before I left and I liked it, drawn in by the strange autonomy with which Hulme makes her characters act and speak, I instantly agree.

A woman who lives isolated in a tower, somewhere in a small town by the sea – where else should a typical novel be set in New Zealand? – meets a man and a child. That’s how the story starts. Individual existences come together but don’t form a family. Typical for the 1980s, I think on the very first pages – how pleasant to come across people as people, not lashed into gender roles and family clichés. I’ve been wondering often recently to what extent the past twenty to thirty years haven’t just seen progress in society but also regression. And what an unpleasantly educationally correct, sterile middle-class setting some of the German novels of recent years have had. Here, on the contrast: a seven-year-old boy who smokes. That’s something I only know from the work of Wolfgang Hilbig. And a woman so lonely she’s always talking to the telephonist who puts her calls through. Albeit, the child’s not allowed to be a child, no one sees him as one. I only realize that later, and I’m shocked by the story’s progress.

We meet in the afternoon, in the only place to meet in Moeraki, a mixture of a pub, a restaurant and a billiards hall. She’s sitting outside on the patio with a beer and she raises the glass when she sees us coming. A plump older, extremely modest woman in a sweatshirt, tracksuit bottoms and aviator glasses inset with tiny glittery orange stones. Not much later we’re sitting opposite one another. The conversation starts up haltingly. She seems shy and reserved but still passionate. We spend a long time talking in great detail about the weather. She asks us where else we want to go, and I find out that she doesn’t like travelling at all. Although I’ve got more used to New Zealand English since we’ve been here, I find it hard to understand her. And when I do ask her a few questions, for example what she’s doing at the moment, perhaps writing as well, her speech seems to get even faster and more indistinct. I get the impression she doesn’t really want to talk at all – which I find very likeable.



A few days after we meet I’ve made more progress with her novel, and I begin to understand that the three people it’s about are trapped in a terrible maelstrom of closeness, distance, domestic violence, loneliness and helplessness, which is related very drastically, with great force. The way Keri Hulme describes it, as hard as it is to bear, instils great respect in me.
After the pub she’ll take us to a small cove, show us stones, seaweed and shells, and a couple of ramshackle huts on the beach. Concentrating on the conversation, I won’t notice until the last second that we’re passing a sea lion, the first I see here, lying perfectly camouflaged on one of the brown rocks.

After meeting Keri we drive to the Moeraki Boulders. Strange. Huge balls of stone, only in one place in the world, only on this beach. Apparently scientists have now solved the puzzle of how they came about. Yet they’re still an astounding sight. A few huge spheres cast down by nature at this exact spot, like an open question.

The turquoise of Lake Pukaki – what a colour! It ignites the entire landscape, makes the sky above it – grey rain clouds in the distance, interwoven with large patches of clear sky-blue – appear a reddish-purple shade. My minor excursion into epistemology, all my deep thoughts about how we see things and why are past, rendered unimportant. At least for the moment. Simply because I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. That’s something that happens to me several times over the next few days. Incomparable impressions alternate with others, no less interesting, which are confusing because they differ from what I’m accustomed to, with which I can’t help immediately comparing them, over and over again.

Familiar examples that spring to mind instantly: the sun moves in the opposite direction. It is approaching April and the leaves are beginning to take on their autumn colours, one by one. The further south you go, the colder it gets. Less familiar: the angle at which the moon’s light falls on the earth is different, and so on clear nights it has a much more intensely glowing colour, tending towards green. Or: as New Zealand was originally uninhabited and some of the animals brought along by the settlers threaten the balance of nature here, the categories of “domestic” and “wild” animals have had to be redefined. As well as cows and many, many sheep, you often see fenced-in deer grazing peacefully in meadows – an absurd sight for Europeans.



We’ve managed to steer our campervan out of the hire-company’s driveway and into the flow of traffic driving on the left-hand side of the road, surviving the critical first twenty minutes without an accident, and we leave Christchurch to drive a little way westwards up country.
And so now this lake. This turquoise. As an over-civilized person you tend, after the aforementioned phase of great astonishment, to relate such sensory impressions to man-made, absolutely ridiculous things, which you have – unfortunately! – come across before, and you think: it’s as blue as a luminous highlighter pen. Or: as a lake in a colour-enhanced video.

An almost empty country road. All around it bare land, as if vacated. Unpopulated, left to itself, so it seems. As I keep stopping to get out of the van, to marvel, to take photos, I remember what I read beforehand: meltwater rivers that dash out of the glaciers here are used to produce electricity. This making use of incisive landscapes for human purposes prompts these places to change in your perception – at least for me. They are nature, and yet subordinated to a human purpose. Some kind of construction – usually a dam wall, in this case neat, straightened canals filled with turquoise water – denotes the process. The mountains around Mount Cook, protruding snow-capped and wild, remain untouched by it, but the immediate surroundings suffer a loss of autonomy, and the steering process gives the stretch of land something fantastic and unreal.

Is it conceivable that one of the few rebels and subversive outsiders we know from the history, or rather the literary history, of a country as obedient to authority for centuries as Germany – a character such as Michael Kohlhaas, for instance – could lend his name to a huge stretch of land? That’s possible here. The area is called Mackenzie Country, named after a Scottish rustler who once stole thousands of sheep, drove them into the hinterland and drove the forces of law and order to desperation, but apparently gave a major boost to sheep farming.

Before we drive back towards the coast we top up our diesel for the first time, at a sun-shimmering white petrol station. An abandoned hut, the paint peeled off, the wood beneath it so bleached that it is almost white too. Two petrol pumps, one dusty aged credit card machine, hill after hill, covered in golden yellow grass, all devoid of humanity.

Sobering arrival in Christchurch, a city still clearly marked by the earthquake. It is chilly and grey, not unlike the weather in Berlin apart from the wind. Low buildings. Motels. Large shop signs and billboards aimed at car drivers along the edges of the pavements. It all seems American to me – but only at first glance.
A drive to our accommodation, short walks. I have no sense of orientation at all. A strange feeling of being in a suburb, never leaving the edge of town, until I eventually realize that this city doesn't have a centre any more for the time being. It's too inadequate, brought to a standstill. Hastily assembled construction fences mark out the vacant houses that can no longer be lived in. Some askew, with a rip in the façade or broken-off gables and roofs, others semi-demolished. One suddenly looks at all the remaining buildings with mistrust, in search of fractures, unevenness. A gap at every second or third street corner. Paved over with grey stones, remains of the rubble. Many people, I'm told later, still don't know if they're allowed to keep their homes; they're waiting for a surveyor's report to plead in favour of demolition or repair.

You could go in there, I think when I see a still new office building with a glass façade that looks absolutely intact. But then I look more closely through the windows and make out tipped-over shelves, desks and chairs, collapsed pillars, wires hanging from the ceiling. On the entrance doors of a neighbouring house, the spray-painted comment "Clear" and a date. Does that mean it's been given the all-clear?
I have to spend a long time standing in front of the barrier blocking off the terrain where the destruction was the greatest. It is still not open to the public. Friends and relatives have attached flowers, cardboard signs and small pictures to the fence, commemorating the people they lost here. The flowers have shrivelled and dried, fluttering in the wind.



In the evening I meet up with two artists, who are trying to redefine some of the destroyed areas as places of public encounters, improvising with little funding. A touching attempt – which also works. In the middle of a wasteland that I pass the next day and look around, a fridge has been set up, filled with books for the locals to borrow and either bring back or exchange for others. Alongside it makeshift cosiness: a few flowerpots, a reading bench. And in fact someone does soon turn up with a plastic bag, opens the fridge, takes something out and tops it up again.

The evening ends on a bizarre note. Overtired, and by now thoroughly confused by my tiredness, I let the "gap-fillers" talk me into watching an off-theatre production in a shed, a short walk away in an unpaved, puddle-ridden backyard.
A bare room. A tiny stage on which an almost naked, long-haired man is lolling on a stretcher or a mortuary trolley. To his right a double-bassist, on the left a female singer. A play by the German dramatist Werner Fritsch, staged in what seems like a rather over-ambitious production. An hour and a half that soon feels very long, as my jetlag-plagued brain only understands fractions of the English. The bassist is wearing a Frankenstein mask and the singer – to my disbelief – a Hitler mask. As they screech, pluck, yell and declaim, I sit devotedly in the darkness.

Before my departure, one last train journey from Hamburg to Berlin. Sallow yellow, stubbly winter fields. Allotments. Patches of industry on the edges of towns, small stations in the mist. It is just this image that I will first have in my mind's eye a few days later, when I wake up at seven in the morning in a caravan next to a loudly rushing river, push aside a grey curtain and come up against the hard, gleaming light that my eyes have been struggling with since my arrival in Christchurch. What fortune to remember one's own life from the other side of the world! When I was asked if I'd like to spend six weeks in New Zealand, travelling and writing about it, I agreed without revealing that my wish to put some space between myself and my home, to see the place where I live from this incomprehensible distance for once, was just as important as my interest in getting to know two large Pacific islands, if not greater.

What would I give to see the world a single time through the eyes of a dog! I first came across this quote, which is said to be from a respected epistemologist, at school at the age of seventeen. It has accompanied me for decades and it was what prompted me to think about why I perceive things the way I perceive them. Just as I have quoted it here – perhaps not quite correctly – these words have stayed with me; I have never tried to find out who they originate from.

Days on the plane. The second of March 2012 is sucked up by the speed I'm travelling at, transported into a void that is inaccessible to me, a substance in which I seem to be immovable in my aeroplane seat, in temporary storage as if immersed in a preserving and life-sustaining fluid. While people in uniforms serve me food and provide me with a screen that offers me pictures of people, cities and streets so that I don't lose contact to reality, my body loses all sense of the times of day, my consciousness slips into a state between waking and dream.

Meanwhile, I think about how my writing relates to this trip. About my intensive study of the map beforehand. About texts and pictures I used to prepare myself: what I have kept in mind of them, and how I connect them to what I am and what I know.

Reading Olga Tokarczuk's book Der Gesang der Fledermäuse a few months ago. The way she introduces her characters, eccentric residents of a remote settlement in the mountains between Poland and the Czech Republic. The names the narrator gives them are extremely strange, as if made up. They don't match with the region where the people live, with their origins. And in fact, at a later point the first-person narrator admits she has invented them herself and also reveals the much simpler names these people really have. We are forced to reflect upon the fact that the voice that is speaking has everything in hand, that her description shapes what we experience as we read. Later it turns out that this woman, in whose apparently rational view of things we have placed our trust, is a murderess, killing people one by one with a plan and an idea in mind. The fantastic names, products of pure invention that she has given the characters, become an allegory for someone who has lost contact to reality. And as we read we are reminded that we ought not to accept what we comprehend as given, that we have to think about who is writing, and why. So where am I travelling to?

To a country of which I had to reassure myself to begin with that it is a quarter smaller than Germany, because distance and spatial size are two concepts that soon become indistinct if one doesn't keep reprimanding oneself to precision. To two islands with landscapes that seem, when I train my German eye upon the map, at least in the south to consist of an astounding amount of physical material I am familiar with, that I grew up with, that was the subject of my Eurocentric geography lessons: alps and fjords, for instance. To a region with a cartography that brings home to me the gap between land masses, compounded ultimately out of nothing other than silicates and carbonates, and the people who named them in all the mental constraints under which they lived, from our modern-day perspective: place names like Invercargill, Blenheim and New Plymouth. Alongside British and occasional Dutch titles the Maori names: Otematata, Kakapotahi. More mysterious, hard to remember and by that alone more real.