“Strange, to wander in the fog! Each bush and stone is solitary, no tree sees the next. Each stands alone.”1 Such is November 1905 in the poetry of Hermann Hesse. Andreas Laudert’s journey takes us into November 2025, into the city, the countryside, and the soul, and poetically calls on us to embrace the Earth and everything in it so as to discover: I am—what’s missing.
Everyday life has brought me to be constantly traveling back and forth between the Hanseatic cities of Hamburg and Lübeck, with the capital Berlin often thrown in. The seas are never far away—the North Sea and the Baltic in particular. But that’s not the predominant impression sinking into the memory of my soul during these trips, not what’s imprinted upon my body of habits. Rather, it’s the endless series of days and hours of overload, of gray crowds, of acoustic, olfactory, and visual distress. Trains don’t run, they stop on the open tracks; rain pelts against the panes; doors jam and—as I often think—so do our whole lives. Why do we do this to ourselves? Perhaps others have similar experiences in their own cities and lands.
At moments like this, for example, in the central bus station in Lübeck at 10:30 p.m., in these mystical (in their way) places where there’s no light but merely lighting, I have such a tremendous visceral, sensorial longing for nature, for the sea, for the wide vastness, silence, and beauty, for sunlight. Or for my bike and how we would ride through the fields of rapeseed and the green meadows on the island of Fehmarn in midsummer. And then I understand all those who choose to escape this stress, who never want their children to grow up in a big city, or who prefer to drive a car because, even in a traffic jam, at least they’re alone and have their hand on the rudder of their own lives.
Still, at the same time, I feel and think that nature is not the alternative. Nature is being degraded because it has become a place of longings, a projection screen for our desires, because civilization is exhausting us. In the countryside, one needs a car; in the city, one needs a garden. We think in terms of quiet zones and nature reserves because we no longer protect nature as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Nature herself no longer offers us protection but is once again becoming the danger she always was. Suddenly, some shift in the weather upsets us, and the onset of wind or rain is worthy of a newsflash. The railway warns of “high occupancy,” and the news warns of excessive heat. Longing for our much-deserved summer, or for the solitude of the forest and the sing-song of birds, longing to go home again because “people on the tracks” have gone astray and our own appointments got cancelled—all means getting stuck halfway there ourselves.
But then it’s too late. We can no longer return to the Garden of Paradise. We can only move forward—to Heavenly Jerusalem. Cities are now our destiny; it’s right to live there, just as it’s not wrong to flee them—at least as they are nowadays. Our fellow human beings have become our destiny, and only by encountering them can we reveal our potential freedom.
We ourselves are the apocalypse. I realize, in Hamburg Central Station at 10 p.m. on a noisy Saturday, or in a small brick-lined town on a dreary Monday at midnight, amid the smell of filth, alcohol, and ugliness, that I must love all of this, exactly this. I must learn to love all these wounded human beings—and myself, including my grim expression or, depending on my mood, the pencil lead with which I jot down enlightening observations, as a writing observer who can afford to do so, since I don’t have to make my bed this lonely night in the ice-cold tiled shopping arcades like the homeless do.
I am—what’s missing. I am the pond with silent, circling waves. I am the gentle breeze, the sublime peace of the mountains, the blue heavens. I am the lush greenery. I am the sunrise on the sea. I rewrite history, or no one does.
This whole travel in metal and steel, on highways or express rails, is an image of our transition as a civilization and as humanity. We’ve made our choice. We’re turning away from the country, and so it becomes the alternative. We are hangers-on of nature because we’ve left it behind; we’ve begun to rush, to want things to be more practical, more efficient. The choice is irreversible, and the heartbeat between periphery and center is faltering. No bus will run, no guide will come, no midwife will help, no doctor will heal. Now our etheric heart must begin to beat. The non-physical light of Christ wants to be ignited at Berlin-Lichtenberg station and on the A7, in the north and south and east and west, in the nomadic tents we pitched as we sank into our smartphones. The world is only social when what lives on the periphery, on the circumference of our eyes’ horizon, also lives in the centers. When we look to what escapes us, when we find the countryside as interesting as the metropolis—only then are we a human community. No cell phone regulations in schools will save our children, no master plan, no climate target, and no magic number. We have to get through this because we are renewable. We have to learn to hate ourselves in order to love again, to endure the ugliness in order to transform it—not embellish, gloss over, or lift up, but transform.
Nothing grabs the attention in our big cities: a couple kisses obliviously in the crowd under the arcades; someone staggers and rants, another preaches; a bang is heard here, and someone is taken aback there. No one looks up, or if they do, it’s only briefly. In the villages, where everything moves slowly and seems tranquil, everything provokes a sensation: in the provinces of our souls, in some new little custom, in the penny I give away, in the word I say, in the most insignificant practice of kindness with which I surprise everyone—not least myself. In the villages, we look up and lift our heads, which are spilling over with appointments. In the future, the villages will look to the cities and the cities will esteem the villages. So let’s look up! Let’s look at the sun at midnight, the sun in the eyes of our fellow citizens and fellow travelers—Yes, we are on our way! Let’s take the moon personally and the whole Earth, and let’s see to it that we can look up to ourselves again.
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Image Rummelsburg Bahnhof Lichtenberg; photo: Fridolin Freudenfett, Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Footnotes
- Hermann Hesse, “In the Fog” [Im Nebel], first published in Unterwegs (1911); see Scott Horton, “Hesse’s ‘In the Fog,’” Harper’s (September 22, 2007).
