WHICH CAME FIRST?
date: 15 March 2010 at 10:00:59 - 0 comments
We started writing our first novel, “Critique of Criminal Reason,” at the turn of the twenty-first century. We hadn’t been published at the time, and so were able to take our time and indulge our fantasies. The book eventually appeared for the first time in 2006 as a Faber & Faber hardback.
At a certain point, while writing the story, we needed to describe Hanno Stiffeniis’s first impression of the port of Königsberg in East Prussia. We had never visited the city – certainly not in 1804 when the story takes place! – nor have we ever been there since the book was published, so we imagined the scene.
This is what we wrote:
“I raised the blind and looked out of the coach.
The listless grey sea stretched northwards beyond a narrow sand bar to infinity. The tide was out, and a small fleet of fishing-smacks lay awkwardly on their keels, the masts and rigging a forest of icicles. The shallow beach was a sheet of solid ice except for a narrow channel of fast-flowing water in the centre of the estuary. A black stone pier projected out like an arm into the stream. Tall three-masters lining the sea-wall were moored in line like dead whales waiting to be hauled on shore…”
The other day, while sorting through a box of old postcards and pictures, we came across this striking illustration. The oil painting by Caspar David Freidrich is entitled “Hafen bei Mondschein” (Port by Moonlight), and it is dated 1811. It is exactly the sort of scene that we were trying to create, and it belongs to the collection of the Museum Stiftung Oskar Reinhart in Switzerland.
Daniela and I have never been to Switzerland. We have no idea where the museum is. Neither of us ever remembers seeing the painting in a foreign exhibition. So, where did we get the postcard? And where did we get the idea for the description of the port?
And which came first?
Ps: A quick look at Internet reveals the following interesting facts: Sotheby's recently sold a work by Caspar David Friedrich on paper, “Evening: Sunset behind Dresden's Hofkirche,” for the world-record price of 1.128m [pounds sterling]. At the same time, you can buy a hand-painted copy of a work by Freidrich from a gallery in America at prices ranging from $236 to $484, depending on size!
Picture: Caspar David Friedrich, "Port by Moonlight, 1811."
