Prose: non-fiction
March 2023
Mein Gott, How Beautiful
by Filip Springer
In May 1787, a ship with a secret cargo arrives in the port of Swinemünde. Moments later, the captain, Winfried Koschke, shows the first signs of madness. Shortly after returning from his great voyage to South America, the famous Alexander von Humboldt stands on top of the Rosengarten and says that he has one of the three most beautiful views in the world.This is not reportage. It's a half-fictional, half-documentary story in which the landscape is the main character. Travelling by bicycle through the territory of the eastern provinces of Prussia, later called the Recovered Territories, the author follows in the footsteps of people who, seized by a vision of progress, joined the industrial revolution and gradually transformed the world around them. Part of the story takes place on the Oder, Europe's first regulated river, and part in the forests of Prakwice, where Kaiser Wilhelm II, battling his own demons, wiped out the deer population.Springer looks at the landscape in the same way as 19th-century lithographers, the builders of the Prussian railway or the father of Polish photography, Jan Bulhak. In doing so, he tries to understand where this inescapable premonition of having been here once comes from.
