Honored reader,
before we begin, I must confess something that in novels is usually confessed only at the end – if at all: I owe this house, which will so often be named and so often altered in what follows, more than a backdrop.
For me, the Sonnenalp is not just a place you go to in order to relax, and later talk about as if you had bought it like a souvenir; over the years it has become a second home to me – a room inside that I enter as soon as I walk through its doors. I do not know my way there like a guest, but like someone who returns. I know the sound of footsteps on the floor, the way the afternoon light falls on wood, and that particular mixture of arrival and permission that you feel only in places that do not belong to you and yet take you in.
Precisely for that reason, honored reader, I did not content myself with leaving it in peace.
For in the lobby, where you put down your coat and at the same time a little of your life, there is a saying on the wall. It is simple, it is friendly, it sounds like a little moral that you do not notice as long as you do not need it. It reads (secularized and therefore only in essence) – in the real Sonnenalp, in the Sonnenalp I mean:
Joy to the one who comes.
Peace to the one who stays.
Joy to the one who leaves.
It is a beautiful tripartite saying, so beautiful that you easily overlook it; and yet, if you think about it longer, it is a complete worldview: coming may be joy, leaving may be joy – and in between, in the stretch that modern people endure the worst, peace is offered, not as an achievement, not as a program, but as a state: to stay.
Now, when you read my novel, you will notice – or perhaps only later, when a sentence comes back to you that you never actually read – that I have mutilated this tripartite saying. In my book, the wall reads only:
Joy to the one who comes. Joy to the one who leaves.
I left out the peace. I withheld it, as one withholds a number in an account, not by mistake, but because one needs the result. In the novel I took from the Sonnenalp the middle sentence – and thus, strictly speaking, its real promise.
Why does one do such a thing to a place one loves?
Because literature, honored reader, does not consist in confirming what is loved, but in testing it. Because a novel – if it wants to be more than a keepsake – must pull things out of their goodness and place them in a different light so that they show something they do not have to show in everyday life. And because I was, as you will soon notice, under an influence stronger than any hotel philosophy: under the influence of Thomas Mann.
The Magic Mountain taught me that you cannot describe a refuge without transforming it. That in literature you often only really make a place that grants peace visible when you subject it to unrest. Mann did not leave Davos as it was. He turned it into a school of time, of illness, of desire, of worldviews – and thereby created something larger than the place it uses.
And so – and this is the irony I do not wish to gloss over, but which, if I am honest, I even like a little – it was precisely the peace of my real Sonnenalp that gave me the unrest to deprive it of peace in the novel. I calmed myself in a house whose wall motto blesses staying, in order to write a book that makes this staying problematic. I robbed my second home of its peace in order to create a work that could not have come into being without this peace.
You may find that unfair. Perhaps it is unfair. But it is, I fear, the kind of unfairness that art always commits: it takes what it needs and gives it back transformed.
So, honored reader, do not take the Sonnenalp that you will encounter in what follows as a description, but as a mirror. It bears a real name, but it is an invented world. Its characters are masks, even if they greet you kindly. And where on the wall there is talk only of joy, think, if you wish, of the missing sentence as well – not as a correction, but as backlighting:
Peace to the one who stays.
For somewhere, outside this book, it holds true. And without it this book would not exist.
