Cherrypicker
No One is an Island

Dörte Hansen’s new novel is a farewell to the everyday life of the native population of a small island in the North Sea. If we take a closer look, though, slivers of hope glow from among the dark waves again and again.

By Hendrik Nolde

© Penguin In Dörte Hansen’s third novel Zur See (To the Sea), a whale on the beach is the elephant in the room. Its colossal corpse hurls the lives of the Sander family off course. The blood of whalers may run through their veins, but the reality of modern society has long since caught up with them. “The people from the islands don’t have to freeze any more, and they don’t have to go to sea. They’re allowed to be frightened, like everyone else, when they find a sperm whale in the surf on a winter morning just after sunrise.”

Henceforth, the young whale, “who had to die because he had lost his way,” hovers as an immense symbol over the family, which belongs to the old “island nobility” and has never questioned, but taken their life course for granted. “They probably should have known better. But they couldn’t imagine anything else than sending their eldest out on a ship, too.” It’s as if the philosopher Adorno also docked with one of the ferries from the mainland: Behind the whale bone fence of the most beautiful house on the island, it soon becomes unavoidable: the question of the right life in the wrong place.

Balancing on the edges

Hansen has devoted her entire narrative oeuvre, including Zur See, to the rural regions of northern Germany. Her current novel is set even further on the periphery of the Wadden Sea. The story takes place on “a North Sea island, somewhere in Jutland, Friesland or Zeeland.” The vagueness of the location is no coincidence, as the fate of the island and its population seems emblematic of the shared structural transition of this particular geographical region.

Nowadays, fishing is a poor way to make a living, and locals go to sea only for the occasional burial. Instead, the seemingly unstoppable growth of the tourism sector is the economic engine of island life. Almost all year round, throngs of “decelerators” and “dropouts” are now seeking refuge on the island from their hectic modern lives. “The breathless, who use the island as if it were an oxygen device.”

The local population has long since come to terms with this ambiguous coexistence; since childhood many have gotten used to giving up their bedrooms in the summer for holiday guests and playing their roles as extras in the island drama. They have perfected “balancing on the edges,” and so they just about manage to claim the ever-shrinking free spaces of island life for themselves. On an early morning swim in the sea after the night shift, one can still enjoy some solitude.

A final island chronicle

Islands have long been havens for all sorts of happiness seekers. They serve as projection surfaces and exert a fascination that has been fuelled again and again over the centuries, not least by fiction. To a certain extent, Hansen writes against this tradition and strives to create a realistic picture of the island’s mores. Her island chronicle shines a light on everyday life, on the domestic problems of the island priest and the night shifts at the nursing home for the elderly, which coexist with shanty choirs in fake traditional costumes at the island festival and romantic carriage tours that can be booked directly at the ferry pier.

Hansen’s characters chafe at the stereotypes that are brought to the island from the outside, at clichés of waiting sailors’ wives and picturesque lighthouses in oil paintings. At the same time, they cannot escape the fact that their lives are inextricably linked to the island and its history. In their own mundane way, they all struggle to preserve a last vestige of authentic island culture.

“There’s nothing permanent here. It’s a never-ending flowing, streaming and silting up, storming, tearing apart. Land gained; land lost. Everything wants to be a horizon here.” With Zur See, Hansen rebels against the storm of cultural levelling that sweeps across the North Sea island habitat and, at least for a fleeting moment, places her story at the edge of the harbour as a vertical monument to everyday island life.