Wanderlust by Reid Mitenbuler

Author:Reid Mitenbuler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

32

“I Have Seen So Many Naked People in My Time”

The telegram came from Berlin. It said that Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (AG), one of Germany’s biggest film studios, wanted to do a film adaptation of Storfanger. The studio also wanted to film in Greenland and use Freuchen as a consultant, providing him with an all-expenses-paid reason to visit his beloved island. If Freuchen was interested, the telegram said, the studio would buy him a first-class ticket to Berlin.

It was an incredible opportunity. The film’s producer, Joe May, was a hitmaking pioneer of the German film industry, a man who had given big breaks to several talents, including the great Fritz Lang. If all went well, this might also be Freuchen’s big break.

The offer came at a perfect time. Six months had passed since Freuchen had been in Russia, and he needed a distraction. Enehøje was so gloomy this time of year, socked in by wintry clouds gray as tombstones. The season also put Magdalene in a low mood, not to mention that neither of the children was there, depriving the farm of their joyous laughter. Freuchen had wanted the children on the farm full-time and had even hired a private tutor to take care of their schooling, but the tutor hadn’t been very good. Pipaluk was eventually sent back to her grandmother’s house, where she had more friends and could get a better education (she visited the farm on weekends and planned to spend the upcoming summer there). Mequsaq, for his part, was sent back to Greenland temporarily. Freuchen had hired several additional tutors for him, but he’d struggled to keep up with other children his age. Several specialists diagnosed a “glandular disorder,” which gave the boy a learning disability. “The doctors had no hope he would ever be normal,” Freuchen wrote as he tried to figure out what was best for him. Since Mequsaq had already spent so much time in Greenland, and claimed he wanted to be a hunter when he grew up, Freuchen and Magdalene decided to temporarily send him to live with friends in Thule—“who would educate him in the crafts of the hunter and look after him as carefully as I would have myself,” Freuchen said. “I hated to send him away,” he recalled about the painful decision, but he wanted to figure out where the boy would be happiest. In the meantime the house on Enehøje “felt empty.”

With melancholy hanging around him like a misty fog, Freuchen chose to distract himself with work, as he often did when he was depressed. In the months preceding Joe May’s telegram, he’d finished his second novel, Rømningsmand (The Deserter), and was looking for his next project. It didn’t take long to pack his bags and board the train, first-class, for Berlin.

Weimar Germany, economically bankrupt but creatively fertile, was experiencing a great moment of cultural ferment: a Roman candle, burning down fast, headed toward an end that was unknown then, tragic now. Before that final spark, though, when the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.