Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (Penguin Classics) by Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (mobi)

Author:Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann (mobi)
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780141198811
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Descent into the Mines*

1826

Heinrich Heine

I found the descent into the two best Klausthal mines, the Dorothea and the Karolina, very interesting, and I would like to describe the experience in some detail.

A half-hour’s walk outside the city, you happen upon two big blackish buildings. There you are immediately received by miners. They are dressed in dark, generally steel-blue-coloured, wide jackets hanging down over the belly, pants of more or less the same colour, a wrap-around leather smock tied in the back and a small green felt cap, completely rimless, like a lopped-off bowling pin. The visitor likewise dons the same attire, except for the leather smock, after which he is taken in hand by a miner, a foreman, who lights his pit lamp and leads him towards a dark opening resembling a chimney sweep’s hole, climbs down to chest level, instructs the visitor to keep a tight grip on the ladder and bids him follow fearlessly.

The descent is, in fact, a risky business; but being as yet ignorant of the workings of the mine, you are initially oblivious to the real danger. The fact that you are obliged to pull off your clothes and slip on this dark prison-like apparel already gives you a curious feeling. And now you are supposed to sink to your hands and knees and climb down, and the dark hole is so dark, and God knows how long the ladder is going to be. Yet soon you realize that the rungs leading down into the black abyss do not belong to a single ladder but rather comprise a series of fifteen to twenty ladder joints, each of which leads to a tiny platform on which you can stand and in the midst of which a new hole leads down to a new length of ladder.

I first climbed down into the Karolina (the filthiest and most cheerless Miss Karolina that I have ever met). The ladder joints are muddy and wet. And down you go, from one length of ladder to the next, the foreman in the lead, and the fellow keeps telling you: it isn’t really dangerous, you just have to make sure to grasp the rungs firmly, and don’t look down at your feet, and don’t get dizzy, and for God’s sake don’t step on the side board, where the whirring cable is just now hoisting up the vats of ore, and where just two weeks ago a careless fool fell down and unfortunately broke his neck.

There is a bewildering hubbub and hum of activity down below; you are forever bumping against beams and cables hoisting up vats of hammered ore and buckets of water that has seeped out of the rock. Sometimes you also happen upon hollowed-out corridors, called Stollen, in which you can glimpse the growing piles of ore, and where the lonely miner sits all day, laboriously hammering the lumps of ore out of the wall.

I never did get down to the very bottom, where, as some say, you can already

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