In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

134 ARRAYS
y Negro imparts this dual connotation to a description of frost-flowers,
a canonical symbol of the domestication of sublime nature: "White
archway of frost-flowers, / ... / Are you a bridal veil? Are you a shroud?
/ A white sepulcher? A pearly tabernacle? / Lightning of death or glow
of the moon?"
But icy mountains, lethal danger, and erotic desire are not exclusively
a poetic pattern. With the same regularity as in lyrical texts, mountains
appear as a landscape of death in the daily news: "The two students from
Munich who, as we reported, have been missing since they hiked into
the mountains from Innsbruck were discovered dead on the east face of
the 'Wilder Kaiser'" (Berliner Morgenpost, July 25). [see Cremation] The
New York Times features a "grim tragedy of the North" on its front page
of September 25, under a headline that, once again, plays on the motif
of ice and violent death: "Eskimo Killed Prof. Marvin ... ; Confesses
Arctic Crime of Seventeen Years Ago; Victim, Reported Drowned, Was
Shot." What follows are complicated but inconclusive conjectures about
why "two Eskimo boys" murdered the young Cornell professor Ross G.
Marvin on a North Pole expedition in 1909. [see Murder, Polarities] But
the display of factual details tends to disappear behind the powerful
images of the "Arctic crime" reiterated in many papers: "Kudlooktoo
Says Explorer Went Mad and Left Other Eskimo to Die ... They Declare
They Invented the Tale of the Drowning in Fear of White Man's
Wrath." Neither in newspaper stories nor in poems does the association
of icy mountains with death require any explanation. The philosopher
Theodor Lessing cannot imagine mountain climbers other than as "hovering
over the abyss" (Lessing, 142), and the Communist poet Johannes
Becher evokes the Alpine landscape of Davos as a natural place for rich
people to die: "For years, however, quite a few had to lie / On deck
chairs in Davos, spitting lungs; thus / We care for ourselves: guzzling rot"
(Becher, 103). Only Egon Erwin Kisch, a journalist, seems to discuss the
tension between the classic image of mountains as an idyllic environment
and their scenic function as a theater of death and crime. Kisch begins
his essay "Verbrechen in den Hochalpen" ("Crime in the Upper Alps")
with an evocation of all the traditionally positive commonplaces and
expectations related to Alpine landscapes: "Up in the highland pastures,
there is no sin, let alone crime, that would not seem inconceivable: gently
grazes the little lamb, softly the American woman says "How lovely,"
good-natured cows stare at the tourists, and the dairy farmer yodels"