It’s 2012, and current events seem to keep getting worse. The financial system is in meltdown, the climate is irrevocably damaged, and the world is, allegedly, about to end. In a small flat in the middle of Hamburg, a blonde travel journalist is packing his rucksack. His adventure will be a kind of penance, a small contribution in helping nature get back on track. His biggest problem is the Alps, which he must cross on foot. Almost 1000 years after Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV famously trekked from Germany to Canossa, another German is about to set out to repeat his journey. And, admittedly, at least in part because his destination is famous for its delicious tortellini...
Dennis Gastmann takes us on a very unusual pilgrimage, and details a string of situations along the way in which he reaches his physical and psychological limits. He has his fortune told in Osnabrück, meets East German army veterans in the Rothaargebirge mountains, takes to the floor of Frankfurt’s stock exchange, goes on a “spiritual night walk” somewhere in the countryside in the Rheinland-Palatinate, makes his very first (and mostly truthful) confession at the famous Speyer Cathedral, and makes an overnight stop in Besançon, a town famed, of all things, for its breast implants. He even follows the trail of a disgraced German politician to the Geneva hotel where he met his death under suspicious circumstances in 1987. After 1000 exhausting kilometres, he reaches the isolated mountain huts at Mount Cenis. An absorbing travel memoir as lively and diverse as it is enjoyable to read.
