Professor Bernhard Malkmus launches Himmelsstriche with an evening of music and readings
Last week, Professor Bernhard Malkmus celebrated the publication of his latest work Himmelsstriche, a memoir and ecological reflection on life on the Northumbrian coast and in the Scottish mountains. Attendees of the event were treated to a fusion of music, songs, and readings in both German and English.
Bernhard was joined by Marielle Sutherland, a translator, and George Herbert, New College's Assistant Organist. The music, selected and improvised by George, included pieces by Britten, Debussy and Picton-Turbervill, as well as traditional folk and bird songs.
Bernhard describes the premise behind Himmelsstriche (literally translated 'sky lines' or 'directions in the sky'):
The English Northeast is a hotspot of the Anthropocene - a landscape, a seascape, and a skyscape whose intertwined natural and cultural histories are likely to enable open book for us to read. It tells the stories of mining and industrialisation as origin stories of the biosphere's transformation throughout modernity. Fringed by the rough coastline of the North Sea in the East and the bleak Pennines and Cheviots in the West, this region is also an important breeding ground for many bird species. Since spring 2022, seabird populations under these skies - and across the country - have been ravaged by avian flu. The virus was bred in the factories of industrial food production, has spread throughout the entire world by migratory birds, and has now begun to affect mammals.
Flight Paths is a travelogue through these little-known territories, unearthing the deep strata of its geology, following its human, animal and plant inhabitants, chiming into the seabirds' songs to the sea. A hymn about the cycles of life, and an elegy about our loneliness without the kinship of birds. A reflection on our lives in a pandemic age. A search for the roots and the reasons behind our collective suppression of ecological realities. In an era of the Sixth Mass Extinction, the book seeks to develop a language for the beauty of the living world, for the world of mourning about its loss, and for an ethos of cohabitation with other-than-human creatures.
