From Genius to Sloth

Toward the end of Wolfgang Hildesheimer's novel Tynset (1965), the insomniac first-person narrator ponders the contents of his kitchen cupboard as he teeters between wakefulness and fitful bursts of sleep. Mentally listing different combinations of mixed dried herbs, he concludes that a specific assortment containing rosemary would never sell in Germany. A herb that Shakespeare's Ophelia links to the power of memory, rosemary is simply not a German affair. Nor is garlic, the narrator muses, for “deutsche Esser” (German eaters) prefer to have pure breath. From an unidentified place of self-elected exile he remembers the German man who imparted this to him, someone he once met arbitrarily on a train and who subsequently became famous for his surgical skill. During the war this random acquaintance transplanted the hip bones of “a few” Danes to “a few” Germans. Whether the Danes in question were alive or dead at the time remains open to speculation. Having thus implied that this perhaps pioneering medical procedure was, in fact, an exercise in butchery, the narrator interrupts his disturbing train of thought and returns to his mixed herbs, concluding that there is certainly no question of his forgetting anything. Some punctuation—a dash—then indicates that he has drifted off to sleep, but by the next paragraph he is abruptly awake, convinced that a murderer lurks outside his bedroom window.