GÜNTHER BACH
THE HORN OF THE HARE
A NOVEL OF ARCHERY
VERLAG ANGELIKA HÖRNIG
Günther Bach
The Horn of the Hare
© 2000 by Verlag Angelika Hörnig
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
without the written permission of the publisher.
Illustrations: Günther Bach
Translation: Robert Dohrenwend
Cover design: Angelika Hörnig
Lecturer: Mitch Cohen
© 2012 ebook
ISBN: 978-3-938921-25-8
Verlag Angelika Hörnig
Siebenpfeifferstr. 18
D-67071 Ludwigshafen
Germany
Table of Contents
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Author
“Perhaps feelings are somewhat uncertain,
but there‘s no help for it,
we have to depend on them anyway.“
Johannes Bobrowski
When this book was written, it was impossible to get it published in the part of Germany where I lived at that time.
The manuscript lay in a drawer for almost twenty years and I only occasionally glanced at the pages while they become increasingly brittle as time passed.
From today’s viewpoint, it is hard for me to describe to an American reader the conditions under which people lived in East Germany (DDR), a state which called itself democratic, mocking those who had to live there.
When the Second World War came to an end, I was ten years old. I had grown up in a small city 900 years old with many Gothic brick churches which had escaped the bombing during the war. My father was a hunter and a man with a deep love of nature. Only poor eyesight kept him from making this passion his career. So he became a banker, weekdays in his office in a neat gray suit, quiet, friendly, and dependable, but on the weekends, he was outdoors in the woods and fields wearing an old green loden coat and an even older shabby felt hat. The hat had a spray of grouse feathers on it whose original colors were no longer recognizable.
There was only a short period in my life when I was allowed to accompany him, but it was long enough for me to become familiar with this, his most lovable side. If really lasting impressions are formed in childhood, impressions which are significant for the rest of your life, then these were mine. Even today when I go into the woods, I am silenced by a feeling of magic which I try not to disturb.
This childhood, peaceful in spite of the war, ended with the end of the war, with white flags at the windows and jeeps and tanks rumbling through the empty streets.
A proclamation by the commandant required the inhabitants of the city to bring all their weapons to the city market square. I was there when my father handed his two hunting weapons, a drilling and double barreled shotgun, to a friendly officer.
The officer laid them in a row with other hunting weapons, with the barrels on the curb of the sidewalk and the butt stocks in the street. Then he waved to a soldier who sat smoking in the turret of a Sherman tank. The soldier drove the tank forward, and my father watched with a stony expression as his expensive and cherished guns were smashed into a heap of bent scrap metal and splintered wood.
For the rest of his life, my father never again owned a weapon. The Americans soon pulled out as a result of the arrangement among the allies. They were followed by the Russians, whose arrival was anticipated with fear and terror by many in the city. And at that time, the first people began to flee to West Germany for fear of what was to come. We stayed in the Soviet occupied zone, which four years later became the so-called German Democratic Republic (DDR).
My home city lay only 100 kilometers away from Berlin, which was located in the middle of the DDR. Berlin – the former capital of the “Third Reich”, proclaimed capital of the DDR, and now finally the capital of reunited Germany, was then the only open way out when things no longer seemed to work out for people. If you couldn’t take it any more, if you could no longer pretend to be satisfied with the restrictions and hypocrisy of this police state where only members of the state party could advance, if you could no longer stand the smug self-satisfaction of the ruling mediocrity, it was good to know that you could always go to Berlin, take a tram to the West, and be free.