A Woman in the Polar Night

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While the quantitative evidence for how nature affects our minds has grown over the last few decades, humans have always expressed the power of the wilds to offer mental succour. But few have written about it so generously and beautifully as Christiane Ritter. Christiane Ritter was neither an explorer nor a luminary. Instead, she was a well-to-do Austrian hausfrau who, prior to her year in Spitsbergen, had never strayed far from her comfortable surroundings. Yet perhaps because she had no interest in an Arctic Grail, whether the Pole, the Northwest Passage, or just an Unknown Land, she could appreciate the Arctic in ways that the aforementioned luminaries, wrapped in their Grail-oriented blinders, could not. And in appreciating the Arctic, indeed thriving in it, she gave the lie to the notion that women do not belong at the ends of the earth. Northern lights of incredible intensity stream over the sky; their bright rays shooting downward, look like gleaming rods of glass. They break out from a tremendous height and seem to be falling directly toward me, growing brighter and clearer, in radiant lilacs, greens, and pinks, swinging and whirling around their own axis in a wild dance that sweeps over the entire sky, and then, in drifting undulating veils, they fade and vanish. Her transformation from the excitement of arriving on the island, which reads like an Enid Blyton style adventure of the day (1930s), to a fear of what she has let herself in for as the sun goes down in October, not to rise until February, is perfectly described. That bright Blyton style descends into a dark cerebal tone; the mental toughness necessary for survival is evident.

Layout - so on top of being bored to tears with the subject, I actually didn't understand a lot of her writing. Most of the time I had no idea where she even was, she referred to every stopping point as 'the hut' which had me totally lost - taking me yet further out of the story. And I felt she almost wanted her writing to be so 'beautiful' that she never actually got to the point, it was just descriptive words. This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society's expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime. Note: I received an ARC through NetGalley, and the passages quoted may not be in their final forms. The writing is quite restrained in places (e.g. when it comes to detailing personal information or relationships), but Ritter's descriptions of her surroundings are captivating. Landscape, climate, and nature - and how they change throughout the year - are all depicted in an almost painterly style:

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A little more of Hermann’s story is told in another volume. Although Christiane does not say so in her account, her husband was an officer in the German merchant fleet and pressed into service as captain of a German naval vessel during the war. According to the author of “ The war in North-East Greenland ,” he was a secret pacifist and sought to undermine Germany’s effort to control weather stations in Greenland. A year in the Arctic wilderness in 1934. We review A Woman In The Polar Night. Polar Night – the blurb Sie berichtet vom dortigen Alltag, den Aufgaben und ihren Erfahrungen. Besonders schön und persönlich fand ich, dass ihrem Buch acht ihrer Aquarelle und 25 ihrer Federzeichnungen hinzugefügt wurden, die das Buch abrunden und sehr bereichert haben- immerhin war Ritter Künstlerin. So dürfen wir als LeserInnen (abseits des Geschriebenen) erfahren, wie sie ihre Zeit dort wahrgenommen hat.

But for me, the descriptions of the arctic weather and wildlife are the best aspects of the book. Not completely knowing what to expect going in, she winds up realizing that a life lived without a connection to nature is a lesser life.Christiane Ritter- Künstlerin, Abenteurerin, Ehefrau und Mutter, doch vor allem eine Frau, die ihrer Zeit voraus war.