He left the train in Rheinweiler and slowly walked out over the pontoon bridge. The Rhine, with this narrow dock, lay under a high spring morning; it was already warm.

Barry the dog dashed circles around him in large sprints without barking. When Claus paused, the dog remained still and looked around at their surroundings. Sometimes the animal trod close to the edge of the bridge and sniffed at the raging water, which was sending up a cool mist.

The Rhine, the Rhine!

More and more frequently Claus would linger, stretch, breathing deeply, spread his bare hands, throw his head back and then bring it down with a smile. There was where his heart beat, in the limbo between Germany and France, in the middle of the Rhine, a sacred current, pumping the blood joyously through his body, and he felt as if a shimmering brightness was flowing out, outside his own physical being, reaching much, much further than the arms he stretched out towards the east and the west – from one hill on the horizon to the other!

He felt something of that silvery down on his fingertips as it wavered over and around him in the blue sky, in that whole, wide space up to the heights of the Black Forest that he looked back upon. Yes, there too, along the narrow seam between forest and sky, it smouldered and flickered as if from a fire of ether, bringing forth some great, mild deed. Also in the river itself, the little light of his soul darted here and there, dove underneath, and then flew away once more into the blue.

Suddenly he was overcome with that old childlike exuberance, he spoke to himself of ‘Pentecostal flames over the Rhine’, of ‘overwhelming the borders with a beautiful day’, of the ‘power of a divine carelessness over the customs officers’, he felt strong and fresh in this, his own secret language, the use of which gave him a certain feeling of timelessness, and as he finally looked up towards the youthful green crests, like the kind that also hung from the poplars on the Alsatian riverbank, and they, in the completely windless air, seemed to quiver from the light of the sky alone, then he tore the hat from his head with a flourish and cried aloud into the morning:

‘Vive l’Alsace!’

‘Vive l’Alsace!’ he cried a second time, and waved with his hat in the direction of three figures that awaited him on a little hill over the embankment, over in France, and so he had cried out in French.

René Schickele, 1927, as published in “Das Wort hat einen neuen Sinn” (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 2014). Translated from the German.