Wolfgang Hardtwig’s “The Farm in the Mountains” – Culture

It takes a whole village to raise a child, goes an often quoted African proverb. But what child today has a village around them? The cultural historian and historical theorist Wolfgang Hardtwig, born in 1944 and one of the most thoughtful in his field, comes from such a village, the Bavarian town of Reit im Winkl, near the Austrian border. He made a book out of the childhood he experienced there, which seamlessly combines vivid narrative and historical reflection in a matte, shimmering prose whose loving, subterranean irony, which only occasionally emerges to the surface, ensures that relaxed self-distance that conveys feeling and knowledge perfectly balanced. A wonderful book.