Literature Tim Krohn makes the silence of the mountains audible in the city too
Tim Krohn's "Die Stille der Höhe. Tales from the mountains" is moving and makes you long for more.
08.10.2025, 06:30
SDA
The end at the beginning: "At 90, you're not really old yet." Tim Krohn's last sentence in his latest collection "Die Stille der Höhe" (The Silence of the Heights) does not refer to one person, but to several beds that are housed in an old building: a house in the mountains that belongs to the author. He bought it with the help of his audience after promoting it at readings. A pair of kestrels nest in the gable of the open hay barn.
Author Tim Krohn ("Quatemberkinder") was born in northern Germany and grew up in Glarus. He has lived in Val Müstair, a side valley of the Engadin, for over ten years. He writes his "Tales from the mountains" there, as well as crime novels set in the Engadin under the pseudonym Gian Maria Calonder.
Reading his new stories makes you long for the mountains, regardless of whether you are a mountain child or not. Tim Krohn himself lived in the city, in Zurich, for over twenty years before moving to the mountains. So he knows how to introduce city dwellers to the mountains: that you can breathe in the scent and tranquillity of the heights without actually being there.
Archaic and magical
Not all of his texts are set at dizzying heights. Once he describes Adam and Eve, Adam's effort to kill a deer ("The First Days of Mankind: The Hunt"). There is something archaic and at the same time magical about all the stories - the one about the trumpet player in Ilanz ("Helle Nacht") or about Margrith from Zurich, who goes hiking in the Lower Engadine ("Wenn das Vieh spricht in der Christnacht"); the essay about the Glarnerland ("Die Fremde beginnt nach ein paar Kilometern...") anyway.
But where and how do you read Tim Krohn's collection about these people, who you may have already encountered in earlier works? In the valley, of course. Before and after descents, also in a figurative sense, in solitude or in the city. Everywhere, in fact. Tim Krohn knows how to shape his stories in such a way that they take his readers with him.
Incidentally, the Roth beds are not actually 90 years old. They just look that way and appear in the essay about living and the best neighborhood ("Our ideal home"). The writer found them, just like silence in the heights.*
*This text by Nina Kobelt, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
