American environmentalist Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams, one of the highest creations of contemporary naturalism: “If the north pole were the tip of a pencil, it would draw an oscillating irregular circle of variable diameter every 428 days.” Between 7.6 and 9 meters. All of the irregular circles drawn over the years would fall within an area of approximately 20 meters in diameter called the Chandler circle. The middle position of the center of this circle is the geographic north pole. Another voice from the vast continent, the owner of another, no less meaningful sensibility, the voice of Emily Dickinson, said: “The sailor cannot see the north, but he knows what the needle can see.”
This unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tension between science and poetry, knowledge and thought, objectivity and subjectivity appears on every page of Bernd Brunner’s The Invention of the North (Berlin, 1964), which the Berlin popularizer edited into a rather comprehensive title. An enjoyable contribution to cultural history that aims to show how the concept of what we call the North was mediated by exploration-based enterprises that culminated in legendary Arctic expeditions, as well as intellectual adventures of controversial honesty echoed by racial issues. and Günther, who are clearly identified with eugenics and the idea of the north and the alleged achievements of the Germanic man as emerging from Wagnerian sensibility and embodied in figures as disturbing as those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Hans.
As a cabinet of wonders, Brenner brings together in his book many actors, from ancient times, when the north was almost a blur in cartouches, to the present day, when the north is drawn like an overcoat across an unbalanced man (perhaps the last). The terrible way of life, driven into an irreversible ecological abyss, is part of this story full of heroism and tragedy, gods and demons, mysterious animals and unredeemed peoples. Thus The Invention of the North showcases the enigmatic narwhals and the melancholy extinction of the great auks, the pseudo-poems attributed to Ossian and the fascination that Iceland evoked in the cultured Europe of the Enlightenment, the saga of the Vikings in legendary Vinland, and the saga of the Vikings. The Victorian passion for heroism, the Scandinavianization in which Nazism tried to develop the Aryan ideal, and the irresistible beauty of the Norwegian skies, the invincible nobility of the Eskimos and the stories of the Brothers Grimm.
Literature, anthropology, geology, oceanography, economics, medicine, politics, art. It all serves as an excuse for Brunner to refine and sharpen his vision; It unfolds before us the complex, convoluted and undoubtedly unfinished story of one of the less obvious concepts at first glance, although it forms part of our emotional and intellectual imagination. It seems that, like all things human, it is occasionally delightfully plastic (and problematic), depending on the perspective adopted by its observer.