Search results for "Christiane Ritter"

Music in the Dark: Soundscapes in Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in The Polar Night

2020

In A Woman in the Polar Night (Eine Frau erlebt die Polarnacht, 1938), Christiane Ritter, a well-to-do Austrian housewife, describes her experience as the first central European woman to overwinter on Svalbard (1934–35). Ritter’s prose is extraordinary in its lyrical simplicity, and in German editions the text is interspersed with her paintings of the scenes that at first were so alien and changing, yet became so familiar and loved.
 Although stationed on the north coast of Svalbard with minimal human contact and without any recourse to the music with which Ritter had been surrounded in Austria, A Woman in the Polar Night is a text that is full of references to sound, natural sounds th…