A visit to Heinrich Böll’s cottage: A calm, sprawling and undeniable pull

The population is sparse; you sense people more than you see or hear them. They have a perfect, meticulous routine as though everything has a pattern. Even the window you spot in the distance during your early morning stroll seems neglected at first (with scratches here or there).

But the closer you get, the clearer the patterns become – geometric shapes, intricate and silver, etched into the frame.

Stillness surrounds you. Just like the vacant wooden bench by the door of the stone house, perched beneath the window with its drawn curtains. Several other quiet houses dot the road, their facades telling a story, giving a glimpse into the lives of their inhabitants.

Outside, vignettes of life unfold around you like a movie or a play.

Three inviting chairs welcome you on a terrace, bathed in the warm orange of the autumn sun. Their emptiness suggests a sudden departure.

On a path near the cottages, two women chat, fingertips gripping onto bicycle handles. Beyond them, vast fields stretch to the horizon, white clouds filling the sky.

Elsewhere, a nimble squirrel dashes across the road, nearly gone before you notice him – a guest star without any stage time.

Finally, an unfenced cemetery is cradled by the sunlit, grassy roadside between Heinrich Böll's town and a neighbouring one. On Sundays, visitors of the departed gather there, content to celebrate life.

Patterns of nature

The people here won't make a fuss about your foreignness – a stranger from a faraway land, coming to visit. In fact, they won't make a fuss about much of anything.

Nothing is over-the-top, spectacular, or contrived. Everything is functional – down to the houses, and probably their owners. Someone must be behind this sense of peace, after all.

You might cross paths with town residents now and then. You'll probably share a nod and maybe a few words. The interactions won't follow you around for the rest of your life. They're fleeting memories, frozen in time.

Even nature seems to follow a utilitarian formula around these parts. No leaf is a centimetre out of place. Beautiful, practical, and carefully curated. Surely, a lot of time has gone into creating this harmony.

Anything this effortless must have been born out of effort.

At one point, I wonder, is there any lingering trace of the harsh picture of the world described by German thinker Max Weber in his famous book 'The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism'?

Walking on art

Sprawling fields match the sprawling silence.

Yellow and green swathes of agriculture stretch around you. For a moment, you might feel as though the uneven ground beneath your soles is the bumpy texture of a canvas. Indeed, you don't need artists like Vincent van Gogh or Claude Monet, or even Monet's house museum in the French village of Giverny, to imagine this.

With Böll's cottage and his small rural town behind you, you throw the concept of "directions" out the window. You simply wander – aimlessly and lost in thought.

"Distance" is now measured by familiar sights. Maybe a short-legged horse that you walked past earlier, who grazes alone. Or the tree you saw yesterday. Or the vast field of barley, its pale stalks harvested and pressed into giant, identical cylindrical bales, neatly arranged in a geometric pattern between the cornfield and the forest.

The more you walk, the wider the world grows, and the smaller you become. Until you're just an infinitely minute dot in an immense and boundless land.

Wild, spectral trees

There is what you know before you walk into the eternal darkness of a German forest, and there is what you know after.

Stumble a few steps into the dense wilderness and you'll brush past enormous, hulking trees, like nothing you've seen before.

They seem to have been rustled out of a deep, dark and unknown depth. Your knowledge of human dominion over nature, its taming and domestication, doesn't help you in the slightest. A flutter of fear forces you a step back, and you cannot muster the strength to resist it.

Then, a profound calm returns – but not the normal kind. The kind of calm inhabited by spirits or ghosts. The trees towering over you are suddenly home to spectral souls from previous realms – a time before creatures even came into existence.

An interminable amount of time passes before you step back out of the lush blackness.

You ponder the German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger (and his dark forest), who accomplished much of his philosophical writings in a small house (perhaps a log cabin) he built in a mountain in the woods. He once said, "Only the black forest can inspire me."

You also recall the thinker and novelist Elias Canetti, who wrote 'Crowds and Power', in which he saw the forest as the most powerful embodiment of the German spirit.

As you walk the path through the fields, getting closer to the townhouses, you think about the surge of German "rubble literature" after the Second World War, and its pioneer Heinrich Böll.

What a miracle, how this literary movement helped lift Germany from the ruins of the war.

Undeniable pull

You arrive at Böll's cottage again. There, you read that in February 1974, he hosted the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of 'The Gulag Archipelago' (for which he was deported), for two days. They walked these very halls.

In front of the house, they held a press conference. They discussed supporting Russian writers who had defected from the totalitarian Soviet regime.

How many other interesting conversations must have taken place between these walls?

After Böll's death, his family decided to turn the cottage into a residence for artists and writers. This new tradition, starting in 1989, continued his literary legacy.

Whether you feel Böll's spirit when you visit is for you to decide. But the undeniable pull of this place, its paths, people, and endless plots of land is impossible to ignore.

Here, you're a shadow among other shadows, at least for some time.

And then, inevitably, you're back in the real world.