![\"\"](\"https:\/\/jcmeister.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/Omdraisvlei-1.png\" "\\"Omdraisvlei-1\\"")
<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\nBlank. It takes a couple of seconds to sink in. Last time I saw Edwin must have been about 9 months ago; he was about to move to De Rust after finally loosing the battle over the Karoo family farm Omdraisvlei. It is so remote and in the middle of nowhere that you can actually find it on some old terrestrial globes. And it is so remote that Google doesn’t know it and I should actually misspell its name here (have I?) to protect a dream from the cognitive fascism of machine learning and the idiocy of recommender algorithms. This is how it works:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine 25.000 hectars of semi desert, with Bushman paintings, the remains of an airstrip and a school house and a train station and black rocks and table mountains and endless skies and lone sheep and a patch of green grass irigated by wind motors that pump up ice cold water from 80 m below and glistening sheets of corrugated iron on the walls of the barn where the shearers sweat in 45 degree heat and heaps of wool get sorted into huge boxes and Edwin stands outside the farm kitchen the next morning with a mug of coffee in hand and it’s 6 am and he’s smiling and in the evening he will crank the handle of the old lister diesel generator and the machine will hammer through the icy Karoo night and the lights will go on and then eventually they will go off again and we’ll sit around the fire and Edwin will be full of stories, so full of stories, and you listen to him and you realize, this guy is crazy, seriously crazy, crazy in the most heartwarming and inspiring way, and yes, not everything about this is nice and there is quite a bit of collateral damage to come; he and Sue will break up, but for now it is still 1988 and we have just met him and Sue for the very first time on our very first trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town, Johnny told us about Edwin and that we’d be welcome there, and we just popped in without prior notice and even if Johnny did indeed tell Edwin about us coming Edwin had clearly forgotten or didn’t find it important for visitors to be announced – remember, we’re talking 1987: no cell phones, no internet – and in 1994, on our last journey to Cape Town before leaving SA for a couple of years, we’re at the farm again and I see: the huge wind pump next to the garden, a massive thing over 25 meters high, imported from Australia by Edwin’s dad or granddad and apparently once the highest in South Africa, is shattered to bits, the rotor blades flapping aimlessly in the breeze with a creaking, metallic noise, and it was then that I realized: from here on it’s down hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But I only realized that I had realized that then quite some years later. All of us kept on living, fighting, marching on with the determination of ants. And who’s to judge; at least we tried and we didn’t whimper either (here’s the connection with German contemporary literature and ‘Stoner’, this touching hymne to the stoicism of deed and language). Edwin in particular didn’t whimper. 15 years ago he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Last time I saw him he was, simply put, frail, no doubt about it. But his mind was not just on fire – it was by then radio-nuclear and he still didn’t know any half-measure in anything. If a candle had three ends instead of two, Edwin would have lit them all. Which, as I said before, was not always nice, let alone fair to those who tried to be close to him. But he had a soul, and best of all: he didn’t need followers. I remember that in his first autobiographical account which he self-published he describes how he enters the dining hall in a Parkinson’s clinic for the very first time and there’s this strange rustling, like a gust of hot air tearing at the corrugated iron sheets of the barn on his farm, and he realizes: it’s the cutlery of the patients clanking on the enamel plates, and so he decides to join the symphony of the shaking limbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I sat down (we’re back in Berlin) and wrote an eMail to Angela:<\/p>\n\n\n