Die Wüste magazine

Die Wüste is a specialist magazine about deserts that the narrator’s father gave him as a subscription. Not intended for children, it nevertheless became a defining source of the narrator’s childhood knowledge: its articles carried deserts into his reading, his schoolwork, and his ideas about what a future life might hold.

A Magazine in the Family

The subscription belonged to the father’s habit of giving magazines as gifts. He continued to receive specialist periodicals even after his interest in their subjects had faded, and the family’s reading included publications devoted to beekeeping, fishing, and farming. He gave the narrator’s mother a gardening magazine for their wedding anniversary, while the narrator received a publication devoted to deserts, also titled Die Wüste. Magazine subscriptions were thus both a practical form of reading matter and a characteristic expression of the father’s enthusiasm for specialist knowledge.

Reading Beside the Father

The narrator recalls sitting on the sofa with Die Wüste while his father, in his armchair, studied graphic photographs of the so-called dressing of wild boars. The two read side by side, but the subjects sharply divided their attention: the father absorbed himself in hunting material, while the child entered the magazine’s desert world. The publication was explicitly not made for children, yet the narrator read it closely enough to acquire knowledge he associated with genuine desert specialists, including the ability to distinguish numerous kinds of scorpions.

The Desert Takes Over Schoolwork

The magazine’s influence became visible in the narrator’s primary-school essays. Teachers repeatedly asked him to write about the assigned subject rather than about the desert, but he found a way to turn even a topic such as children in road traffic toward his favored subject. His account began with his own short walk to school and then shifted to Bedouin children who could take days to reach theirs. The detour makes the magazine’s effect more than a matter of accumulated facts: it supplied the narrator with a recurring imaginative destination, one that could absorb almost any prompt.

Knowledge and Imagined Work

Among the details the narrator encountered in Die Wüste was the claim that lightning striking sand of a particular mineral composition could penetrate several metres and melt it, leaving a fragile, jagged crystal that could be carefully excavated. The image of digging up such lightning joined another desert possibility he had read about: photographing mirages. These were the occupations that magnetically appealed to him. The magazine therefore linked specialized knowledge to childhood vocational fantasy, turning facts about desert phenomena into imagined forms of work.