Devon House (Station 1 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

The graceful palace fascinated Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife right from the start:

"Of course we have not yet decided definitively, but we are starting negotiations with the owner. After all, we don't risk anything if we try [i.e. home] – even if only for a few months initially. [...] However, we are now in contact, not only with the owner of the house (a very pleasant young man born in England), but also with the owner of the grocery store, who is the president of the tourist board and who has shown himself open to our projects." (1)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife lived from 1957 to 1961 on the mezzanine floor of Devon House. The palace plays an important role in Tynset, a prose work for which Wolfgang Hildesheimer was awarded the Büchnerpreis and Bremer Literaturpreis literary prizes. Tynset is a long monologue by the narrator during a sleepless night, in which it is not only the narrator's living conditions that strongly evoke Hildesheimer, even the house in which he moves is clearly inspired by Devon House. Who inspired the figure Celestina, the very devoted maid but addicted to alcohol, we will not reveal here.

"It is still too early to undertake the walk through the house, I will do it later, if even then I have not been able to sleep. I skimp, I keep postponing my night actions. So I'll get up and walk around the house later.

At night I get up several times and at least once I go around the house, through the large wooden room, adjoining mine, which contains nothing but a large stored interval and every now and then the sound of wood and the rinsing of a fountain, through the library, before whose walls crammed with books I pause or not, I go out on the wooden stairwell [...].

[...] and I enter the back shed, in that cyclopean room where in summer and autumn herbs and drugs are hung to dry. There is a good smell here. I go up or not up to the telescope, I leave the shed, I go in or not in the kitchen, I go up the staircase, I take a look at the four rooms on the first floor - in one of which there is my gigantic summer bed.

Here I sleep in summer, in a solemn breezy height, in a wood-rimmed void, roaring with silence, this is therefore the starting point of my summer night walks, in winter I rarely stop up here, I usually look for another room, one that is full of objects, and I go down the stairs. I never go higher, at least at night, [...] because up high there is only one room, Celestina's bedroom, where I never enter. From below I hear her snoring, or I don't hear anything, and it means that she is sitting in front of a bottle of red wine or that she has taken it to bed and drinks. or I hear her mumble, and it means she prays."

Sources
(1) Letter to his mother, August 1956 (trans. Monika Thurner).
(2) Tynset, by Wolfgang Hildesheimer, preface by Gabriella Rovagnati and Italo Alighiero Chiusano, ed. Il Mosaico, Tirano 2016, pp. 7-9.