Devon House (Station 1 Rundgang Hildesheimer)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife immediately took a liking to the pretty palazzo:

"Of course, we haven't quite decided yet, but we are now entering into negotiations with the owner. After all, we don't risk anything if we try them [i.e. the apartment] - even if only for a few months at first. .... In any case, we are now in contact, not only with the homeowner (a very pleasant young man born in England), but also with the drugstore owner, who is the chairman of the tourist office and was very open to our plans." (1)

Wolfgang Hildesheimer and his wife lived on the mezzanine floor of Devon House from 1957 to 1961. The house plays an important role in Wolfgang Hildesheimer's prose work Tynset, for which he was awarded the Büchner Prize and the Bremen Literature Prize. The book is about the monologuing reflections of a first-person narrator in a sleepless night. Not only the circumstances of the narrator are strongly reminiscent of Hildesheimer, but also the house in which the first-person narrator moves is clearly inspired by Devon House. Who is the role model for his very pious but drunken housekeeper Celestina, we do not reveal here.

"It's still too early to walk through the house, that comes later when I still can't sleep later. I save, I postpone my nocturnal actions in front of me. So later I will get up and walk through the house.

I get up several times at night and walk through the house at least once, I cross the large wooden room next door, where there is nothing but a big saved break and from time to time the wooden sound and the splashing of a fountain, go through the library, at whose book walls I am staying or not, enter the stone staircase ...

... and in the back shed, the cyclopean room, where in summer and autumn the aromatic herbs hang to dry, here it smells good. I climb up to the telescope or not, leave the shed, enter the kitchen or not, go up the stairs, I look into the four rooms on the first floor, in one of which is my monstrous summer bed.

Here I sleep in summer, elevated, sublime and airy, in a void framed by wood, rushing with silence, so here is the starting point of my summer night walks, in winter I rarely stay here, usually I choose another room, one full of objects, and descend the stairs again. I never go higher, not at night.... because there is only one room at the top, that is Celestina's chamber, which I do not enter. From below I hear her snoring inside, or I hear nothing, which means that she sits in front of a bottle of red wine or lies in bed with her and drinks. Or I hear her murmuring, which means she's praying."

Sources:
(1) Letter to the Mother, August 1956.
(2) Tynset, Frankfurt am Main, 1965, p. 19ff.