Dangerous encounter on the One Man's Pass - Romberg, Erich

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Résumé :
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Biographie:
Erich Romberg was born in Essen in 1950 and grew up in the Ruhr region. He still remembers the bombed-out houses of the post-war period, which he visited with his father to collect roof beams for firewood. The family was barely making ends meet. Then came the economic miracle, and little by little the ruins disappeared from memory and the many empty fields were covered with new houses. All he remembered from primary school was that most of the teachers beat the children and that a trainee teacher read his essay about a walk in the woods out loud to the class as an example of how it should be done. It was his first A and a source of satisfaction, because his class teacher thought he was a boy who would never amount to anything. But he never had to repeat a year. There were still quite a few teachers like that back then. After completing a craft apprenticeship, the essay writer was drawn back to school, an evening school in the Ruhr area. Here he was amazed to discover the beautiful things of the mind. Although he actually wanted to do something completely different, he studied physics. As a physicist, he researched in various fields for a while and eventually became a consultant for air pollution control and local climate. Writing had always been a part of his life...

Sommaire:
The author lived in Ireland for about ten years in the 90s of the last millennium. During this time, the stories of the planned book series were written down. These stories mix fact and fiction. It is about the traditional storytelling of the old days in Ireland. The idea came to him at a storytelling festival in the small western Irish town of Kiltimagh, which he attended for the first time. However, he got his inspiration from the stories told by the people around the crackling peat fires, which conjured up a mystical atmosphere to accompany the stories. In the first story, the narrator finds himself on death row. He is said to be a parricide. *** In the cover story, I venture up the legendary One Man's Pass on the cliffs of Slieve League one day despite my fear of heights and have a dangerous encounter with a giant who moves safely up here in a particularly narrow place where no two people can pass each other. Nobody wants to back down, but do I have a choice? Then the stranger makes a surprising suggestion. In the third story, the narrator picks up an old hitchhiker in Kinnegad late at night in stormy weather and is drawn by her into a maelstrom of eerie stories dating back to the sixteenth century. Has he fallen into the night of the eternal judgement of blood, a curse from the past? On this night, the devil takes a traveller every 70 years at the hands of an old woman who joins him on the road. It's about love, betrayal, jealousy, superstition and death. The author then gives the floor to a storyteller from Donegal. He tells four stories: How do you become a dream designer? The first story provides the answer. The author has borrowed a little from Novalis here. In the second story, he tells of a man who, for a moment, must have realised the insignificance of his vanity. The third story is about a ruler whose greed for power and vanity lead to his downfall. The last story is about addiction, deception and self-deception. The author really lets it rip in the last story. It is guaranteed to have no deeper meaning. As Albert Einstein so aptly put it: Even the senseless still has a loose meaning....