If war comes, we’ll spend it in the desert
We wanted no hand or part in the mass suicide of civilized people.
The Sheltering Desert begins at the story’s end, with a “clang” of the Windhoek Prison’s gate closing behind its two heroes. Henno Martin finds little comfort in the faded inscription above: “Alles Zur Besserung.” All For the Better. Despite the long day’s journey across the desert, sleep wouldn’t come. It was a walled fortress he and Hermann Korn had managed to avoid for two and a half years, but his colleague had contracted beriberi – a severe Vitamin B1 deficiency – leaving him in desperate need of medical attention.
The pair had only recently resolved themselves to their fate – a seemingly inevitable interment at the hands of their own government after being shipped home. The prison had separated the two. Korn, suffering and weak, slept in the neighboring cell. As memoir setups go “End of the Road” is a fine one — though short, running a single page. There’s little doubt that, as he writes, the Freiburg, German-born geology professor ran through the previous years’ experience, awake in bed, as the light of a far off lantern flickered through the bars. He wonders what could be next for the pair, as their time on the continent drew to a close.
“Well, for one thing, we shouldn’t have to stalk our breakfast in the morning,” he writes, with the faintest sense of relief, “it would be brought to us in our cells, ample proof that human society had got ahold of us again.”
Windhoek Prison was, perhaps, an inevitability – or at least, the only possible outcome aside from dying in the Namibian (née South-West African) desert. It was there, just south of the Goboboseb Mountains, that Martin discovered Messum in 1939. In a contemporary review of The Sheltering Desert, New York Times book reviewer (and native of neighboring South Africa) John Barkham described the area as, “a lunar landscape, with its white-chalk plains flanked by serrated ridges and its vast networks of gullies and gorges in which one caught the occasional glimpse of water.”
A massive crater didn’t seem especially out of place in an expanse of land Barkham compared only slightly favorably to the surface of the moon. But the Messum Crater’s appearance belies its origin story. On its surface lives a population of welwitschia mirabilis, an impossibly hearty plant endemic to the area, which is believed to live in excess of 2,000 years. Beneath the surface sits an ancient, long extinct volcano believed to have been the site of one of the Earth’s largest explosion.
Geologist friends Martin and Korn were conducting research in nearby Windhoek, Namibia’s capital, as the Second World War dawned. “[We] had already decided that this was not our war” writes Martin. “We had seen it coming for a long time, and in fact that was the reason why we had left Europe in the first place. We wanted no hand or part in the mass suicide of civilized people.”
Returning home was quickly ruled out. While neither man fit the description of the millions whose lives would be horrifyingly terminated in Europe’s concentration camps, the fear was quite real. Their pre-war joke, “if war comes, we’ll spend it in the desert,” suddenly seemed the most viable option. German rule of Namibia had begun late the previous century, under the rule of Otto von Bismarck, in a bid to hamper British encroachment into the territory. Within decades, the German colonizers began a systematic genocide, brutally murdering 75,000 – a majority of the area’s natives. Those who survived would lead difficult lives foreshadowing South Africa’s apartheid state decades later.
Remaining in the capital of an ostensibly German state would almost certainly lead to Martin and Korn’s deportation, and, perhaps, result in years behind the camps’ barbed wire. “By the time the light of the zodiac stood over the western hills, the idea had become a decision,” Martin writes. “we would go into the desert and live there in complete isolation until the war was over.” The two men packed supplies and set out in truck, accompanied by their dog Otto, his tail wagging at the prospect of new adventure.
The trio traveled 130 miles southwest to Kuiseb Canyon, carved out by the river of the same name. They lied about their destination to their local contacts and set out on a circuitous route that avoided homes where they might be spotted, over fears of being reported to the local police. It was a journey that lasted a full four days, according to Martin. Settling into their destination, they hid the car nearby, removed the battery and used it to power a radio.
“[T]here, in the desert, we listened to the latest war communiqués,” Martin writes. “They were about the German tanks driving into France. The voice that came to us out of the ether seemed unreal and fantastic, and yet alive as though in a dream. Through the hot, sharp gusts of the east wind we could almost hear the roar and rattle of the heavy tanks.”
A wind generator would power the battery for the remainder of their time in the wilderness. Supplies (tobacco and food) were severely limited, forcing the men to learn how to trap small animals and hunt larger game with their gun. Frustrated with their inability to catch fish, Korn grabbed the pistol, focused on the water and nailed a four-pound carp.
They fried their fish, smoked their meat and drank from the river, all while photographing the experience and carrying out geological surveys of the land they occupied. Korn painted and played his violin. Contact with fellow humans was rare – largely the result of health emergencies. Otto, for instance, ran afoul a territorial antelope and required medical attention. Martin describes the rock shelter construction of a “living room” and “kitchen,” the latter of which utilized a metal trunk as a table and a gas can cupboard.
Korn fell ill in the winter, as morning temperatures dropped to freezing. Martin managed to fell a zebra near their hut, in hopes that liver meat might heal his vitamin-deficient friend – or at least reduce his intense pain. “We hoped that complete rest and plenty of good food, particularly raw meat, would restore him to health,” Martin writes in the book’s final chapter, “and for almost a month he spent most of his time in bed, sketching prehistoric stone implements and doing a bit of watercolor painting, for which he had a real talent. But it was no use, and there were days when the pain extended from his back to his neck and head. In the end we decided that the time had come to call it a day.”
Neither man was sent to a camp after their return to Germany. A year after the war ended, Korn died in a traffic accident. Eleven years later, Martin’s Sheltering Desert was released, illustrated with the photographs the men had taken along the way. The following decade, he became the head of Geology at the University of Göttingen. He died in 1998 at the age of 87.
Sources:
The Sheltering Desert by Henno Martin
The Story of Henno Martin and Hermann Korn https://www.namibia-accommodation.com/articles/the_story_of_henno_martin_and_hermann_korn
The largest volcanic eruptions on Earth https://eprints.qut.edu.au/40259/1/c40259.pdf
They Chose the Stone Age https://www.nytimes.com/1958/10/05/archives/they-chose-the-stone-age-the-sheltering-desert-by-henno-martin.html