Zurich (dpa) – For Doris Dörrie, traveling is more than just covering a distance from A to B. It is always a departure full of curiosity, an essential part of her life, a wealth of experience.
Perhaps the corona pandemic had to come first so that she could write a book about it: “The Heroine Travels” is now published by Diogenes. It’s very personal, very smart, very entertaining. “In 2019 I traveled to the USA, Japan and Morocco. I could never have imagined that it would have been the last trip for a long time,” writes the 66-year-old. “My life still seemed to be the same as in previous years: almost always on the road, rarely at home for more than three months.”
Traveling has always seemed to the director (“Men”, “Cherry Blossoms – Hanami”) and author (“And what will become of me?”, “All inclusive”) as an opportunity to think outside the box since she went to Hanover after graduating from high school left San Francisco to study in the United States. “The whole world seemed to be an exciting, but basically friendly place, which I now had to traverse in order to learn and grow.”
Sometimes there are very mundane reasons for traveling, such as a film festival, but what makes it special for Dörrie has only marginally to do with such occasions. “Being on the move was my ideal state, on the way I felt liberated from myself, and at the same time I kept dreaming about becoming a different, better version of myself in the foreign country.”
Dörrie tells of formative travel memories, how she comes to Japan for the first time, for example, how excited she can’t sleep, how she notices the taxi driver’s white gloves, the short-legged tables and the politeness of the women at the hotel reception. The author is an excellent observer – also as a traveller. She has long since become familiar with Japan – otherwise her two “Cherry Blossoms” films would not exist. And that can be felt again and again in “The Heroine Travels”. “In no other country do I feel so looked after and protected as here.”
But one of the most impressive stories in the book is the one about Tatsu, a Japanese friend who studied at the music academy in Hanover, including an agonizing, painful affair with a singing teacher. It is the opposite perspective: that of a Japanese woman on a Germany that seems alien, which is so different than expected and at the same time is becoming more and more familiar to her.
Travel experiences are often associated with anecdotes, and Dörrie does not omit that. This includes the fact that as a child she and her three sisters had to endure seemingly endless journeys to Italy, squeezed tightly in the back seat of their parents’ car, while the car windows were covered with cloths to protect them from the sun. Or that she always writes “housewife” under the job title on the immigration form for the USA to calm down the bad-tempered immigration officers.
“The worse stories are usually the better ones,” Doris Dörrie is convinced. It’s definitely the more exciting ones. And as if to prove it, she talks about the planned return flight from San Francisco, when a bang is heard, a yellow glow flashes outside the windows, fire flickers, she writhes in mortal fear, loses her sense of time, only feels panic when the machine has to reverse. In the end she lands and didn’t crash – maybe the best stories are the bad ones that have a happy ending.
Doris Dörrie: The heroine travels. Diogenes Verlag, Zurich, 239 pages, 22.00 euros, ISBN 978-3-257-07184-9
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