Jürgen Ehlers - The Ice Age

This book is a translation of the original German edition Das Eiszeitalter by Ehlers, Juergen, published by Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE in 2020. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE, part of Springer Nature.

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Writing a book does not only mean spending many hours at the computer, but such an undertaking interferes with many aspects of daily life. In this case, for example, it led me one day in the summer of 2019 to stand in a well-known shop for comics and joke articles near the University of Hamburg and ask for something I assumed would be effortless to get. But the waitress shook her head, "A devil mask? No, we don't have anything like that."

Too bad. But there were numerous other things that had to be organised first. For example, many places had changed significantly over the years. These included the glaciers in Scandinavia and in the Alps. This also included the erratic block "Alter Schwede" in Hamburg, which suddenly looked completely different in January 2019. The only object that had not changed significantly was the dinosaur made of cement at Hagenbeck's zoo in Hamburg. Only our son, who served as a size comparison then as now, has changed. After all, there are more than 10 years between the two photographs.

There were many beautiful but also exciting moments during the off-road activity. For example, when my wife and I were wading around in the middle of a Swedish strand bog shortly before nightfall and in pouring rain and suddenly realised that we had lost our bearings. But it all worked out. And we also eventually got the devil's mask, by mail, along with a pack of fake blood. We couldn't use the blood.

It's supposed to be pretty hot in hell. The story with the mask ended, appropriately enough, with me standing in front of a glacial boulder in a thicket near Lyon on one of the hottest days of the year in a devil's costume and having my picture taken. The stone was called "Pierre de la mule du diable," and Albert Falsan, who first described it in 1877, drew the boulder, complete with devil and mule, for his book. We did not have a mule with us just then; so, all we had left was the devil. When finally everything was over and I could take off the mask again and returned to our car covered with sweat, the owner of a neighbouring lonely house was already waiting there, who explained to my wife and me in French that this was his property and that we were not allowed to park there. He showed us a piece of paper on which he had written our license plate number. We didn't need to do that. We knew our license plate number. Good thing the man didn't know he had just met the devil. We politely excused ourselves and drove away.