#RivetingReviews: Sarah Escritt reviews HIMMELSSTRICHE (‘Flight Lines’) by Bernhard Malkmus, translated by Marielle Sutherland

Translation in Performance

In his recent book, Himmelsstriche, Bernhard Malkmus takes us to the icy winds, shifting lights and infinite colours of the Northumbrian coast. Sometimes, he says, the cold clarity of the light here is like tinkling ice cubes, brought from the Highlands by the north wind. Himmelsstriche is about his neighbours in Whitley Bay, the stories and histories of the region, and the seabirds that helped him to discover its lights and colours. His writing teems with the birds that he encounters along the Northumbrian coastline and in the Scottish mountains. 

The catalyst for the book, however, was not the abundance of life, but rather the recognition of its finitude. In Spring 2022, not so long after we had emerged from Covid lockdowns, Malkmus started to come across the silent corpses of seabirds, victims of avian flu, washed up on the sands. Writing about these cumulative deaths and empty breeding grounds was a way to try to map and to comprehend what was happening. At the same time these losses instilled in him an urgency to record what was living. In the resultant diary entries, spanning the period from May 2022 to September 2023, Malkmus describes walks and conversations, books and poetry, and the changing seasons, reflected in the birds that he sees: a skylark over Whitley Bay and swifts over Newcastle rooftops in May, goldeneyes and sanderlings in the sea off Druridge Bay in October. He also writes about the multiple, overlapping reasons for the decline in bird numbers: viruses, climate change, pollution caused by industrial decay, intensive farming, failure of vision and understanding. 

Malkmus’ writing – precise, poetic and erudite – shows us that everything is connected. The diary entry of 18 July 2022 takes us from Cullercoats Coffee Co to New Labour via Lindisfarne, Swan Hunter, Sting, terns and temporality. Throughout the book, pictures supplement words. Illustrations include Lyonel Feininger’s Bird Cloud, photographs by Chris Killip, a carpet page from the Lindisfarne Gospels and shipping maps by Ben Schmidt. The title, Himmelsstriche, we learn, is a multi-layered word, archaic in modern German. Malkmus uses it to describe the flight paths of the birds that form such a central part of his book. It translates literally as ‘sky strips’ but can mean the trajectory of a star or a strip of sky or land. It evokes a sense of connectedness, between land and sky, earth and the stars, that we lack in daily language and life. 

For all the beauty of both the writing and the book as object, Himmelsstriche is a lesson in the limits of representation. Its captivating description of a barn owl passing overhead in the black of night cannot substitute for the experience itself. Instead, through its naming of colours and descriptions of birds, it encourages us to look again at the world around us. It urges us to pay attention. 

Malkmus has not waited for this book to be translated in full into English. Instead, he has taken it out and about in performance. Extracts have been translated by German scholar and translator, Marielle Sutherland, and set to music by musician, George Herbert. All three join in an incandescent performance of music and words. 

The next reading, alas this time without piano, will be on 18 October 2026 at 2.15 pm at the Weston Library in Oxford, to accompany the Wonder of Birds exhibition. 

Reviewed by Sarah Escritt

HIMMELSSTRICHE (‘Flight Lines’)

Written by Bernhard Malkmus

Published by Matthes & Seitz (2025)

Extracts translated into English by Marielle Sutherland.

Music chosen, adapted and performed by George Herbert

You can read an extract from Himmelsstriche in Marielle Sutherland’s translation on the New Books in German website.

September 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.

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Sarah Escritt was the runner-up in the 2025 Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation and in the aspiring translators category of the Austrian Cultural Forum 2026 Translation Prize.

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