Über tausend Hügel wandere ich mit dir

Hanna Jansen:
Über tausend Hügel wandere ich mit dir:
eine erschütternde Kindheit in Afrika
Stuttgart: Thienemann, 2002
365 S.
ISBN 978-3-522-17476-3
Paperback edition: Knaur, 2003
English translation:
I will walk with you over a thousand hills
(Andersen Press, 2007)
French translation:
J'irai avec toi par mille collines
(Hachette livre, 2004)

This is a true story. It is based on the memoirs of Jeanne d'Arc Umubyeyi who as the only member of her family escaped the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and now lives in Germany as the adopted daughter of Hanna Jansen. The book, in which the author has recorded Jeanne's story is the result of long conversations in which Jeanne tried to overcome the terrible experiences.

Jeanne grows up in a carefree manner with her brother Jando and her sister Teja in a family of teachers in Rwanda, the country of a thousand hills. When the killings begin, sudden and abrupt from the children's point of view, she is eight years old. Fanatic Hutus call upon a war of destruction against the Tutsis. Jeanne's family, who are Tutsis also flee to a gymnasium but are not safe from the killings there in which even their own neighbours are involved in. Hutus invade the gym and Jeanne is forced to experience how her mother is brutally beaten to death. Her sister is burnt to death with many others who were crammed into a house. Together with her father and brother she hides in a banana field during the night. The father leaves to ask the mayor for help but never returns. Jeanne is forced to watch how Hutu murderers cut her brother into pieces with machetes. Jeanne only survives because a Hutu neighbour who was married to a Tutsi passes her off as her own daughter and takes her along to her parents' farm.

When the Tutsi rebels end their killing spree Jeanne is picked up by the military. She tries to find survivors of her family. Together with a friend she eventually flies to Germany.

Genocide as the theme of a novel for young readers? In view of the cruelty of the events portrayed in "I will walk with you over a thousand hills" one asks oneself how much real violence one can expect young people (the publisher's age recommendation is 13) to deal with? Through videogames and websites teenagers are often used to more violence than parents and teachers would like, but the experience with this book is different. Here there is no room for a quick mouse click that eliminates the opponent, or action that brings satisfaction but makes no allowance for the need to identify.

"I will walk with you over a thousand hills" tells the story of a survival from the perspective of a child. The author, Hanna Jansen, chose a publisher of youth literature for her book even though she does not want her book to be regarded as belonging to the genre of youth literature only. Rather, she would like to achieve that especially young people "will not close their eyes to the permanent transgressions of human rights and would be willing to propagate a world free of war related violence."

Hanna Jansen succeeds in describing the everyday life of a Rwandan family before the genocide without any exotic charm. Young readers can identify with the girl whose everyday thoughts and feelings are like their own. Thus the horror of the events breaks even more brutally into a peaceful and protected world. What takes place does not happen in an uncivilized, foreign Africa, in which "tribes" fight out archaic and bloody feuds. Rather, it can always recur, anywhere and everywhere. There is no opportunity to distance oneself and hide behind the protective statement that "something like that" could not happen "here".

Emotions of anger and dismay are captured in the book's indirect dialogic structure. Even though the author reworks the terrible events that she has learnt about from Jeanne or has researched herself into a novel, thereby fictionalizing them, the reader is not abandoned or left alone with the terrible events. Insertions in which Jeanne is directly spoken to by her step mother, create a link to the Rwandan girl's current life with her German family. In this manner it is always clear that Jeanne has survived all this, and is living the normal life of a German teenager, and that she has found a new family in which she is loved and accepted. In this manner, the readers, just like Jeanne, are gently taken by the hand and experience that cruelty and brutality did not have the last word, even in this extreme story. The book not only bluntly confront us with the crimes of the Rwandan genocide, but also follows Jeanne’s path of remembrance and grief work that helps her to overcome the past and turn towards a new life. Simultaneously it restores dignity and identity to the victims of the genocide, namely Jeanne's parents and siblings, who are representative of millions of other dead people and of the destiny of so many abused children who because of their exposed vulnerability are the first victims in adults' conflicts.

In Germany the question concerning teenager's confrontation with historical violence is not new. The "Diary of Anne Frank" for example is prescribed school reading material precisely because it is not comprehensible without information about the industrially driven mass murder of millions in the Nazi concentration camps. The necessity of conversation between the generations concerning the genocide committed by the Nazis is an essential part of the German moral-political conception of self. However murder and brutality can show their ugly face everywhere if there is no vigilance against it. One can also understand the dialogic structure of "I will walk with you over a thousand hills" as an invitation to readers of the book to read it together and to let the reading experience evolve into a dialogue between teenagers and adults.

The fundamental question behind the horror of which this book reports will however not be able to be answered: Why do people do such things to one another?