The Latest at Goethe

It was a rather unusual expedition: A journalist and two musicians headed out in search of Greenland’s spirit world. Now, they have returned with a hard drive full of interviews, strange stories and sounds. A travel report by Sabine Küchler.

“It’s the light,” says photographer Olaf Otto Becker, who was a guest on my show in early May. “You will never forget the light and the air.” Over the years, he has visited Greenland and documented the landscape with his plate camera: icebergs, crusty walls of snow, water and rock – a world in white and turquoise of breath-taking and eerie beauty and grandeur.

We’ll see each other again, because Olaf Otto Becker will coincidentally also be in Greenland when we travel there. Three sound enthusiasts, a radio journalist and two musicians (Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky of Duo Merzouga) in search of stories and songs, the unmistakable acoustical expression of a culture. For us, it’s not about resources and global warming, not about the yet unexhausted tourism capacities of Greenland, but about the tradition of the so-called qivitoq stories. Our interest may seem quirky and outmoded.


Rooted in the mysticism of the Inuit, these ghost stories are still told on long evenings when the winter storms rage outside. How alive is this culture of storytelling really, we ask ourselves, in what way do the qivitoq stories link the mystic world of the Inuit with the modern lives of Greenlanders?

We head out in early June. On the prop plane to Nuuk, an older lady is seated next to me who draws my attention to the beauty of her country with jabs of her elbow. It was hardly necessary as I can hardly see enough of this landscape of stone and ice and sea and snow, which – or so it seems from above – would do just fine without any humans. It is astonishing when Nuuk suddenly appears, a jumble of colourful houses on the rocks. Below, on my first day in Nuuk, I will ascertain that Nuuk is modern, urban, cosmopolitan and somehow entirely different than I had imagined. This will remain a leitmotiv of our journey – the way our diffuse expectations are revised by the experience of a present rich in contradictions.


The recorder and camera are in use constantly from the very first day. At the end of the journey we will have recorded more than 24 hours of interviews, music and never-heard delicate sounds of nature. We will receive a lesson in drum dancing in Nuuk that shows us how strong the need is here to develop a contemporary identity from the roots of tradition. “The songs do not belong to us,” one of the young singers says later, “we partake in them with our voices. We sing the songs and then release them again.”

Isn’t every artist a qivitoq?

Filmmaker Karsten is shooting a modern qivitoq film. “We are only two or three generations away from the hunters and the way they think,” he says. Nothing of folklore, nostalgia or esoteric neediness. “The qivitoqs exist, that’s clear,” says Karsten. “Maybe Nuuk is not the right place for them because too many people live here. But they do exist.”


Elisa, the director of the National Library of Greenland, who organizes qivitoq evenings in the reading room twice a year, only speaks of storytelling ever since people started beating a path to her doors because everyone is mad about ghost stories. Elisa sniffs at people who believe you can have coffee with the spirits. She once owned a polar bear fur with magical powers. She objectively tells about how the fur plunged all of Nuuk into darkness with a short circuit. Ghosts also live in the library. “Sometimes, we hear the sounds of the paws on wood, then a loud breath, the lights flicker and in the morning, a pungent odour lingers in the entrance area.”

The old stories survive and thrive in the dissonance of tradition and the present. “’Going qivitoq,’” filmmaker Karsten in Nuuk told us, is the slogan for all those who cannot bear life in our cities; who prefer the wilderness to our civilization. “Going qivitoq,” the tupilaq artist Kim down in the harbour of Ilulissat explained to me, “is the principle of our culture.” And I wasn’t sure whether it could possibly be right to purchase a tupilaq, one of these small, troll-like sculptures. As if a brief journey and the right “authentic” souvenir would suffice to absorb a culture.


“What,” we asked our photographer friend Olaf Otto Becker at the end of the journey, “what does travel actually mean to you?” “You know,” Olaf responded, “that you are only a guest everywhere you go. For one brief moment, you perceive a window onto it and it is quite possible that you have not understood what you saw through this window at all. Yet you would like to understand it more. And that is why you keep on travelling.”