Crime writer Lenz Koppelstätter first had to move away from the Alps in order to learn to appreciate and love them. Now he is back – and happy.

As a child, I was always puzzled. From our house on the mountainside, from our balcony, I would look across to the peaks on the other side of the valley; between them lay the green plain, the motorway running straight along its edge. Traffic jam at the motorway exit. There they all came again. They wanted to come to us. To the mountains. I did not understand it. What was so special about the mountains?

I had known them from the very first day of my life. I grew up in the middle of the mountains, grew up with them. When I arrived, they were already there. They accompanied me day after day. In the morning, the sun crawled out from behind them, making the snow-covered peaks glitter during the day; in the late afternoon, the mountains cast long shadows, and in the evening, the sun disappeared behind them again. Then they lay in darkness.

A life without the mountains – I did not know it, we children from the Alps did not know it. The mountains were a fixed point, an anchor, like mother and father. Like older brothers looking down on you, protecting you, on whom one romped around, scrambled about, with whom one gathered life experience. Like best friends.

Those people in the cars – did they not have best friends where they lived? Why did they stand in traffic at the exit, why did they put themselves through it, hours of driving, stress, just to see the mountains, which were nothing special after all? Mountains, the most normal thing in the world. Simply there. Basta. What a sweet, naive, childlike thought.

I skied with my friends, went hiking with my parents, conquered the highest peaks around our village with my father. When I grew a little older, I began to quarrel with the mountains. Just as one quarrels with friends, brothers, parents. I felt that they stood in my way. That I had to break free from them. They no longer stood by me like good friends, parents, brothers. They surrounded me. They did not leave me breathless. Rather, they robbed me of the air to breathe. Seemed to stand in the way of freedom.

From the peaks, I saw that behind them there were further peaks, and I asked myself what lay beyond them, there where there were no more peaks, there where the cars always came from, the ones that stood in traffic at the motorway exit.

I moved to Berlin. To study. I enjoyed student life – for a long time. I enjoyed no longer remaining at the end of the world, in what felt like the remotest province, behind all the mountains. I enjoyed being where supposedly “everything” was happening. Even though I soon did not quite understand what this “everything” was supposed to be.

I stayed in Berlin – for a long time. At some point, however, I missed something, and it took me a while to understand what it was. It was the mountains. And everything that belongs to the mountains.

The power of the seasons. How I missed it in Berlin. In Berlin, you enjoy the short summer and then wait in darkness, in sleet, in wind, for spring, which arrives late. Sorry, Berlin. I love you anyway. Differently.

In the mountains, you enjoy the summer and, at the end of summer, look forward to the cold, snowy and yet at the same time sun-filled season. The clear mountain air. The cold mountain lakes. The stoic chewing of the cows, the whistling of the marmots. A dumpling soup on the way back from the summit. The snow pressing down the branches of the spruces and firs. A few turns on the steep slope. Pure happiness.

The mountains do something to a person who grows up surrounded by them. They eat their way into their DNA. You can take the Alpine boy out of the mountains, but you can never take the mountains out of the Alpine boy.

I observed myself becoming, before long, like those who came to us, standing in traffic on the motorway. My heart grew warm when I saw a mountain panorama on a poster or on the page of a magazine. Soon I was filling the ears of anyone who wanted to hear it – or did not – with mountain stories. Which peaks I had already stood on, which peaks I still wanted to climb one day.

I became pleasantly nervous, as I had as a child in the days before Christmas, when I drove south by car, towards home, towards the Alps. I felt my heart beat faster when, after many kilometres, the silhouette of the mountains finally appeared on the horizon. I understood what I had not been able to understand as a child.

Simon Messner, son of Reinhold Messner, himself an excellent climber and a clever young mind, once said to me: “You know, Lenz, anyone who never leaves home in life, who never perceives their own reality from the outside, will only ever know half of themselves.” These few simple words occupied me for a long time, and they still do again and again.

It was only by leaving that I understood how beautiful we have it at home too. We mountain people. We Alpine boys. The mountains, my friends, are not something to be taken for granted. They provide support. I believe that human beings need something like that. A force of nature that lives inside them. That awakens longing in them. Inexplicable, almost painfully beautiful.

It does not always have to be the mountains. There may be people to whom the mountains say nothing. For my South Tyrolean crime series, I myself invented such a person, knowing that, as an author, one never truly invents anything completely new – that everything seemingly invented is only a mixture of encounters, observations and experiences from real life.

My Ispettore Claudio Saltapepe was transferred from Naples to the mountains to assist my Commissario Johann Grauner, an Alpine boy. Saltapepe does not understand the mountains. “Why do you climb up there?” he asks Grauner. “So that we can look down,” Grauner tries to explain. “Then you might as well stay down below,” the inspector continues, shaking his head.

Saltapepe is a man of the sea. The immense force of the surf lives inside him. Some need the sea, others the mountains. And whoever does not have mountains or sea where they live has to go there, even if only for a few days. Holiday. To the sea? Or to the mountains? The classic question.

Some perhaps also love the power of the plain. I cannot listen to Giuseppe Verdi’s operas without seeing, in the darkness behind closed eyelids, the mist lying over the lush green of the Pianura Padana, his homeland. Mountains, sea, plain. A few days of bliss for us stressed workaholics. Feeling the pulse of nature. This immense force. Refuelling oneself with it.

Today, when I look out from my terrace across to the mountains, to the peaks on the other side of the green valley, when I see the cars at the motorway exit, nothing surprises me anymore. I understand what draws them here, what longing drives them, a longing that lives in me too.

But in order to discover it, I first had to leave, then come back. And I will leave again on the day I notice that I am dismissing the beauty of the mountains as something self-evident. To distance oneself in order to fall in love anew.

Today, I consciously perceive the beauty of the mountains. Every day. It is a little like taking a holiday in the Alps every day. It does not get more beautiful than that. Freedom. In the midst of my friends, the mountains.

LENZ KOPPELSTÄTTER