Art stele Ernst Penzoldt

When a summer guest on Sylt enjoys bad weather, it's quite surprising. The writer Ernst Penzoldt offered a plausible reason for this very circumstance, as his daughter later recounted: "He was quite happy about rainy days because then he didn't have to feel guilty about going to the beach – after all, he had actually traveled to the Kampen Authors' House to work." The house in question belonged to the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, ​​and Ernst Penzoldt was a guest there several times from 1937 onwards. "I feel like I'm on the moon," marveled the visitor, captivated by the impressions of another world: "I indulge in the creative idleness that the magical blond island tempts us to," he wrote to a friend. And in another letter: "You ask me what I do all day. Nothing. I'm completely absorbed by it from morning to night." Well, Ernst Penzoldt did get to work after all. In 1948, he wrote the crime story "The Pearl" in Kampen, thus also breaking new ground: "It is the first time I have engaged with this genre of literature." As the son of a medical professor, Ernst Penzoldt spent "a wonderful, almost spoiled youth." After studying sculpture in Weimar and Kassel, he volunteered for military service in 1914. He began writing during the war. His first volume of poetry was published in 1922, and eight years later, Penzoldt, of whom Thomas Mann wrote, "I immediately sensed the charm and stature of his talent," wrote his most successful book: "The Powenz Gang." Although Penzoldt came from southern Germany, he soon developed a strong affinity with Sylt. "He was truly enthusiastic about Kampen. He even felt he was actually from there," his daughter recalled. Even if the writer once expressed himself quite disrespectfully (“What a fuss people make about Kampen! I, however, can't find anything special about it. Kampen consists mostly of nothing but air, water and sand.”), his words mostly expressed affection: “The colors here are enchanting: the brown heath, the green mudflats, the silver-green of the dunes. The sea is always something beautiful, sublime – I never tire of watching it.” And it wasn't just on rainy days that Penzoldt found his way to the beach. There he sunbathed naked, swam tirelessly through the waves, or lay on his stomach in the sand and sorted the tiny grains: “Some are clear and round like a dewdrop, some are pink, others shimmer amber-gold. I have separated each type according to color and cut.