Dangerous encounter on the One Man's Pass

The author lived in Ireland for about ten years in the 90s of the last millennium. During this time, the stories of the planned book series were written down. These stories mix fact and fiction. It is about the traditional storytelling of the old days in Ireland. The idea came to him at a storytelling festival in the small western Irish town of Kiltimagh, which he attended for the first time. However, he got his inspiration from the stories told by the people around the crackling peat fires, which conjured up a mystical atmosphere to accompany the stories.



In the first story, the narrator finds himself on death row. He is said to be a parricide.

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In the cover story, I venture up the legendary One Man's Pass on the cliffs of Slieve League one day despite my fear of heights and have a dangerous encounter with a giant who moves safely up here in a particularly narrow place where no two people can pass each other.

Nobody wants to back down, but do I have a choice? Then the stranger makes a surprising suggestion.

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In the third story, the narrator picks up an old hitchhiker in Kinnegad late at night in stormy weather and is drawn by her into a maelstrom of eerie stories dating back to the sixteenth century. Has he fallen into the night of the eternal judgement of blood, a curse from the past? On this night, the devil takes a traveller every 70 years at the hands of an old woman who joins him on the road. It's about love, betrayal, jealousy, superstition and death.

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The author then gives the floor to a storyteller from Donegal. He tells four stories:

How do you become a dream designer? The first story provides the answer. The author has borrowed a little from Novalis here.

In the second story, he tells of a man who, for a moment, must have realised the insignificance of his vanity.

The third story is about a ruler whose greed for power and vanity lead to his downfall.

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The last story is about addiction, deception and self-deception.

The author really lets it rip in the last story. It is guaranteed to have no deeper meaning. As Albert Einstein so aptly put it:

Even the senseless still has a loose meaning.



Erich Romberg was born in Essen in 1950 and grew up in the Ruhr region. He still remembers the bombed-out houses of the post-war period, which he visited with his father to get out roof beams for firewood. The family just about managed to make ends meet.

Then came the economic miracle and the ruins gradually disappeared from his memory and the many open fields were covered with new houses.

All he remembers about primary school is that most of the teachers beat the children and a trainee teacher exposed him as a good essay writer. He still remembers being allowed to read out an essay about a walk in the woods because the trainee teacher thought it was so good. That was good, because the class teacher thought he was stupid. However, he was probably not stupid enough to be demoted down a class level.

After an apprenticeship in a trade, the essayist was drawn back to school, an evening grammar school in the Ruhr area. Here he was amazed to learn about the beautiful things of the mind. Although he actually wanted to do something completely different, he studied physics. As a physicist, he researched in various fields for a while and finally became an expert on the environment and climate.

Writing had accompanied him the whole time, it was a need to put feelings into poetry and stories. He learnt about the momentum that poems and stories take on when you simply write them down. They develop a life of their own and the writer doesn't know beforehand what will come out in the end, at least that's how it was for him.

Spontaneously, as he wrote his stories, he also ended his previous life and moved to Ireland, which he had been cycling around on holiday for the previous two years. On his first holiday, he got to know Kiltimagh. After his second holiday in Ireland, he rented the house in Kiltimagh from an Irish friend from Germany for five years. There he found leisure for writing and windsurfing, which he enjoyed equally. Publishing was not on the agenda back then.

Today, the author lives with his wife and underage son in a village in Saxony-Anhalt. The idea of leaving books to his son seemed increasingly appealing to him. The author hardly knows anything about his own father. He didn't want to burden his son with his own manuscript chaos. So he has now begun - against his physicist nature, love of chaos - to bring order to his manuscripts.