Jo Lendle - fictionalised account of the life of polar explorer, Alfred Wegener, who died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930 while attempting to prove that one can survive a winter in ‘the loneliest place on earth’. Now known for his pioneering work on continental drift, here we meet Wegener in all his ambiguity and scepticism.

Jo Lendle, All the Land, Trans. byKaty Derbyshire, Seagull Books, 2019.

How, in 1930, did Alfred Wegener, the son of minister from Berlin, find himself in the most isolated spot on earth, attempting to survive an unthinkably cold winter in the middle of Greenland? In All the Land, Jo Lendle sets out to chronicle Wegener’s extraordinary journey from his childhood in Germany to the most unforgiving corner of the planet.
As Lendle shows, Wegener’s life was anything but ordinary. Surrounded by children at the orphanage his parents ran, Wegener was driven by his scientific spirit in search not only of answers to big questions, but of solitude. Though Wegener’s life ended in tragedy during his long winter in Greenland, he left us with a scientific legacy: the theory of continental drift, mocked by his peers and only recognized decades after his death. Lendle gives us the story of this great adventurer, of the experiences that shaped him, resulting in a tale that is both thrilling and tender.

The All Land is a beautifully written, meticulously researched, and gripping fictionalised account of the life of polar explorer, Alfred Wegener, who died on expedition to Greenland in 1930 while attempting to prove that one can survive a winter in ‘the loneliest place on earth’. 

In 1880, Alfred is born to a minister and his wife in Berlin, where they run an orphanage. He grows up to be smart, if a bit hot-headed and driven. After completing his meteorological studies, he seeks the meteorologist Köppen’s advice in Hamburg and takes off on his first solo expedition to Greenland. He barely survives the grim conditions. He returns to go to Marburg to study, and three years later, he also returns to see Köppen – and his daughter Else. They get engaged shortly after, but the wedding is postponed, as Alfred insists on going on another expedition to Greenland. Alfred returns eventually, and in 1913, he marries Else. 

He is drafted when Else is nine months’ pregnant, and when he returns, his wife and baby are strangers to him, and the war has taken its toll. Alfred turns more and more to his studies. He presents his theory of the formation and drift of the continents, his idea of an ‘Ur-Continent’ that he calls ‘All Land’ – but he is laughed at by the whole scientific community (it will take thirty years after his death in 1930 until his theory is acknowledged). Eventually, as he approaches his fiftieth birthday, he decides to go on another expedition to Greenland, promising Else it will be his last. 

Looking back on and summing up his life, he ultimately presents himself as the ambiguous character that he is. Trying so hard to be a family man, but ultimately failing, he not only devoted his life to science, but was also repeatedly drawn to the digressive paths and phenomena related to his fields of research. An eternal sceptic, he is doomed never to be truly happy with his life and accomplishments. 

Lendle is a gifted writer, whose prose is rich in imagery, whose descriptions are tender and precise. From the beginning of this poetic novel, he slips into the boy Alfred’s mind and describes the world through his eyes, a world in which mundane things are fascinating, and in which one can lose oneself.
- http://archive.new-books-in-german.com/english/961/313/96/129002/design1.html

‘Lendle lends his language an airy lightness and a hidden melancholy.’– Tagesspiegel

‘Jo Lendle has written a delicate, romantic debut. We readers, occasionally looking up at the stars, applaud the author as he achieves that distant aim of writing this novel, which, in spite of its remote, spectacular and radically romantic destination, manages to travel lightly. Truly breathtaking.’– Die Welt on Cosmonautin

A beautifully written, meticulously researched and gripping fictionalised account of the life of polar explorer, Alfred Wegener, who died on an expedition to Greenland in 1930 while attempting to prove that one can survive a winter in ‘the loneliest place on earth’. Now known for his pioneering work on continental drift, here we meet Wegener in all his ambiguity and scepticism. From the beginning of this poetic novel, Lendle slips into the boy Alfred’s mind and describes the world through his eyes, a world in which mundane things are fascinating, and in which one can lose oneself. - www.new-books-in-german.com/nbgchoices

This paper explores a fictionalized series of past events in which a process of scientific discovery clearly contradicts the dominant academic discourse and is therefore bound to meet with powerful opposition. Based on an analysis of Jo Lendle's novel Alles Land (2011), the literary representation of the life of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) and his theory of continental drift is studied against the backdrop of Thomas S. Kuhn's conceptualization of the processual character of science, as well as a modified reading of Foucault's discursive formations. The novel identifies Wegener's scientific plight as the fatal outcome of a nexus between modalities that predefine the object of research and those that regulate the institutional right to speak. In Lendle's context‐dependent narrativization, which provides the reader with a clear epistemic advantage, these two modalities fatefully converge in order to effectively, if falsely, claim that as a young astronomer and atmospheric physicist, Wegener allegedly lacks authority to speak on geological subject matters. - Norbert Schaffeld

www.researchgate.net/publication/331015303_A_Fictionalized_Representation_of_Scientific_Counter-Discourse_Jo_Lendle's_Historical_Science_Novel_Alles_Land_2011