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Shortly after his death in 1957, The New York Times obituary of Peter Freuchen noted that except for Richard E. Byrd, and despite his foreign beginnings, Freuchen was perhaps better known to more people in the United States than any other explorer of our time. During his lifetime Freuchen's remarkable adventures, related in his books, magazine articles, and films, made him a legend. In 1910, Freuchen and his friend and business partner, Knud Rasmussen, the renowned polar explorer, founded Thule—a Greenland Inuit trading post and village only 800 miles from the North Pole.

The North Pole looms large in our collective psyche—the ultimate Otherland in a world mapped and traversed. It is the center of our planet’s rotation, one of the places that is most vulnerable in an epoch of global climate change. Its sub-zero temperatures and strange year of one sunset and one sunrise make it an eerie, utterly disorienting place that challenges human endurance and understanding.

Ein junger Schauspieler bricht aus seinem grauen Theateralltag aus, schnappt sich sein Fahrrad und bricht auf zum nördlichsten Punkt Europas. Auf seinem Weg schließt er Bekanntschaft mit unzähligen Mücken, den Gewalten der Natur, schwedischen Fußballfans und einem trinkfesten Norweger. Nicht alles läuft nach Plan und nicht nur einmal scheint es fraglich, ob unser Protagonist sein Ziel erreichen wird. Ein rasanter Reisebericht mit viel Witz, der aber auch Raum für ernstere Gedanken und Betrachtungen lässt.

In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least, sleep to my heart's content," but when Christiane arrives she is shocked to realize that they are to live in a tiny ramshackle hut on the shores of a lonely fjord, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, battling the elements every day, just to survive.