I watch a lot of documentaries, but few leave their mark on me like this one.
On 22 August 1962, a 20-year-old German called Heinz Stücke left home with a bicycle and a tent. He was leaving what he described as a ‘life without a future’ to follow what most people would have called an impossible dream – to see everything in the world. By 1996 he had set foot in every country on the planet. But he didn’t stop there. He kept riding until May 2014 when he finally returned home to Hövelhof after more than fifty years on the road.
The Man Who Wanted to See it All picks up the story of that homecoming. His village have decided to prepare a museum in his honour, and he has to sort through a lifetime of photographs, objects and memories. It’s a film about reunions and what it costs to be gone for so long.
One scene in particular has stayed with me. Heinz leaves his small, untidy, modest home to visit an old friend who lives in a large, fancy, ornate house. This friend took the conventional route through life – a career climbing ladders, marriage, children, a comfortable home. You don’t need to spell out the contrast. Just seeing the two houses and the two lives is powerful enough.
Personally, I found it a little uncomfortable to watch. While this isn’t a story about right and wrong, it is a story about the trade-off most of us make without admitting we’re making it.
Following your own path often costs you something, and those who step off the track rarely end up owning as much as those who stay on it. They often end up with fewer possessions, less security and, sometimes, no partner or children. Of course the conventional path costs something too, but it’s harder to see because the price is paid in things that never happened.
Still from the documentary ‘The Man Who Wanted to See It All’ (directed by Albert Albacete) featuring Heinz Stücke. Courtesy of Feel Sales/Netflix
This is what I came away with after watching the film. Everything in the big house stays behind when its owner goes, and so does everything in the small one. What goes with us, if anything, is what we noticed, felt and did with our time, and the people we befriended and whose lives we touched along the way. Heinz spent fifty years collecting that. The film suggests the people he met became a kind of global family. What a strange and wonderful thing to be able to say.
Of course, grown children are not a consolation prize, and a nice home full of memories raising a family is every bit as real as a mountain pass at dawn. Those of us who chose to wander might sometimes assume that the people who stayed did so out of fear. But that’s not fair. Sometimes they just chose differently. And they’re happy with their decision. I sold nearly everything I owned in 1996 at the tender age of thirty to go and study, and I’ve never regretted it. I’ve also come to love a family and a home I never expected to have at twenty-five. Deep down I’ve always felt like I’ve lived two lives. Maybe I’ve been lucky to have both, however different they’ve been.
At the end of the day I don’t have a tidy answer to any of this, or to the questions Heinz’s life throws up. His village is building a museum to hold the photographs and objects he collected during his incredible life. But the best of what he gathered? The people and the moments? He ended up taking those with him.
These are some of the questions I explore in ‘Beautifully Borrowed‘, my new book of twelve reflections on mortality, attention and what we leave behind.
Heinz Stücke, born 11th January 1940. Died 22nd July 2026.
Over the months before and after the great event I found myself returning, again and again, to a handful of questions I hadn’t dealt with properly before. What does it mean to live well once you’ve admitted the time you have left is limited? What do we actually owe to the people, places and communities that briefly become part of our lives? And, more than anything else, what will remain after we’re gone?