On Mount Ćurevac I had been completely engulfed by fog. It was still bitterly cold. From the surrounding forests of Montenegro the dogs, wolves and bears were barking. The days in October are short. Daylight might last just long enough for the descent into Tara Canyon, 1,300 meters (4,260 feet) deep, but never for the steep climb back up.
Thus I set out to walk back to Žabljak, straight through the forest. The map showed a hamlet called Bosača. Maybe I could get a cup of tea there or warm up my hands. After not having encountered any human being the whole day, it would also be nice to exchange a few words with a farmer, a shepherd or a lumberjack.
To anticipate the outcome: Bosača was the wrong place for a friendly chat next to a warm stove. No sound came from the village. I saw not a single car, no light, no human being. The spooky thing was that I didn’t even see colors. Everything was gray, dark, foggy. Dead, in a way.
Some of the houses stood several hundred yards apart, with barren meadows and remains of wooden and barbed-wire fences between the plots of land.
There, a few cows on top of the hill! At least something is alive.
In any other Balkan mountain village, you are surrounded by dogs. Here I neither hear nor see a single one. No bird sings, chirps or flies. The only sound comes from the wind.
Does anyone actually live here? Most of the houses don’t look like it.
On the other hand, there are still power lines going to some of the houses.
Halfway through the settlement, I see the first sign of human life: a fire, already mostly extinguished, but still emitting smoke across the path I have to take.
I look around to find the fire’s creator and keeper. No one to see. But now I can hear something. Chop. Silence. Chop. Silence. Chop. Somebody is cutting wood, but he is hidden behind one of the houses. The echo in the valley makes it impossible to determine from which direction it comes.
A lonely man with an ax in a village that looks as if only once every few years a stranger is passing through – who in this particular case doesn’t even speak Serbian/Montenegrin – is not the kind of human contact I am longing for right now. I proceed with a fast pace, trying to make as little sound as possible.
Only once I have reached the forest, I dare to look back. Checking my watch, I notice that today is 31 October. Halloween. This village in Montenegro doesn’t need any hollowed-out pumpkin faces to make you shudder.
This morning, between Frankfurt and Słubice, it did indeed look very peaceful and friendly.
Although there are a few border guards on either side, it hardly feels like a border. People live on one side and work on the other, they attend university on one side and live on the other, and they split their errands between two countries.
When I was already completely lost, I spotted a little house in the forest.
Although I should have been warned by the gruesome tale of Hänsel and Gretel, curiosity got the better of me.
I approached carefully and silently, so as not to alert anybody. But soon after sneaking through the old gate, all the carefulness was for nothing, as I couldn’t hold back from a loud and heartfelt “Whoah!!” But it didn’t matter, for nobody was alive anymore.
I had stumbled upon the lost village of Tannenfeld.
It used to be a castle, and was later expanded into a sanatorium for people with addiction and other psychological issues. Once of the patients was Rudolf Ditzen, probably better known under his pseudonym Hans Fallada. He had to come here a few times, and in between he took up a job on a farm estate in nearby Polsterstein, which you can see from the clinic.
Actually, Tannenfeld is no longer completely a lost place. It’s officially open to the public, and they sometimes have events in the wonderful park. But as I was there in the middle of the week, I had the whole place to myself.
Those medical institutions from the turn of the 19th and 20th century are often quite fabulous places. Their generous park-like spaces are impressive enough, but even more so if you compare them with the squalid conditions that most people lived in at the time. And in many of these sanatoria, you can wander around freely, without a doctor committing you to the institution. Some more recommendations: The clinic in Berlin-Wuhlgarten. The institutions for the blind in Chemnitz. And of course Otto Wagner Hospital in Vienna.
Whenever someone underestimates people from other times, regions, generations or cultures – considering them less civilized or sophisticated -, I think of these paintings, which are at least 30,000 years old.
In every country in South America, there is one specific topic with which you can interrupt the logorrhea of even the most verbose person. In Brazil, mentioning the numbers 7-1 is enough to make people cry. In Bolivia, you praise the beauty of the country, the diversity of nature from the Andes to the Amazon, before adding innocently: “Just sad that you don’t have the sea anymore.” Depending on his character, the Bolivian will break out in tears, in deep pondering or in torrents of hatred against Chile.
Even young Bolivians, who can’t possibly have any personal memory of losing the sea, talk about the War of the Pacific as if access to the Pacific had been wrested from their own hands. In that war, Chile fought against Bolivia and Peru. Chile won the war and gobbled up some nice pieces of land from both losers. Peru became smaller and Bolivia lost its Pacific coast.
Oh by the way, all of this happened already between 1879 and 1884.
With Lake Titicaca, Bolivia actually has far more beautiful waters than the broth that washes up dead fish and plastic waste on the shores of the continent’s other countries. But for the purposes of ex- and importing, a common sea with China would be more important. Bolivia does indeed suffer from its position as a landlocked country, the only one on both American continents (Paraguay can access the Atlantic via the Paraná River). Every export of minerals requires that treaties be negotiated with the neighbors, who use their position to suppress prices, divert part of the profits and make everything more complicated. Switzerland and Austria can be lucky that they don’t need to export anything, but that tourists and black money flock to them naturally.
The distance from the world’s seas weighs especially hard on Bolivia because the country lives from selling gas, ores and precious minerals to China. These goods are hard to transport by plane. The cocaine producers would prefer a coast with ports for submarines, too, which would be more comfortable than carrying the precious substance through zika- and malaria-infested jungles.
Visually, Bolivia does not suffer from the absence of the sea because the shore around Lake Titicaca is one of the most beautiful sceneries in South America. That it’s not attractive to stoned surfers isn’t necessarily negative. I even dare to establish the theory that Bolivia is more intellectual than most of the neighboring countries exactly because it doesn’t have the coast anymore. Without sandy beaches, Bolivians don’t constantly need to think about their appearance in swimsuits, leaving more time for literature and the arts. Brazil has boobs and bikinis, Bolivia has brains and books.
Nonetheless, every 23rd of March all of Bolivia finds itself in collective lamenting. On the Day of the Sea (Dia del Mar) the national flag is replaced by a maritime version. Replicas of sunk ships are being carried though the streets like an ostensorium.
Military marching bands play sad songs like ”Vaya, vaya, aqui no hay playa. Vamos a La Haya!“(“Oh no, oh no, we don’t have a beach. Let’s go to The Hague!”). All day long, films related to the sea are being shown on TV (The Perfect Storm, Titanic, Pirates of the Caribbean, Vicky the Viking).
Irredentism has constitutional status in Bolivia. Article 267 elevates full sovereignty over the Pacific coast as a national objective – without any geographical limitations. When President Morales receives or visits foreign heads of state, he gives them a book that explains Bolivia’s claim to access to the Pacific. The present then probably ends up where the brochures of the similarly insisting Jehovah’s Witnesses are discarded.
To underline its claims, Bolivia maintains a navy. Not just any navy, but the largest naval forces of any landlocked country in the world. Because there is no sea, the 60 boats need to chug in circles on Lake Titicaca, from where nobody knows how they would reach the Pacific if there was ever a war again. Maybe they can be dismantled, transported by train and then put together again?
This arsenal may seem exaggerated, but it’s the reaction to a strategic mistake during the War of the Pacific: back then, Bolivia had no navy at all.
With having a big-ass navy come martial threats. This mural by Lake Titicaca depicts a Bolivian soldier ramming his bayonet into the neck of a Chilean soldier. The inscription says “What was once ours will be ours again”.
I wonder how Chilean tourists react to this.
But I don’t think there will be a war. So far, President Morales is content with delivering speeches along the line of “The whole world hears the legitimate cry of the Bolivian people against the injustice perpetrated by the imperialists”, and so on, because in Mr Morales’ worldview, anyone who doesn’t agree with him or do what he wants is imperialistic.
My Bolivian lawyer friends are quite happy that Bolivia wages judicial instead of naval battles. First, Bolivia filed a case with the League of Nations, and now with the International Court of Justice (the real one, not the one re-enacted by cute children). The obsession with the Pacific coast means that in Bolivia as a landlocked country, there are more master and doctoral theses about maritime law than in all other countries of South America combined.
To me, all of this looks as if the Bolivian government is trying to distract from real issues and wants to blame “imperialist Chileans” from the 19th century for the current lack of drinking water, infrastructure, housing and schooling. (My Hungarian readers know this concept from the tirades against Trianon, and the older German readers will remember when the Treaty of Versailles was blamed for any and all problems.) But the wish for access to the sea has indeed been ingrained in many Bolivians.
Books about the War of the Pacific are bestsellers. Particularly popular is the theory that the peace treaty was “unfair” and that the country was betrayed by Bolivian politicians; something like the Bolivian Dolchstoßlegende.
When Bolivians go on holiday in Chile, they take flags with them and walk through the sea which was once “theirs”. This ritual is the Bolivian equivalent to the pilgrimage to Mecca. Once in a lifetime, you need to do it.
If I have given you the impression that all of Bolivia is in an irredentist rage, that would be wrong. As I have been trying to convey many times already, Bolivia is a highly likable and personable country with a sense of humor. When you talk about this subject a bit longer, most Bolivians will concede that it would be impractical to rescind all wars. “Otherwise, the Spanish could come and claim that South America used to be theirs.”
And don’t you just have to love a country where naval officers are being paraded around in a ship made of painted bed sheets?
Admittedly, these are somewhat older editions. But law school was one Cold War ago.
I also ask you for a minute of silence for the US State Department lawyers, who, with much creativity, might have come up with some justification for the US attack on Venezuela, if only the President hadn’t held a press conference like a Mafia boss after a heist.
But this e-mail was about something quite different:
Hi, wish you a great new year. I also wanted to send you a message. My name is […] and I am a person targeted by the intelligence service for unauthorized human experimentation and death. I know it will sound weird
Indeed it does.
but the Pentagon and intelligence team (Army, Navy and even police) have behaved weird throughout decades with biopising people forcibly and still do nowadays. without purpose, by force and killed several by performing brain biopisies and other organs with and in some cases without anesthesia and out of consent disrespecting elemental human rights and people say no but when they are selected they are knocked out with injection screaming most and are brain biopised anyway, without any clinical indication for it some died because they sampled too much of the brain or performed it poorly and cruel. Any brain biopsy means impairment for life hence it only possible in cases where that is strong clinical evidence of necessity. Whoever knows wishes out of the countries. They claim that its for theoretically for research purposes that are hardy fulfilled because most are just stored poorly and lost,
What a shame. All those beautiful brain biopsies, and then they get lost in some archive.
turning it in a sincere nuisance. and that is their so called corporation career dream of nothingness. All because their great model BS contract with the Pentagon with full allowance of the United Nation Organization which also performs the same and protects and gives their blessing. Thus you imagine the truth it happens all over Europe United States, Great Britain Canada and Australia. They are utterly well defined as SICK people. If you can please spread the word and perhaps prepare to sue. They seal all files, but they are coming clean eventually soon.
Kind Regards
Ehm, I am not exactly sure whom you want to sue for what and why, but I’ll just say “no, thanks”. Because one of my New Year’s resolutions is to stay away from complicated people and hopeless causes. And from biopsies, I now want to add.
