The company I work for soon announces entry into the German market via a webshop.
We need to make sure we have control over the legal aspects of selling to German customers. Therefore, we need a freelancer to complete our impressum, data management description as well as trading terms. Furthermore, the person must go through various pages such as customer service, check-out flow, disclaimer in relation to German law.
Uff, that’s a lot of work.
The requirement for the freelancer is that the person is a native German educated lawyer and has experience with e-commerce laws.
Check.
We need your skills as soon as possible so that we can reach our tight deadline.
Oh no, that’s a red flag right there!
I replied:
I am not quite sure what you mean with “tight deadline”.
Surely, it’s up to you to decide when you launch your webshop in Germany.
I can’t imagine that you just had this idea yesterday or that it only appeared to you today that Germany might have different laws than other countries.
And even if that was the case, let’s take things step by step. Requirements and readiness will dictate the timeline, not the other way round. Let’s not rush ourselves with arbitrary dates.
I usually don’t hear again from potential clients. People really think that work is urgent, just because they haven’t taken the time to pause and reflect about all the other beautiful things they could do instead.
Anyway, I think my time is put to better use if I write stories for you. Because many lawyers can give legal advice, but not many can write the way I write. Sure, I won’t earn a lot, but many things are more important than that. And maybe you want to keep this project alive by supporting this blog.
“I don’t think anyone will stop. COVID-19 is still around, you know?”
“That will never work, and you’ll end up having to take the train.”
“There are no hitchhikers anymore.”
“Is that even legal?”
Thus sounded the skeptical voices as I announced my plan to hitchhike from Ammerthal to Vienna, a distance of more than 500 km.
Ammerthal is a small village in Bavaria, far away from all arteries of domestic and international traffic. Those who built their houses here and are preparing an extensive weekend breakfast at this very moment are happy about the tranquility. Those, like me, who like to venture into the wide world are suffering from its remoteness. How am I supposed to get to Timbuktu, Tbilisi or Tiraspol if the roads here lead to places like Götzendorf or Weiherzant?
And today is even more tranquil than normal because it’s Saturday. Saturday morning at 8:00. And not just any Saturday, but Assumption Day. In the morning, I read a very blathering newspaper interview with a pastor who tried to interpret Mary’s assumption as “the victory of individualization over all attempts of de-individualization”.
The people who fail to stop on the road to Ursensollen, where a highway promises the connection to the outside world, seem to have taken the idea of individualization too seriously. Or they misunderstood it completely. For more than half an hour, I am standing in the village where evil fate has dropped me, and nobody stops. Some drivers wave at me. Some act as if they are so blind that their driving licence should be revoked.
“What will you do if nobody stops?” hitchhikers are sometimes asked. The standard answer is, “Eventually, someone will stop.” I would manage to get away from Ammerthal too, I’m sure. But the highway is only 6 km away, so I might as well walk. Of course, I always stick my thumb out for any passing car, but high Christian holidays don’t seem to encourage the helpfulness of the predominantly Catholic rural population.
Even in the rain, nobody helps. As I walk through a village called Kotzheim (literally: Puke Home), I feel exactly like that. The travel day doesn’t start too well.
On the B299, the cars going towards Kastl or Neumarkt are not stopping either. Only the Polish drivers slow down and point apologetically to the back seats filled with children and travel bags. I wave back, filled with gratitude. Nobody has any obligation to stop for me, I am aware of that. But some communication from human being to human being, that goes a long way. Much better than all those drivers who stubbornly look straight ahead as if they don’t see me. These are the kind of people who probably walk past homeless people or run over cats.
A young woman drives by without stopping. That I understand perfectly. I do know women who hitchhike alone, but one shouldn’t minimize the additional dangers they face. This is especially true in Amberg and the surrounding area, where the murder of hitchhiker Sophia Lösche in 2018 is still on people’s minds.
But then, something unusual happens: the young woman who just passed by has turned around and came back. “Excuse me, but I was so surprised that I couldn’t pull to a stop immediately.” I actually concede that a lot of drivers might be nice, but just don’t react quickly enough. Another reason for lower speed limits.
And since hitchhiking is not so common anymore, drivers simply don’t think about the possibility of a guy with a backpack suddenly standing by the side of the road. “You are the first hitchhiker I’ve ever seen,” the young woman says, still surprised.
She is an editor with the local television station Oberpfalz TV and is driving to Neumarkt, where I hope to get on the Autobahn A3. She sees the positive side of the Corona virus, because the journalists can finally set their own topics instead of chasing after appointments and invitations and events. More reports, more background stories, fewer press conferences. “But now that everything is loosening up again, I realize that we are already falling back into the old routines. Sadly.” This seems to happen to a lot of people, both professionally and personally. I almost wish for a really long and severe pandemic, for a chance of a real rethink. Away from consumption, away from speed, towards a more conscious life.
In Neumarkt, she takes me to the gas station in Berg, which is located just before the access ramp to the Autobahn, one of Germany’s (in)famous interstate highways without a speed limit. It was a detour for her, but a great help for me. After the depressing morning, I am now in good spirits for the rest of the day. One successful, friendly ride changes everything. Even the rain has stopped. And if one day you will watch a report about hitchhiking on Oberpfalz-TV, you know who sparked the idea.
I unpack the sign, which I have prepared so professionally and artistically, and position myself by the exit of the gas station. (The Ö is not some shocked face, but the first letter of Österreich, the German name of Austria.) It’s quite busy here, at least compared to the dirt roads trying, unsuccessfully, to connect my village with civilization.
Drivers from Romania and Turkey stop to tell me that, unfortunately, they are going in the wrong direction. A family from Poland stops to tell me that, unfortunately, their car is full. It is jam-packed indeed. An attractive lady from the UK stops and is visibly disappointed that I am heading south-east instead of north-west. (Next plan after the Corona crisis: hitchhiking without a fixed destination.)
Soon, a young couple stops. The passenger rolls down the window: “You want to go to Austria? So do we. Jump on in!”
What a coincidence! First, nobody stops for one and a half hours, and then someone comes along who is also going on holiday to our friendly neighboring country and can take me all the way. Jule and Chrissi are going to a place whose name I have already forgotten, but I don’t know where it is anyway. Shockingly, I know less about Austrian than about Australian geography. No idea where places like Innerschmirn or Sellrain are.
“And where do you have to go?”
“To Linz.” Well, actually to Vienna, but a Dutch couple from Linz, readers of my blog, wrote me and invited me to spend a few days with them. There are some really good and selfless people in this world.
“Where is that?”
“Roughly between Passau and Vienna. I think we’ll go past there. Once we’re in Austria, we can check the map.”
Luckily, Jule doesn’t take geography so lightly and checks the map immediately. To the horror of all those who have so far dismissed Austria as a small and compact country, Austria is – even after the Treaty of Saint Germain – still quite large and confusing. Linz is not at all in the direction of the Brenner Pass where they have to go. Instead, the motorways that make respective sense for us already split in Regensburg, so they drop me off at a service station in Parsberg.
Uff, that was close. I almost went as wrong as someone who wants to go to Bayreuth and ends up in Beirut.
In Parsberg there is less traffic, but the atmosphere is more relaxed. People are slowly waking up. A motorcyclist stops and asks if I have a helmet with me. Unfortunately not. A truck driver takes a photo of me for the Truckers’ Instagraph. The police drive by without arresting me. (Just as being male reduces the risk of being murdered or raped while hitchhiking, white skin color reduces the risk of being shot by the police. It doesn’t hurt to make oneself aware of such privileges).
Two Indian ladies with a car full of children stop and offer to take me as far as Regensburg. Because I am worried about getting stranded in the city, instead hoping for a ride at least as far as Passau, I decline gratefully.
The moment they drive off, I already regret it. This was the mistake of the day.
Foregoing the ride in an Indian car just because I was hoping for something more convenient, that should not have happened! Especially not to someone writing about the journey. I am still angry with myself that I have prevented you from engaging in this cultural contact.
And I’ll remain angry for quite a while. Because from that moment on, as if to punish me, nobody stops. Will Parsberg turn out to be a similar provincial black hole as Ammerthal, from which there is no way out? I have been on the road for three hours already, yet I am only in the next county.
It takes a full 20 minutes until a young man stops, who insists on addressing me as Sir, although I tell him that there is really no need to do so. He will leave the Autobahn before Regensburg, but he can drop me off at a parking place along the motorway. There is no gas station, so there is not so much going on here, but you can talk to people while they are performing stretching exercises or when they come back from the restroom.
But as you know, I’m very shy. So I stand next to the parking cars with my sign, not daring to disturb anyone. I am looking at the license plates, one is from Passau. That’s exactly on the way and would take me right to the border. The driver sees me, gets out and calls over to me:
“Where do you want to go?”
“Passau would be perfect.”
“Well, then get on in.”
That’s how easy it is.
The elderly woman is on her way back from Metz in Lorraine, where her French husband lives. Sometimes the couple lives there, sometimes in Passau, sometimes they allow each other some time off, and once a year they go on holiday to Italy, always in the same hotel, for 20 years already. “Not living together all the time makes marriage bearable,” she passes on an important piece of advice to me and you.
It’s noon as we are going past Regensburg, about 70 km from the place I left at 8 o’clock. “You haven’t really gotten very far today,” the woman points out without mercy. But now we are making good progress, always along the Danube, which is an ambivalent river for the lady from Passau. There, the three rivers Danube, Inn and Ilz meet, which regularly leads to flooding.
“2013 was the worst,” she recounts almost with pride. “The ground floor was completely flooded, and on the top floor the water was six feet high. The books were stuck together like concrete, absolutely unusable. I could only salvage the records. I dried them, and they still work.”
The car radio is playing “Life is live”. She turns up the volume and taps the beat with her hands on the steering wheel.
“Who had the idea to build a city in a place like this?” I wonder, but she doesn’t know it either. It seems as defiant a project as Manaus on the Amazon. A wooden cross from Altötting is dangling from the rear-view mirror. Perhaps all unfounded hope rests on that.
She drops me off at the Danube Valley rest area, which thankfully is not flooded at the moment. Here I have to change my sign, turning the unspecific “Ö” into the more specific “LINZ”. Just as I am about to start this work, a man in tattered clothes and with a big shopping bag filled with a few empty bottles walks up to me. He asks if I could give him one euro.
“Look at me, I’m all tattered,” he says, as if I could have missed that. He is working in the parking lot all day, but has only collected six bottles so far. (Or maybe he has already deposited part of the loot in his car.)
I open the wallet, which only holds 2-euro coins, which seems a bit much for a donation.
“That’s alright. Two euros are the customary amount,” he says cleverly and as confidently as if somewhere on a tree nearby, a statute with his fees was affixed.
“I don’t have too much myself,” I say. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be hitchhiking.”
“You certainly have more than me,” he replies, rightfully angry about a clean-shaven hack pretending to be penniless in order to collect material for a story, while he is collecting bottles for survival.
“You are probably right,” I confess, considering whether I should reward him with two euros for the absolutely appropriate rebuke.
But his thoughts are already elsewhere: “Where do you need to go?”
“To Linz.”
“There, the young guy in the red car, he is going to Linz. I am sure he will give you a ride.”
I walk up to the young man in the red car, an old Opel Corsa or something like that.
“Are you going to Linz?”
“Yes.”
“Could you take me with you?”
“Yes, of course.”
I still want to thank the helpful bottle collector, but he has already moved on and is speaking to new customers.
“Why doesn’t he get a job?” many people will think when they see a man in a yellow T-shirt with plenty of holes, reaching deep into garbage cans. But his recycling, conversation and referral services are more valuable than the so-called work of marketing key account executive assistants or of fingernail designers.
The young man, on the other hand, who travels from Bonn to visit his girlfriend somewhere in Austria, no longer has to worry about anyone underestimating the importance of his work since the explosion in the port of Beirut. He studied chemistry and is now doing research and a doctorate on detection methods for dangerous substances in shipping containers.
It’s nice to encounter a scientist who is as skeptical as I am about technical solutions to humanity’s problems, from energy to climate change.
Twice, some fat SUV almost rams the little red car from behind, as if they suspect that we are mocking the naivety of those who believe that an electric engine or a hypocritical hybrid would change the energy inefficiency of using a 2-tonne vehicle to carry a person weighing 80 kg.
By the way, people with a small car without air conditioning, where the windows steam up during the rain because there is a leak somewhere, take hitchhikers much more willingly than people in SUVs, who regard everything outside their tin tank as a hostile world to be rolled over like the trenches on the Somme or the Marne.
I am almost sad to arrive at the rest stop in Ansfelden, south of Linz, because it was such an interesting conversation, covering everything from recycling to right-wing extremism, from greenhouse gases to genocide. I completely forgot to ask for the name of the young man who is making our seaports safer and our roads more pleasant.
In Ansfelden, I only have to wait 5 minutes until two students take me the remaining 10 km to the center of Linz. They are going to the apartment of their holidaying grandmother to water the plants. It’s a pity that not more people know that there are professionals like me to do this tough work, so that the grandchildren could prepare for their school-leaving exams instead.
Louise and Luuk, the two Dutch people who invited me to Linz, had also offered to pick me up on the way. They were a bit skeptical about hitchhiking too. But they are not skeptical at all about hospitality. Although they only knew a few of my articles, they invite me to their house, spend the weekend with me, provide me with a private room with a separate bathroom, and even cook from morning to night.
And they actually would have enough to do, because they too are authors and translators. Luuk drew and wrote, or rather extracted from original documents of soldiers, the graphic novel “Elke Dag Sterven” about World War One. Louise translated it into German. They both write and edit the pages www.HoeVrouwenDenken.nl and www.HoeMannenDenken.nl. On top of that, the whole house is full of self-made art.
“Isn’t that weird, just showing up at at the house of strangers?” I’m sometimes asked. Theoretically it could be, but after a few minutes, the inexplicable feeling of having known each other forever sets in. Some hosts have a talent for this. And so we sit in the garden for long evenings, talking, smoking, and in my case getting a heavy headache from too much chili liquor. I also put on a few kilos, because Louise not only cooks well and plentiful, but also insists on me taking the leftovers for the remainder of the journey.
Only by pointing to the upcoming visit to Mauthausen, where I probably won’t have much appetite, can I avoid packing lasagna, five large bars of chocolate, sandwiches and some freshly roasted souvlaki skewers, complete with fries and salad.
But they insist on driving me to Mauthausen, which, to be honest, I’m quite grateful for, because hitchhiking out of big cities (among which Linz might be counted if we are inclined to be generous) is always the hardest part.
Although this blog does not usually shy away from putting completely unrelated things into a construed context, there is a limit. The visit of the concentration camp memorial in Mauthausen shall therefore remain reserved for a separate, serious article. Here, it must suffice that Louise’s and Luuk’s assessment that one could easily spend half a day at the memorial was absolutely correct. The whole morning was suitably grey and gloomy, and as always at such places, at the same time shocking and illuminating. No matter how much one believes to know, there is still a lot to learn.
The sun only rears its head as I make my way back down to the small town of Mauthausen in the afternoon, but then as strong as if it wants to make up for the missed morning with all its strength. The cyclists overtaking me see my VIENNA sign on the backpack and are wishing me “Good luck!”
The Danube flows right past Mauthausen. As hitchhiking doesn’t seem to pose a challenge anymore, I am thinking of hitching a nautical ride instead. A barge is just turning around the bend. Unfortunately, it is going in the wrong direction, upstream. After that there is a lull in river traffic.
Well, then I’ll have to hitch by the road again. The thermometer outside the pharmacy shows 36º Celsius. The ice cream parlor, where the thermometer would make more sense, is closed. I’m melting as fast as the polar caps, except that you won’t find any mineral resources underneath me.
After about 5 minutes, an older man with glasses and a white short-sleeved shirt, type retired teacher, stops and says: “Oh, young man, here you’ll be standing forever.” He may be right, because Mauthausen is north of the Danube, but the A1 to Vienna runs south of the Danube. “Well, I’d better take you to the highway.”
We talk about where I come from and where I’m going. The gentleman knows Amberg, has been there a few times and praises the big church on the market square. By the way, he didn’t have to go to the motorway at all, and is taking the 40 km detour just for me.
“But now, let’s be honest,” he demands. “You sound like you’ve been to university.” Apparently he is shocked that academics also hitchhike, and I confess that I studied law and philosophy and am currently studying history.
“Law, philosophy and history!” he exclaims with appreciation. “You could be a government minister, you know.”
“I have been waiting for the call all the time,” I pretend, although the phone is actually switched off and in the backpack, because I am not too keen on office and committee work.
“If you are studying history, you will be interested to know where we are. Here, the Romans made a big tactical blunder. In Albing, there was a Roman legion camp and a large fort, from around 170 AD. The Limes, the border of the Roman Empire, ran along the Danube. as you know. And north of it were lurking the Germanic tribes, or the Marcomanni, to be exact. But in the Danube, there is an island at this point, which the Marcomanni secretly penetrated and from there they could attack the Roman camp. A big mistake! The Romans should have secured this island as well.”
His sympathies are clearly on the side of the Italian invaders.
“The Romans finally retreated and built a new site called Lauriacum. Besides Carnuntum, this was the most important Roman settlement in what is now Austria. From that, the city of Enns emerged.”
“This is how Austria and Bavaria were Christianized,” he continues, without allowing me time for more than an acknowledging “oh”. “Christianity came north from Rome, then via Lauriacum to Passau, which was once the largest diocese in the Holy Roman Empire. Even Upper Austria was part of Passau back then.”
When I ask him if he also studied history, he explains: “Not really studied, but I used to travel a lot with my brother. All over Europe,” adding dreamingly: “Oh, there are so many beautiful and interesting places!” And during his travels he always read up on local history.
This describes my modus operandi quite well, except that I don’t have a memory as good as the gentleman scholar’s and quickly forget the details. As I am not taking notes while in someone’s car, the lecture here is also only reproduced in fragments, like the archaeological excavation going on in Enns right now.
“Up ahead you see a beautiful Romanesque church. This is Rems.” He pronounces it like Reims in France.
He takes me directly to the on-ramp of the A1, which leads to Vienna. In Austria, road planning is still oriented towards people, not just cars, and a shoulder provides space for hitchhikers and stopping drivers.
I only wait about 5 minutes until a couple from Slovakia stops. Marko is a mechanical engineer, he studied in Slovakia and in Germany and was just in Austria for a job interview. For him, it was no question that he would stop for me: “When I studied in Magdeburg, I often hitchhiked there from Slovakia. It usually took me two days.” And, with the precision of an engineer: “In one day, you can make between 350 and 600 km.”
His wife is a lawyer. “But I haven’t worked for the last 6 years because we lived in China.” As I have experienced myself, to my great sorrow, a law degree loses its usefulness immediately upon crossing the border.
The engineer is very enthusiastic about China, about the organization, about the infrastructure. The father of two also believes that the one-child policy makes sense for economic and ecological reasons.
The lawyer, on the other hand, criticizes the lack of freedom and regrets that she could not talk openly with anyone about politics or human rights in China.
He: “But look how efficiently China responded to the Corona virus.”
She: “And they efficiently control any coverage of it.”
He: “Our politicians always talk about human rights and so forth, but first they should build roads and hospitals and airports like in China.” (I personally haven’t noticed any lack of roads on the way.)
She: “Surely, one can build things without imprisoning the Uyghurs.”
He: “That doesn’t bother anyone in China.”
“Yes, that’s how the Chinese are,” the wife says sadly and in an effort to reach some consensus. “The most important thing for them is that the family is doing well and that they earn enough money. They’re not interested in politics at all.”
“But this isn’t specifically Chinese,” I dare to interfere in the argument. “I’ve just been to Mauthausen, and that’s the way Germans and Austrians were thinking 80 years ago. And I’m afraid most would do it again.”
Maybe the problem are human beings, not the Chinese or the Germans.
Thus, I brought the mood in the article and in the car to the freezing point, and because I don’t have any chocolate to hand out, I suggest a radical change of topic: “Marko, did you already know German before you went to study in Magdeburg?”
“No,” he laughs and recounts the story of how he acquired his foreign languages.
“I didn’t know English or German. We were in high school when Czechoslovakia was dissolved and socialism ended. Until then we had learned Russian as a foreign language. After the summer holidays, the Russian teachers were suddenly our English teachers. They had got themselves a book somewhere, maybe a tape, and were now supposed to teach us something they couldn’t speak themselves. They were always just one or two lessons ahead of us in the book.”
“I learned zero English in school, but I knew I would need it. So after high school, I flew to the USA with a classmate where we worked at McDonalds. That’s how we wanted to learn English.”
Oh yes, the wild 1990s!
“We worked the grill, hundreds of hamburgers a day, maybe thousands. And then my friend got promoted to the counter. Oh, I was so jealous, because now he could talk to the customers and improve his English a lot faster.”
“But you know what happened? It didn’t help him at all, because at the cash register you always say the same five sentences: ‘How are you?’ ‘Eat here or take away?’ and so on. You don’t learn anything. But I was at the grill and I didn’t have a Slovakian colleague anymore. So I had to talk to everybody in English, to the Negros, to the Brazilians, to the Mexicans. And that’s why my English is so good now.” He definitely has confidence, although he uses terms which strike me as somewhat outdated.
“And your German?” I ask, because he speaks it really well.
“It was the same with German. The European Union offered scholarships, and I was assigned to Magdeburg. So I took a German course during the summer holidays, but I just couldn’t get my head around the grammar. Really, I understood nothing. I thought to myself, well, in Germany you can probably get by with English, after all, it’s a western country. But Magdeburg had only recently become western. They didn’t know English yet, and I had never really learned Russian. So I went to all the German courses on offer: at the Technical University, at Otto von Guericke University, at the Adult Education Center, I listened to everything three times, and because I read and heard the language everywhere, it slowly caught on.” Now he’s being modest, because apparently his German was good enough for a position at the Fraunhofer Institute within half a year.
As the funny Slovaks drop me off at Perchtoldsdorf station in Vienna, I can hardly believe it myself, but: It worked! I did it!
All the doubters and skeptics who said that you can’t hitchhike during the pandemic, that it won’t work anyway, that nobody hitchhikes anymore or that it’s forbidden, they have to pick something else to doubt or to skepticize. Or simply try it out themselves.
When I told Louise in Linz about hitchhiking, she said: “This sounds like a suitable therapy for people who are afraid. People who read too many scare stories about crime, who believe that humans are inherently evil, and who believe that the world is a dangerous place, they should join you for a day.” An excellent idea!
This week’s explosion in the port of Beirut not only woke those who were just taking an afternoon nap, but also memories of my visit to that city. It was a short visit, barely enough for a first impression, and it was many years ago. Back then, I didn’t take any photographs, nor did I take any notes. This was in the bleak old times before I discovered writing, when I was still laboring and toiling as an attorney. Yet, let me try to piece together some fragments from memory.
The year was 2005, and Beirut, or indeed all of Lebanon, had just been rocked by another massive explosion, killing Rafiq Hariri, the Prime Minister. Actually, there were bombs going off all the time, which made it the perfect destination for me. I am not the type of guy for a boring beach holiday.
This was in Israel, but maybe the missile came from Lebanon.
I still have the Lonely Planet guide for Lebanon and Syria, 2nd edition from 2004, and I am browsing it now. I should have marked the spot of my abode on the map. But I haven’t, which suggests that I was very confident to find the way back. I was walking a lot, because I found the buses too complicated. Anyway, walking around aimlessly is the best way to explore a city.
Only upon arrival had I taken a taxi from the airport. It was already dark, and either there were no more buses that evening or one of the taxi drivers was too quick to snatch me off the street. I remember lots of potholes, some of which may have been remnants of war and tears rather than of wear and tear, and some tanks on the side of the road.
I’ve had this feeling many times, and I love it: Arriving in a country for the first time, knowing nobody, not speaking the language, not knowing where I will end up, nor what will happen. And smoldering smoke, tanks in the streets, gunfire lighting up the night sky. There is a little bit of tension, sure, maybe even worry, but excitement and curiosity are winning big time. I was probably smiling.
“Where do you want to go, Sir?”
“I am looking for a cheap accommodation, maybe something like 20 $ per night.” It was the cut-off mark between cheap and not cheap in the Lonely Planet guide, at least at the time. And because everything would be new, I wasn’t really worried about where in town I would stay.
I remember that we were just going straight the whole time, which showed that he was a fair taxi driver, and then he turned right and there we were. He took me up to the second or third floor of an apartment building, rang the bell and explained what I wanted.
“For how many nights?” an elderly gentleman asked.
“Three nights,” I said spontaneously. I only had one week altogether, and I had booked the return flight from Damascus, so I still needed to go to Syria. I recommend booking your flights like that, because it gives you a very rough outline of your trip. But leave everything in between free to be filled with what lies on the way.
It must have already been after 11 pm, because the owner of the hostel showed me straight to bed, for which he only charged 6 $ per night. It was a room shared with 5 other people. Now, I don’t mind the sound of sirens and snipers, but I can’t sleep when someone is snoring. The men all looked like construction workers of some sort, and they were snoring like bears. I slept really badly, if at all, except for the last hours in the morning, because they had to leave early and go repair some building that had been blown up. Once I got up, I realized that I was basically in an apartment that had been turned into a hostel. This was AirBnB before computers. It worked fine without them tech guys fiddling with it, thank you.
The next day, I walked around aimlessly. I stumbled across the place where Rafiq Hariri had been assassinated, and saw what a huge blast it must have been.
All over town, buildings displayed scars from the Lebanese Civil War, which as a child I had seen so much about on the evening news, without ever understanding anything. Except that it was dangerous and complicated, which had probably fostered my fascination for Beirut.
In fact, walking along the Corniche, it felt like in any other Mediterranean city. People were strolling, the waves were crashing, men were selling roasted nuts, children were screaming with joy, young people were looking as attractive as possible. “Paris of the East” the city had been called before the civil war. Looking at the buildings, I couldn’t disagree more. But looking at the people, I could see it.
I hadn’t had any time to prepare for the trip. At the airport in Istanbul, waiting at the gate for Beirut, I was the only white guy among Middle Easterners. One of them asked, concerned: “Are you sure you want to go to Beirut?” Well, I had no back-up plan. A young woman, very attractive, working for the UN in Vienna, and going home for Christmas gave me lots of ideas and things to see. I wrote them down, but she just recommended nightclubs, discotheques and other party places. When she got up, one of the men sitting around us said: “It seems to me that the young lady misinterpreted the intention behind your trip to Beirut,” and he smiled mischievously. I later threw away the notes, although they included her name and phone number. Anyway, I had no phone.
This lack of preparation meant that I probably missed a lot of beautiful places. But one which I didn’t miss was the campus of the American University in Beirut. With it’s own section of the beach, it felt like UC San Diego. Come to think of it, maybe I should apply there for an exchange semester. I mean Beirut, not San Diego. In the USA, people are too crazy for me, all of them carrying guns.
I also remember walking down the Green Line, which had been a demarcation line for much of the civil war from 1975 to 1990. Now, it was just another street. There was nothing dangerous about it, although people said that far in the south, Hezbollah was living. Anyway, I was using the one of my passports without stamps from Israel, so I wasn’t worried. How would I notice when I was in Hezbollah territory, I asked. “More guys with guns,” one person said. “You will see that they pick up the trash more regularly,” someone else joked, and I understood why people voted for a party that was regarded as a terrorist organization elsewhere.
It’s not green anymore, because peace is bad for the environment.
Whenever I went into a shop, people wished me “Merry Christmas”, and I had a hard time reconciling that with the lack of snow, with the warm temperature, and with all the signs in Arabic. Many people who haven’t been to Middle East think of it as a mono-religious Muslim place, but it isn’t. There were plenty of churches, and on Christmas Eve, they had the doors open, so I could hear the hymns and songs as I walked by. Each church had at least one tank with soldiers in front of it.
Because I wasn’t writing back then, I did a lot of things differently from how I would do them now. Instead of going to church, I went to the cinema and watched “Lord of War”, a film about an arms dealer. It wasn’t a particularly good movie, but I found it fitting for where I was.
Naturally, whenever I met people, they asked where I was from and what I was doing. When I said, always obliged to the truth, that I was a lawyer from Germany, their eyes widened, they became even more polite, and once, upon hearing that information, a lady in a falafel store said: “For you, it’s for free. I wish you all the best!”
It was only on the second or third day, as I was reading the local newspaper Daily Star, that I realized why people treated me with such unwarranted deference. You remember that the Lebanese Prime Minister had been assassinated earlier that year? The Lebanese investigation didn’t go anywhere, and thus the UN appointed a special investigator. That person, whose investigation was ongoing at the time, was Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. He was held in the highest regard in Lebanon, and people put a lot of hope into the international investigation. Apparently, when they met a German lawyer in Beirut, they automatically assumed that I was on his team.
But people were generally extremely friendly. After the first day, as I got back to the apartment, the son of the owner asked me how everything was. I said, half-jokingly, that I should sleep during the day and go out at night because of the snoring men in my room.
“Oh, I am so sorry!”, he apologized for what was none of his fault. “Let me speak to my father, maybe we can give you a private room.”
That was good news, and I told him that I would of course pay more for that.
He spoke to his father briefly, and informed me: “We actually have a private room for you for the next two nights. It would be 20 $ per night, though. Is that acceptable?”
It was very acceptable.
And when I was shown the room, I realized that it was the father’s bedroom and that he would be sleeping in the living room, just so that I could have a good rest. I felt terrible and wanted to offer that I could sleep in the living room, but there were more people sleeping there already, and I might not have gotten any sleep again.
The apartment was close to Charles Helou bus station, a mere 300 meters from the port which was completely destroyed this week. Of course I am wondering what became of the people with whom I stayed. If they survived, they are probably in the streets, cleaning up the city, stepping in where the government is failing.
By the way, whenever you think of Lebanon, don’t forget that this is a country ravaged by wars, civil wars, currency devaluation, inflation, food shortages, yet it has taken in the largest number of Syrian refugees per capita. If that little country with a heap of problems can take in one refugee for every four of its own citizens, then we can all do more to help, too.
But nobody saw this coming in 2005. Quite the contrary, on the last day, I went to Charles Helou bus station, looking for a bus to Syria. “Don’t pay more than 10 $,” my host had instructed me, worried that I might get overcharged. As I got to the bus station, it seemed eerily empty and windy, though.
“All buses have been cancelled, because there is a snowstorm in the mountains between Lebanon and Syria.” That was bad, because I had to catch the flight from Damascus in three days. But the adventurous tale of whether and how I managed to get to Syria is better left for another time…
Germans love plans. The bigger the plan, the better. World domination, an airport in Berlin which will never be opened, a spaceport in Congo, and so on. Between all the half-baked Schlieffen plans, it’s hard to establish a ranking because each one is dumber than the other. But I hereby nominate a surprisingly unknown candidate for the most stupid plan ever. On the other hand, I have full confidence in the anecdotal knowledge of my readers and I remain curious about your own nominations.
But first, let’s visit the Qattara Depression.
Never heard of it?
Good, because then you will leave this blog smarter than you came.
Well, Qattara is a depression in the Libyan Desert, which, confusingly, is not in Libya but in Egypt. But desert is desert, and at the arbitrary border demarcation conference of 1884/85, well-meaning Europeans couldn’t get dragged into the depths of every detail, could they? Especially when the detail is very deep, like the Qattara Depression, 133 metres below sea level to be exact.
That’s quite a dent. The only reason this major manufacturing defect of our planet went unnoticed was its location far away from the next quality control center in Cairo. Otherwise, it really couldn’t have been overlooked. It’s 120 kilometres long and 80 kilometres wide. If you stumble into it while walking in the desert, you won’t crawl out that easily. At 18,000 km², the depression is almost as large as the land mass of New Jersey, which would provide ample opportunity for deep and dark comparisons of deep and dark holes, but those would not only be below sea level, but also below the level of this blog.
So, what do you do with something like that?
“Ignore it,” said the Stoic.
“Offer guided camel tours,” said the Egyptian minister of tourism.
“Build a secret chemical weapons factory,” said the neighboring Libyan dictator.
“Dig a canal from the Mediterranean Sea and lead water into the depression, which, because of the gradient, will power several turbines that generate electricity. It will also create an artificial lake [the size of Lake Ontario], whose evaporation will rain down and make the desert green. Tobacco and banana plantations can be created here, where Africans can work for us colonial masters, which, after all, should be better than drowning in the Mediterranean,” said Professor Albrecht Penck, a German geographer, geologist and expert on hollows and basins, who stopped off in Egypt in 1916 on his way back from Australia. Apparently, the long ship voyage had made him crave for activity.
At that time, however, the First World War was raging and every shovel and pickax was needed to dig trenches and to smash enemies’ heads in close combat. Peaceful canal digging on the sandy beach of the Mediterranean Sea was considered to be of secondary importance.
And then, in 1919, Germany lost all access to Africa under the Treaty of Versailles. Game over, one might think. But Professor Penck did not give up. He developed the theory of ethnic and cultural soil, of the need for a larger living space and colonial possessions for Germany. The Germans liked that. They voted for the Nazis and sent soldiers and tanks into the Egyptian desert. All for the Lake Qattara project.
Incidentally, the terrible habit of German men wearing short trousers until old age, which you may have observed on holidays, dates from that time.
But there are other blogs to discuss fashion. You have come here because you finally want to know why an enormous tank battle was fought at El-Alamein in 1942, in the middle of the desert.
As you can see, El-Alamein (on the far right of the map) is located exactly where the channel to the Qattara Depression would link to the sea.
Just a coincidence? Ain’t nobody gonna believe that.
And anyway: Why were there several British divisions near El-Alamein, although they should have been preparing for the landing in Normandy?
At the time, Cairo was a nest of spies, and thus the British geologist, geographer and secret agent John Ball, who had good contacts with the German rock scene thanks to Erasmus semesters in Freiburg and Zurich, learned of the German plan to flood the basin. Initially, he offered his cooperation, perhaps out of genuine interest, maybe with perfidious motives from the outset. At any rate, when in 1933 Germany’s reputation began to suffer due to a certain Reich Chancellor, Ball jumped ship and in the autumn of the same year published his “own” proposal for canal construction and energy production.
And now, it should be clear why hundreds of thousands of German, Italian, British, South African, French, Greek, Indian, Australian and New Zealand soldiers came together at El-Alamein in 1942. Thanks to the desert-tested Australians, the victory went to the British side, and the Germans retreated to Tunisia. There they founded holiday resorts, which they still regularly invade, reminiscing about world-conquering times.
But, to not let the main thread of this story seep away in the desert sand like blood gushing from a foot blown off by a landmine, what happened to the Qattara Depression and the crazy plan?
History repeats itself, one might think, because Germany did not give up.
Professor Friedrich Bassler, a hydraulic engineer, became the driving force after the Second World War. Because colonialism no longer sounded so great, he spoke of a “hydro-solar depression power plant”, which feigned scientificity. As is well known, West Germany lived under Clausewitz’s motto “economics is the continuation of war by other means”, and so the German Ministry of Economics and Technology supported the plans, explorations and feasibility studies. Egypt probably thought “what a stupid idea”, but let the Germans carry on. Because of the minefields that the same Germans had previously generously laid around El-Alamein, the Egyptians couldn’t use this part of their country anyway. (The idea that Germany and Britain could clear the minefields first seems obvious to us today, but back then, kilowatts were more important than children’s legs.)
The plan was, as I said, to build a canal or a tunnel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Qattara Depression, with turbines powered by water in between.
“And once the basin is full?” you ask.
“The depression will never fill up,” Professor Bassler answers, “because it is so hot in the desert that the water evaporates just as quickly as new water flows in.” A perpetual motion machine, the dream of every scientist.
“But if the basin never fills up, won’t the water seep away faster than it evaporates?”
“We’ve calculated all that, young man. In the first ten years, we let more water flow in until the depression fills to a level of 60 metres below sea level. As a result, the surface of the lake slowly rises and with it the evaporation. When we have reached this desired level, we keep the water cycle in balance. That way, we not only produce energy, but we also create an artificial lake for fishing, shipping, etc. New cities and settlements will be built and Africa will become as rich as Europe.”
About 80 scientists and engineers, mainly from Germany, were working on the project.
“But this is salt water”, someone cautiously tosses in, thinking of the few freshwater oases in the basin.
“Salt water is better than no water at all,” answers the water scientist, because it’s not about his own oases. Besides, he really believed in progress, as people did in the 1960s and 1970s.
The only problem was the construction of the canal. It was not even the length of 55 to 80 km. After all, the Suez Canal was just around the corner, measuring 164 km. No, the problem was a mountain range between the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression. Drilling a tunnel instead of digging a canal would take decades. Besides, it was too expensive.
But Professor Bassler had an idea: “I’ve already worked it all out, and it’s quite simple. We will drill 213 boreholes along the route that the watercourse is to take. In each of these boreholes, we detonate an atomic bomb with an explosive force of 1.5 megatons.”
This is the equivalent to one hundred times the Hiroshima bomb. In each of the 213 holes, respectively. Near a tectonic trench breach. Funded by the German government.
“Wouldn’t that lead to atomic contamination of the water, Professor? No one would be able to live there, neither fish nor man.”
“Oh, we will throw iodine tablets into the water.”
And then the project died a silent death. No one knows whether it was the Camp David peace agreement, the meltdown on Three Mile Island, or the murder of Anwar as-Sadat. Perhaps the West German government simply thought that the money could be better used to annex East Germany.
No, I am not talking about Neowise, the current celestial body taking advantage of the boredom caused by the corona virus pandemic, seeking attention with marketing superlatives like “extra bright”, “supersize” and “only available for a short time”, which, for a few days, is making earthlings look up from their telephones into the sky, albeit only briefly and not without first using that very telephone for determining or – or rather to have determined for them – the optimal time and the optimal location for the heavenly rendezvous, during which they are more eager to take pictures than to enjoy the moment, and after which they are most keen on posting, sharing and liking on their phone again. Because for most people today, a comet counts for nothing if they do not capture it photographically and if nobody praises them for the photos that have been posted on the internet thirteen thousand times already, most of them in better quality.
I want to tell you of a different comet and take you back to the time when cameras were luxury and telephones were tied up at home. A time when we were involved in nature with all our senses, without distraction, simply observing, enjoying, marveling in disbelief, when we were devoutly absorbed in the uniqueness and transience of such moments.
The year was 1986, and the fly-by of Halley’s comet was imminent. Compared to Neowise, it says “Hello, Earth” much more often, but at that time, life expectancy was so meager (numerically and qualitatively), that even the 75-year interval of the speeding star was sold as a unique opportunity. I was 10 years old at the time and couldn’t handle such enormous time spans anyway. Or I sucked at math.
In any case, at that time, according to concrete calculations by Copernicus and his cosmonaut colleagues, it so happened that at some point, the nightly and thus visible overflight of Captain Halley over my small village in Bavaria had been calculated, prophesied and announced.
The times must have been uneventful, because for months the comet had been the big thing in the media. We bought science magazines, didn’t understand anything and had no money left for MAD Magazine. On television, which at the time had only three channels that weren’t even working around the clock, physicists in turtlenecks explained the planets and comets using pitifully wobbly papier-mâché models. I didn’t understand anything, but I remember that in the end some powder in a bowl was always ignited and exploded. The show was called “Piff Paff Poff” or something. The Postal Service ingratiated itself with the population for the upcoming change of ZIP codes by issuing a special stamp for Halley’s comet.
By the way, for 80 pfennigs you could send a letter from Bavaria to Bremen, Buxtehude or Berlin (West), but not to Berlin (East), because that was intercepted by the Stasi. We didn’t know that, and so we always thought that relatives in the GDR were too wretched to write back. Just one of many misunderstandings between West and East.
For months, people who, unlike us 10-year-olds, had too much money had been acquiring binoculars and telescopes, extending roof hatches and training, practicing and exercising for the day of the century in such an elaborate and serious way as usually only displayed by NATO once a year, when Canadian soldiers occupied the primary school in Ammerthal and thus for one week cancelled PE lessons, which were never more than the dreaded dodge ball anyway, if I remember correctly. (Thank you, Canada!)
But I digress like the wobbly tail of a comet wandering through space for millions of years without the help of GPS. Back to the eventful day in spring 1986, which I can no longer pinpoint exactly, but which I date in March or April, first because it was no longer too cold to spend hours outside in the night, second for an incisive and epochal event, which, for dramaturgical reasons, I will only allow to make an appearance later in this story, hoping that I shall not forget about it as I have forgotten other things, which, however, form the core of this story and therefore must enjoy absolute priority.
I know for a fact, though, that it was a Friday. Because Friday night was chess club, without any competition from any Friday night alternatives. (By now, we don’t even have chess anymore, as if the comet had not only passed our village, but had struck here and wiped out all social life). One morning in the fourth grade (at that time, there was no school in the afternoon, because parents were neither afraid of children being alone in the afternoon nor of them not knowing three foreign languages and two musical instruments fluently), two gentlemen in suits came into class and tried to inspire us for the Soviet communist board game, which, following Cold War terminology, they consistently called the royal game. They resonated most with those who did not care about football, the only local sports alternative. Back then, I could not have explained it as I can now, but I always had an instinctive aversion to fascist cults of physical prowess.
Finally, the enthusiasts for the black and white board game mentioned that chess is somehow good for intelligence. As a 10-year-old, I thought I was incredibly intelligent, perhaps one of the few likable character traits which have remained constant throughout my life. Thus, together with other brave young men, I volunteered for the chess front. I can’t remember if girls were explicitly excluded or if their participation simply didn’t occur.
It seemed to be nothing more than choosing between shin guards and the chessboard, but after a few weeks, we chess students were already using terms like gambit, en passant and Zugzwang, while the footballers shouted “hey, pass the ball, you wanker”. At the time I didn’t think that far ahead, and I would be surprised if the adults did, but now it seems either amazing or shocking with which precision the students’ decision between chess and football marked the dividing line between those who went on to high school, university and the big wide world and those who remained in the local school and in the village, many for their whole life.
“What does any of this have to do with the comet?” the astronomically curious readers are demanding to know, and rightly so. So, let me get my ellipsis together: One Friday evening, I walked home with a class and chess mate from the chess club, where we had been prepared for the rook, king or tiger diploma. Actually, we weren’t walking straight home, but like land surveyors hungry for more kilometres to put on the travel expense account, we skillfully took the route in the vague direction of our respective homes, allowing us to walk together as long as possible. Because we still wanted to talk. Chess might have been intelligent, but it was very serious. One of the chairmen of the chess club was also chairman of the correctional facility. There was no room for jokes. After an hour and a half, enriched with lots of sugar-rich Coca Cola, we had a lot of catching up to do.
And that Friday night in the spring of 1986 was a special night. For months, people had been waiting for the comet, preparing telescopes, beer and potato chips and cleaning windows. But it was exactly that evening that Halley’s comet had promised an appearance in our region, spread reliably by the local press. Or maybe the comet could be seen all week, but on that Friday evening, holes in the ozone and cloud layers were as wide open as mankind’s astonished mouths.
In any case, we remained where our paths would otherwise have parted, and did not part, but took turns sitting on some telephone-line distribution box that only had room for one, while the other paced back and forth. Like everyone else, we were waiting for the comet. Unlike everyone else, however, we did not have a watch, as young people traditionally received them at Confirmation, a level to which we had not yet advanced. But then, even a watch wouldn’t have done us much good, for we had forgotten (or never known) at what time the comet would pass by.
I am sure we were speaking about the comet, sounding as important as possible and without any trace of self-doubt.
“Hey man, we’re so small in the universe, it messes with your brain to imagine it.”
“And this thing is so far away, even if you go full speed in your dad’s car, the comet is always faster.”
“And it is so hot, if you fire a nuclear missile at it, it will melt on approach. It’s invulnerable.”
My esteemed colleague was able to come up with an ad hoc thesis on any topic and present it so credibly that I believed everything. I only noticed it years later in high school, when I had studied and he hadn’t, but he was called to the blackboard. He could present complete nonsense with such conviction that the overwhelmed economics teacher finally gave him a good-natured C.
Halley’s comet could not be seen, and so we jumped from one topic to the next. From comets to space travel. In January, the Challenger astronauts, also on the way to Halley’s comet, had burst into flames. From space travel to movies like Top Gun, Karate Kid and Crocodile Dundee. From movies to poisonous mushrooms, because we didn’t need logical transitions. Then we discussed which secondary school in Amberg was the best and whether Latin or French was easier or more useful. We didn’t think much further in our lives, because it was the carefree childhood where you could stay outside for hours at night without calling anyone. Nobody worried anyway. If one of us had only come home the next morning and explained that he had stayed overnight at the friend’s house, our parents would have said: “That’s what we thought. But next time, please call and let us know.”
And there was actually much more crime in those days. Oh yes, we probably also talked about terrorists, murderers, bank robbers and hijackers, because their WANTED posters were everywhere and we had memorized the bearded faces to collect the reward of 50.000 Deutschmarks, which meant potato chips for life.
Unmeasured time passed over these far-reaching conversations. We looked up into the sky less and less and almost forgot about the unique spectacle. We didn’t even know if the comet would pass in the north or in the south. And if we had known, we did not know where in our village north and south were. Who takes a compass to the chess club?
“I think we’ve talked so long, we missed it.”
“I don’t know what time it is, but I’m freezing, man.”
“And I have to pee.”
“When will the comet come back?”
“In 75 years.”
We were both too lazy to calculate the year, also because this period seemed so unthinkably far away. At that time, no one grew that old, only the Japanese, of whom we knew none, except for the one guy in the movie, who remains on an island in the Pacific for decades after World War II, preparing for the invasion. But:
“If we’re still alive then, we’ll meet here again. But next time, let’s be more careful not to miss it.”
Some people are looking forward to their birthday, because that one day of the year, they will be the center of attention. I have this blog and can make myself important every day of the year. So, for my birthday I don’t have to sit at home and count the calls of happy-birthday-wishers who never call on any other day.
For epidemiological and environmental reasons, I won’t travel that far this time. From July 1st, I will be hiking the King Ludwig Trail in Bavaria. Although I am a strict anti-monarchist and would have joined the revolutions of 1848 and 1918, I find the trail quite alluring. It is only about 110 km, which I will certainly increase by intentional side trips and unintentional detours.
The route leads from Berg via Starnberg, Andechs monastery, Herrsching, Raisting, Diessen, Wessobrunn, Paterzell, Hohenpeissenberg, Rottenbuch, Wildsteig, the pilgrimage church of Wies, Steingaden, Halblech and Hohenschwangau to Füssen. In more general terms, I will set off south of Munich and walk towards the mountains that form the border with Austria.
The places probably don’t mean anything to you, so here are some photos to give you an idea:
At the end point of the hike, visible from afar like a lighthouse pulling me in the right direction, is Neuschwanstein Castle. And I bet you have seen that one before.
I’ll be walking for at least a week. If any of you live along the route and have a free couch, maybe you want to invite me in. And if that doesn’t work out, then I’ll sleep under trees and bathe in the river. There are worse things than falling into a soft meadow in the evening and waking up with the first rays of sunshine to the view of a royal castle.
If someone would like a postcard from the walk or from Neuschwanstein Castle, let me know! And if/when I come back, there will of course be a detailed report with hiking advice, photos, hopefully interesting encounters and pages of explanations about the Kingdom of Bavaria and especially about King Ludwig II. Just so much already: Please don’t call him Mad King Ludwig.
I kindly ask everyone to refrain from openly expressing condolences. Instead, the hiking reporter is very thankful for any support, which would keep this blog alive for another year.
On my last day in Bolivia, I had bought a bus ticket from La Paz to Puno in Perú. When the bus made a stop for lunch in Copacabana and the driver said “the bus will continue at 1:30 pm two blocks from here,” I thought: “Great, I have two hours to walk around town.” Copacabana has some fun things to observe during a lunch break.
Naturally, I left all my belongings on the bus. Not only is Bolivia the safest country in South America, but who wants to steal two bags, weighing 30 kg and consisting mainly of books and notebooks and maps?
At 1:20 pm, I return to the described point of departure and don’t see the bus. Okay, I am thinking, maybe it’s somewhere else.
To readers unfamiliar with bus stations in Copacabana, Karachi or Kathmandu, I need to set the scenery a bit: There is no real station, the buses just all go to the main square. Because there are many more buses than space, the square fills up fast, with buses backlogging through the side streets and side alleys to side streets. In between, there are hundreds of ticket vendors, food stalls, taxis, travel agents, musicians, people selling hope in the form of lottery tickets, Aymara priests, an escaped lama, a butcher chasing after the lama, and a little lost traveler like me.
I thought I would recognize the bus because it was colorful, but I quickly discover that all buses in Bolivia are as colorful as if designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser.
As the minutes in the scorching sun are progressing, trepidation sets in.
I ask one of the bus drivers if he happens to know where the 1:30 bus to Puno will leave from. “That’s my bus. Hop on in, we are leaving right now,” he says, using ahorita for right now, which in South American Spanish can meaning anything from “I was just about to close the door” to “let me first have lunch and then call all of my children to remind them to do their homework, before I get together for a meeting with the other bus drivers to discuss whether the bus drivers’ union fund should make payouts to the widow of a bus driver who got killed in an accident, although he was in default with his union membership contributions and although some drivers say that he didn’t really like his wife anyway, but then we’ll really set off for Puno.” But I don’t mind, for I am not in a hurry. In my time in the country, I have become bolivianized and all the more relaxed for it.
I am however worried because he clearly is a different driver with a different bus. Confused and causing confusion, I ask him if my luggage is on the bus already.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he replies, as politely as he can.
“I left my luggage on the green bus with which I came from La Paz this morning, because I thought that bus will continue to Puno,” I explain.
“Oh, no. That bus is on the way back to La Paz already.”
Damn.
All the stuff I own, all the possessions with which I emigrated, everything is in those two bags. This may seem little to people who have houses and kitchen pots and winter coats and stuff, but my goal is to reduce it even more, so that everything fits into one backpack. Unfortunately, I really don’t like e-books.
“I have to leave now. Do you want to get on?”, the driver urges me.
I have already paid for the ticket, but finding my luggage again will be even harder once I will be in Perú.
“No thanks.”
The driver looks at me as if I am a bit stupid. And maybe I really haven’t been the brightest star in the sky today.
As the bus pulls out from the mayhem of transport options, towards the nearby border, I begin to think about all the things I have lost. The clothes are neither many, nor important. Only the loss of my Gabor hat, which I bought from a Roma trader in Transylvania, would be sad. I wouldn’t even mind the loss of my computer, my camera and my phone. Cleverly, I always buy the cheapest ones.
No, what I really grieve about, what I regret, what gets me slightly agitated is the loss of my notebooks. For many years already, I have been collecting thoughts, drafting poems and writing stories. Some of them created on location in a castle in Romania, on a ship crossing the Atlantic, or overlooking Lake Titicaca. Situations, memories and thoughts that could not possibly be recreated.
It’s a big loss, but I wouldn’t want to call it a waste. After all, I enjoy writing while I do it, almost independently of whether anyone will ever read it. But on the other hand, I also enjoy telling stories, especially as I know that not all of you will visit all these strange places yourselves. And if you do, you won’t live through the same adventures, if only because you will be smarter than me.
Less important to me, but probably more important to the readers of this blog are the almost 10,000 unpublished photos from Iran to Guernsey, stored on the computer which is now on the way to La Paz.
Luckily, I was very talkative this morning and chatted with the bus driver. I remember his name: Victor. At the square where all the buses arrive and mingle, I am looking for a bus from the same company and ask the driver if he knows Victor.
“The short one with a belly?”, he asks.
“Not an exceptionally big belly.”
“Yes, I know him.”
I explain the situation, and the very kind and helpful driver calls Victor. He is already beyond the ferry across the Strait of Tiquina, where he could have easily passed my luggage to another driver going in my direction. But he will work something out, he promises.
The friendly bus driver sees that I am still nervous and tells, no almost orders me: “Don’t worry! We will work something out. Just go for lunch or for a walk and come back here at 3 pm.”
Worrying about having to start writing and photographing from scratch again – and about the lost toothbrush -, I cannot enjoy the lunch break. What the bus drivers don’t know, what you don’t know yet, and what nobody else should know, is that having lost all of my possessions is only one of my problems that day: I have been staying in Bolivia illegally for a few months. So I am nervous enough about having to cross the border. At the end of this day, when night will fall, I may already be in prison, not to see the sun again for many years. But that’s another story. First things first.
At 3 pm, the helpful driver welcomes me at the bus station: “Do you have something to write?” Luckily, among the few things I took with me from the bus, there are a notebook and a pen, as well as my passport, cash, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.
“Write down the name: José Luis Velasco. But nobody knows him by that name. When you ask for him, ask for El Cupo.” And: “He is short and has a big belly,” which seems to be how he describes all his colleagues. He tells me that the man known as El Cupo is expected in Copacabana by 4:30 pm. On his bus, there should be my luggage, because all the drivers in western Bolivia got onto their phones, trying to find out who is going where at what time. When Victor found a colleague who was going from La Paz to Copacabana, they stopped on the highway in the middle of the altiplano, carrying two heavy bags, full of books, but probably suspecting something much more sinister, from one bus to the other.
And at 4:30 pm, a bus from the same company pulls in. I ask the driver (who is neither particularly short nor fat), if he is El Cupo. He nods and beckons me to get onto the empty bus to retrieve my luggage. It’s all there.
El Cupo and the helpful middleman are sitting together in the market square, having coffee. I thank them profusely and suggest that I invite them to dinner or something. “No, no, don’t you worry, Sir,” they shrug it off, wishing me a nice trip.
Before I moved to South America, people told me that I would get robbed many times. Instead, I was stupid enough to lose all my stuff on my own, and complete strangers got together, telephoning around all afternoon, not only to locate my bags, but to bring them back to me.
Whenever you can take a train, take a train. Trains don’t disappear as quickly as a bus. Also, train stations are more organized than bus terminals.
In South America, don’t even bother about booking ahead. I had missed the bus to Puno, obviously, but there was another one within half an hour of me getting my luggage back.
Also, I have seen many travelers make the mistake of looking for buses online, where only a few are listed. Just go to the bus station and ask. There will almost always be a bus to your destination leaving ahorita.
Traveling with a lot of luggage is a pain in the culito.
If I hadn’t spoken with the bus driver, I wouldn’t have known his name, and maybe I never would have found him again. Speak to people! You can still stare into your cell phone when you are back home.
This is big and it concerns hundreds of you who have contacted me about restitution of German citizenship in recent years. I can’t contact each and everyone individually (my fees are too modest for that, and donations to keep this blog alive are not made as often they should be), hence the following summary of a decision by the German Constitutional Court dated 20 May 2020 (case no. 2 BvR 2628/18).
Legal background:
During the Nazi dictatorship between 1933 and 1945, many people lost their German citizenship due to racial, political or religious reasons. Since 1949, (West) Germany has allowed these former Germans to reclaim German citizenship under Art. 116 II of the German Constitution. The practical relevance now is that this extends to descendants of former Germans, because without the Nazi-era policy, they too would be German citizens.
However, when applying, one has to show that one would have gained German citizenship from one’s ancestors had it not been for the Nazi-era policies. There were always other ways of losing German citizenship (for example by applying for another citizenship or by serving in another country’s armed forces, with exceptions, respectively), as there were limits to German citizenship being passed to the next generation. For example, until 1975, German citizenship could usually only be passed through the father, not the mother. This was clearly discriminatory, but it was not a Nazi-era policy, so it was not rectified under Art. 116 II of the Constitution. (There is another way for these cases, as detailed in no. 8 (a) of my FAQ on getting naturalized as a German citizen without living in Germany. Or, relevant in the present case, until 1993, children born to a German father did not automatically receive German citizenship if the parents were not married at the time (see no. 8 (b) of the FAQ referred to above).
The present case:
A lady was born in the USA in 1967 to a US-American mother. Her father, born in 1921, was deprived of German citizenship in 1938. He had fled to the USA as a Jew. The complainant’s parents were not married. The father recognized her as his child. She applied for naturalization in 2013 in accordance with Article 116 II of the German Constitution. The Federal Office of Administration rejected the application for naturalization. The complainant had been born illegitimate and had therefore not been able to acquire citizenship from her father at that time, regardless of whether he had been deprived of his German citizenship under the Nazis or not.
The court ruled that the constitutional complaint was justified.
The interpretation by the German government violates principal values of the constitution as well as special provisions on the equal treatment of children born out of wedlock (Art. 6 V of the Constitution) and equal treatment of men and women (Art. 3 II of the Constitution).
The court focused on the definition of “descendant” and criticized that the lower courts had stuck to the strict wording of the Citizenship Act without taking into account the values posited by the Constitution (and by the European Charter on Human Rights). Although it’s legally logical to apply previous versions of the Citizenship Act to people born when these versions of the law were in place, the court ruled that henceforth the previous discrimination must not be perpetuated.
What does this mean?
Because the Constitutional Court explicitly referred to the equality clause regarding the German parent, not only the child in question, I would think that this reasoning also applies to the many cases of people born to German mothers before 1975.
This case was a restitution case under Art. 116 II of the Constitution, but I don’t see why the same reasoning should not be applied to other descendants of German mothers or fathers, who do not fall under Art. 116 II of the Constitution, but who applied under the Citizenship Act.
It also means that anyone who ever had their case appraised and was told that it’s not worth to pursue it, should probably have it reappraised in light of this decision. There are now many more people out there who are entitled to German citizenship (or who already have it, often without knowing it).
However, it also means that there will be even more applications, and it will take the German government even longer to process them.
If you have benefited from this information or from any of my articles in the past, I would appreciate some support for this blog. I am putting a lot of time into providing this information to the public, where other lawyers charge thousands of euros.
As I finally saw a village after a day’s walk through the jungle and several river crossings, I was relieved. When I saw that a village of 300 inhabitants, living so remotely, had an active school, my educated heart was overcome with joy.
But before education, there has to be some patriotism, apparently.
Lined up like in the military, the students, all belonging to the Mojeño tribe/nation, warbled the anthem of the Plurinational Republic of Bolivia before marching into their classrooms in an equally military order. Like all buildings in Buen Pastor, the school building was kept rather simple.
To my great surprise, there was a computer room, though, but it had been mothballed for five months. The power supply from the solar panels no longer worked.
There was an engineering student in our group, who checked that both the solar cells and the batteries were okay. Only a small intermediate part needed to be replaced. However, he did not have that part with him, and he would not come back for a few months. So, there would be another semester without electricity.
At least the teachers don’t have to worry about the children being distracted by their mobile phones.
Speaking of the teachers: They have to walk through the jungle or, in the rainy season, wade through the mud for 6 to 8 hours until they get to school. All four teachers working there are from other parts of the country, but between the long holidays they have to live in the village without showers, without toilets, without clean water (they drink from the river or rainwater during the rainy season) and now without electricity, all of this for several months in a row. They don’t receive newspapers, and nobody visits them because everybody is afraid of snakes and piranhas. The journey home for the weekend is not worth it because of the long walk. There is no privacy, because everyone lives in open huts around a clearing cut out of the jungle. The doctor comes once a month. After a few weeks, you really can’t stand fish and rice anymore, but there is nothing else to eat. I didn’t even want to ask about the salary.
During the break, which was of course used for football, I snuck into one of the classrooms to take a look at the history and social studies books. And what am I seeing there, in the middle of the jungle of South America?
Of the ten people depicted, 30% are from German history. Plus Vichy-Pétain. The Bolivian history book does not have a single Bolivian or South American on the cover. Where is Bolívar?? No idea why Hindenburg was more important. Well, at least Garibaldi fought in South America, and Napoleon, through his war against Spain, indirectly gave South American freedom fighters the freedom to go on with their revolutions.
On the other hand, as a history nerd from Germany, it fills me with joy that even small children in jungle settlements without electricity or roads know about the Weimar Republic. I am excited to read about Federico Ebert, Adolfo Hitler and Pablo von Hindenburg.
Of course, I don’t expect a textbook for the third year of secondary school, especially on a distant continent, to provide explanations on the level of the thousand-page tomes I usually devour. But
was the Weimar Republic really a “república socialista”?
if one writes that Adolfo Hitler was appointed Führer by referendum, should one not mention that on 19 August 1934, the German Reich was already a dictatorship and the referendum was by no means free or fair?
referring to the Volksgerichtshof as “tribunales del pueblo” without any further explanation seems to downplay that instrument of oppression.
it’s not entirely true that the Nazis introduced a system of social security.
in light of all of that, it doesn’t really matter that the Gestapo and the SS were not the same.
But this book at least mentions racism, nationalism, anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews. Another textbook, which I find in the bookcase, deals with the history of the Third Reich without mentioning the Holocaust even once, although Bolivia received relatively many Jewish refugees.
Let’s see how things evolved in this distant Germany.
So, Germany becomes a “global power”, does not pay its foreign debts and puts the unemployed into the military. Hitler and Mussolini ally against the communists and help their friend Franco.
And then – poof, poof – in 1949 “Alemania Democrática” suddenly appears. Grotewohl and Pieck establish the “people’s democracy”, experience “some difficulties” in 1953 and 1961-62, but “things went ahead”. In 1955, the Western powers recognize the Federal Republic of Germany, the heads of government are called Heuss, Lübke, Erhard, Kiesinger, Brandt. If you confuse chancellor and president here, you won’t have any points deducted. On 9 November 1989, the wall is torn down (which wall? by whom? why?).
Something beautiful happens, because the fall of communism will allow the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany to unite and to “enter an era of freedom”. As if both countries had previously been unfree. Gratitude is expressed to Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, but it remains unclear of which Germany Kohl was chancellor.
But seriously: There are pupils and adults in Germany who do not know or understand or want to know/understand any of this any better. And in my 13 school years in Germany, I never heard anything about Bolivia. Also, I doubt any of my teachers would have swum through a river with anacondas and crocodiles to get to school.
June 9th, the end of the involuntary Robinsonade, a date which I had been longing for after three months. I had begun to miss the mainland. I had read all the books I brought. I had finished the cigars months ago, and none of the ships brought any reinforcements. In the last week alone, I had dreamt about cigars three times, so you can imagine the withdrawal symptoms.
But yesterday the flight to Lisbon finally took off. Traveling is rather bleak at the moment, because there are restrictions and bans everywhere. No hand luggage, no food at the airport, nobody sitting next to me, a bit like on a prisoner transport.
I looked at the ocean, at Faial, at Pico, São Jorge, at the islands I was leaving behind.
And soon, I dozed off. What else was there to do? Until a sharp turn to the left and the voice of one of the guys steering the plane woke me up:
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are sorry, but the Portuguese government has banned all flights from the Azores.”
Oh shit, that means we’ll have to turn back again.
“We don’t have enough fuel to return to Faial.”
Well, maybe the trip would be fun after all. Luckily the planes here can land on water. And then we would be drifting until a ship comes along. The sea looked calm, so I wasn’t too worried.
But the navigator had another solution:
“The nearest island we can reach is São Miguel.”
Never heard of that before. But I’m sure people live there, so it can’t be that bad.
As I was getting off the plane, I asked the pilot when we would continue to Lisbon.
“We’re grounded for at least another week. We’ll know more by June 15th.”
One week. Stranded again on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And because I had been dumb enough to spend all my savings for the onward journey from Lisbon to Vienna (it was the cheapest flight) and from there to Germany, I was so short of money that I had to decide: cigars or a bed?
It felt quite warm. For one week, I should be able to sleep in the forest and wash in the sea, I thought. Maybe there are as many empty houses here as on the other islands, then I can easily hide.
I am telling you again: Don’t travel this year! Things won’t go as planned.
With these gloomy thoughts I was walking through the city, apparently looking a bit depressed, because a lady ran out of a beauty salon, all excited:
“Excuse me, do you speak English?” she asked, as if she was looking for help urgently. But on the contrary, she wanted to offer her help: “You look a little lost. Can I help you?”
I explained the predicament. She was sympathetic, maybe because she usually lives in the USA (like so many Azoreans) and had planned to stay on São Miguel for only a month. But now she has been stuck here for several months herself.
She was so typically American-optimistic that she really infected me with her “Don’t worry!” She took her phone and called a friend: “Hey Marcos Flavius, how are you? Listen, there’s a young man here, he’s stranded on the island. You have rooms available, right?”
The man with the name of a plebeian tribune didn’t dare to say no to the effusive-resolute lady. I was extremely uncomfortable about this until it turned out that he was not at home (probably stranded on the mainland involuntarily) and I would therefore not be a burden to him. The house was conveniently just across the road, and the key was under the flowerpot.
Marcos (“you can call me Flave”) said I should just go inside and see if I liked it and then decide if I would stay. (A very generous offer to someone whose alternative is sleeping outside.)
I liked it very much, and thus, completely unexpected, I will be staying in a small palace in Ponta Delgada, which by the way is not such a small town after all. Exploring the neighborhood that night, I even discovered two cigar factories in the immediate vicinity.
Well, as far as I’m concerned, the flights can remain suspended for a few months. Because once I get to Lisbon, having lost all the booked flights and trains and stuff, I will have to hitchhike home to Germany. In case you don’t have a map on hand: that’s really far.
The Happy Hermit 