I really enjoyed the Botanical Garden in Kyiv, but that little dude freaked me out.
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With the warm and sunny weather we are having in Kyiv, I thought I would go to the beach. “Hold on,” I hear the geographically gifted object, “Kyiv is not by the sea.”
Well, actually it kind of is because the Dnieper river connects the city with the Black Sea and is wide enough to allow large ships to come all the way up here.
If you want to catch a boat, this is the port, although it didn’t seem to be very active.
And indeed, there are beaches.
There used to be ice on the river in winter, as shown in this painting by Ivan Aivazovsky from 1872. But nowadays, both the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the nuclear waste dump of Prydniprovsky chemical plant are keeping the water warmer than usual.
But even ice wouldn’t have stopped the old lady I saw on Trukhaniv Island. I was sitting there, reading a book and smoking a cigar, thinking I am the only person enjoying the beach. An old lady with a woolen cap and a thick purple jacket walked down to the river, probably oblivious to my presence, took off her clothes (there was a really chilly wind which made me shiver despite wearing all my clothes), and went swimming. The exercise lasted only about ten seconds, but still, I was impressed. She got dressed again and continued with her daily routine, probably going to the post office or shopping.
The water temperate of the river in December is 3 degrees Celsius, and that’s already with radioactivity.
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“Please throw unwanted children in the trash,” this sign at Sovky Park says. Or so I thought, before reading the small print.
Pictographs can be so misleading. There is just no substitute for real language.
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“I would never go to Eastern Europe in winter.”
“You are going to freeze your butt off.”
“How stupid of you!”
These were some of the comments I received when I announced my plan to spend the winter in Ukraine.
And here I am, today, on 19 December, enjoying the sun at the Botanical Garden in Kyiv (outside, not in one of the greenhouses).
I am reading a wonderful road novel of young Polish guys exploring Ukraine, written by Ziemowit Szczerek. Thanks to Thomas Kuban for sending me this book! It’s so suitable for this trip, although I definitely won’t be drinking as much as the protagonists. Unfortunately, it’s not yet available in English, but if you read German or Polish, I highly recommend “Mordor kommt und frisst uns auf” or “Przyjdzie Mordor i nas zje, czyli tajna historia Słowian”.
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You should actually recognize this column:
Exactly, it’s the one which looked like this six years ago:
Walking through the center of Kyiv, you see many memories of and memorials to the Euromaidan protests.
But before I write anything about that, I’ll have to meet people who were part of it.
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The reason for my stay in Kyiv are two young kittens, Stella and Stuart, about half a year old. They are full of energy, very sweet, always ready to play, but equally interested in my work.
And when I am still at the desk by 10 pm, the cats are already waiting in bed, reminding me that there are more important things in life than work.
And by 6 am at the latest, the rest is over. The cats are hungry and if I don’t get up voluntarily, they will gently bite my toe or arm.
Overall, food is very important to them. As soon as I come home with a shopping bag, open the fridge or begin to cook, they want to be part of the action.
I can only eat with one hand because I need the other one to fend off the two kittens. Probably, I will eat out more often. But I simply can’t be mad at them, they are just too cute.
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Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Blogs.
During the following three weeks in Kyiv, I will probably gather so much material that the resulting article, should it ever materialize, will be too long for most of you to read. For those more interested in my travels and less in my endless ramblings about 20th century European history, I will publish a daily photo from the Ukrainian capital instead. Like Instagraph, basically.
Let’s start with the view from the apartment which I am sitting and which comes with two cute kittens.
Arriving in the evening, it can actually look rather gloomy at this time of year.
I am staying in the far west of the city, about 10 km from the center, but perfectly connected by a fast metro. Lots of skyscrapers, but between them there is the odd historical building or a church.
And as soon as the sun comes out, you see the advantage of Soviet city planning: whichever direction I look from the 19th floor, I see green spaces, parks and tree-lined avenues. Which makes way more sense than selling a plot of back garden to every petit-bourgeois family, thereby artificially creating a shortage of land and raising its price, although the gardens ultimately won’t be used for 99% of the time. Here, on the other hand, everyone can enjoy green spaces close to their home for strolling, jogging, playing chess, making pull-ups, walking the dog and feeding squirrels.
And this is in December when most trees have shed their leaves. Just imagine what this will look like in friendlier seasons!
If you know Kyiv, I’d be happy to hear your recommendations. If not, I am looking forward to your questions.
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We still have to wait until 3 April 2020 for the new James Bond film No Time to Die to be released, but here is the first trailer:
My worst fears have materialized.
The writers still have absolutely no novel ideas and thus simply continue the non-story line of Spectre, the worst James Bond film ever. Why Christoph Waltz and Léa Seydoux were hired again after their lackluster performances, nobody knows.
Every scene in the trailer is a copy from previous films, the dialogues are flat, Daniel Craig hasn’t picked up a third facial expression, and women are still mostly meat packaged in tight dresses, it seems. You’d think that the producers put the best bits into the trailer, but this is terrible.
The film is called No Time to Die, but maybe it is time to die for Mr Bond, after all. Especially as we have seen how well plot-driven spy movies work, for example in The Americans, The Night Manager and Deutschland 83. If you have watched anything of similar quality, I would be happy to hear about it.
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Truth is the first victim of war, one could sum up the film Donbass, which confused me more than it educated me. But it did so in a memorable, partly unsettling, partly amusing way.
In 13 episodes, Sergei Loznitsa portrays life in embattled Eastern Ukraine. Or his imagination of life there. Or how the separatists portray life there. Or an image of the separatists that Ukraine wants us to have of them. Or even more complicated. Again and again, there are false flags and blatant lies.
If you haven’t read anything about the war in Ukraine, you won’t understand much from watching this film. But the one thing one is reminded of starkly: a country in Europe has been experiencing war since 2014. The fact that the rest of Europe, and the world, needs to be reminded thereof is part of the problem.
The film is not for those of delicate disposition, as some episodes are rather brutal, like the lynching or the massacre in the make-up salon. But then, others are very funny, like the checkpoint where soldiers hope to take some lard of grandmothers on the bus. Or the men in prison, all desperate on their phones.
Throughout the film, the actors are very good. You never know if they are professional actors, extras hired on the spot, or if they are just themselves, not even noticing the camera.
I haven’t been to Ukraine yet – a shortcoming that shall be rectified soon -, but I feel like I have met many of the characters in Donbass over the years of living and traveling in Eastern Europe. Including the Russians greeting me with “Hitler kaputt” upon learning that I am from Germany:
Do you have other film recommendations for my upcoming trip to Ukraine?
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Recently, I stayed with my father in Bavaria, where life is informal and one can put the feet on the table and smoke inside the house. We were both preoccupied with reading, my father with the newspaper and me with a book about the end of the Soviet Union, when I took a cigar from the casket on the living-room table.
It is a wooden box, elaborately ornamented, with amber intarsia, or so I had always thought, until I noticed upon closer inspection that it was straw. The treasure trove has clearly been in use for a long time, but it is still recognizable as the result of a love affair between creativity and craftsmanship.
“Nice box,” I say appreciatively, because I really like it and because parents like to hear that some of the household objects for whose acquisition they once toiled on the assembly line are appreciated by subsequent generations instead of being taken to the recycling centre or handed over to the aunt, who sells estates at the flea market, immediately after the demise of the original purchaser.
“Dimitri made it,” my father says cryptically. We do have carpenters and other wood artisans in the family, but I have never heard of any Dimitri. Having noticed my questioning look, he continues: “He was a Soviet prisoner of war, living on my grandparents’ farm in the Bavarian Forest.”
It sounds a bit like someone having a nice time in the countryside, but I am not that easily deceived: “A forced labourer, then?”
“In a way,” my father admits. Unlike other members of his generation, at least he is not into historical revisionism.
We both talk ourselves into believing that it was not the family’s fault, because prisoners of war were probably allocated as forced labourers, and that Dimitri, of whom we know nothing else, must have had a better time on the farm near Kötzting than in a mine, an armament factory or a concentration camp. Still, I am shocked. If even a small farming family with a few cows had a forced labourer during World War II, how many other families and companies in Germany had them? The cookie princess is probably not alone in her ignorance.
And as always when it comes to the Nazis: the more you read about a topic, the more horrible it becomes. First, it was not only prisoners of war who were forced into labour, but millions of Eastern European civilians were abducted to the Reich as well.
Second, Germany continued the racially motivated war of annihilation even against Soviet prisoners of war. They were systematically under-nourished and were treated much worse than Western European or North American prisoners. About half of them died during their captivity in Germany.
Third, the surviving Soviet POWs were then stigmatized in the Soviet Union after 1945, being regarded as traitors and collaborators. Often, they were directly sent to another labour camp. Internment in Germany was a life-long stain and a taboo, both in public as well as within families.
And fourth, the successor countries of the Third Reich denied any compensation to civilian forced labourers until the 1990es. Only in 2000, the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” was established for that purpose. By then, most of the victims had passed away. The prisoners of war never received any compensation at all.
I wonder what became of Dimitri.
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The Happy Hermit 