yours sincerely...

from neukölln to nicosia, or: the cruelty of anniversaries

2011-08-13T15:59:00.002+02:00

In late September last year, I travelled to Cyprus for a few days to see to some family matters and, while I was at it, to enjoy a spell of early-autumn sun. Half a decade had elapsed since my last visit to an island I had called home for every summer of my childhood and on which, so my mother tells me, I was conceived.

My flight landed at Larnaca’s fancy new airport in the middle of the night so, after a few hours' shut-eye at a nearby beach and a quick dip in the sparkling sea the next morning, I drove north to Nicosia—the last divided capital city in the world.

Since the Turkish invasion of July 1974, provoked by a nationalist coup backed by Greece’s military (and sponsored by the CIA), brought to a cataclysmic close more than a decade of ethnic unrest on the island, Cyprus has been in what is often called a frozen conflict. It remains a drag on resources for the United Nations, who patrol the Green Line between the two zones, and a major policy obstacle for the European Union, which allowed the southern half to accede in 2004. A UN-sponsored, island-wide referendum on re-unification that year had failed to gain a majority amongst Greek Cypriots, who claimed their demands had not been met.

Nicosia—Lefkosia to Greeks, Lefkosha to Turks—is the polluted playground for both sides’ politicians and, at once, the dusty museum of this mummified dispute. The Green Line writhes its way through the historic centre, cleaving in twine the star-shaped Venetian fortress like a verdant moat gone haywire. (Though indeed lusciously overgrown, it allegedly owes its name to the colour of a British commander’s pencil that, briskly scribbled, delineated the ceasefire boundary.) The buildings on either side are utterly dilapidated, and where they are collapsing trilingual warnings ward off passers-by. On the Turkish side, a crimson sign depicting an armed soldier adorns the grey-brick wall.

Yet even here, adjacent to no-man’s-land, life goes on as normal. A bewildering array of workshops—carpenters, car mechanics, blacksmiths, printers—form a spawning ecosystem of their own, buzzing and clanging, humming and whirring in the dry silence of the afternoon siesta. An ancient proprietor shuffled in the shade of his corner kafeneion (marble floor, ceiling ventilator, traditional wooden chairs, old-school Coca-Cola sign), to the right of which the street went no further. The barrels-and-barbed-wire road block beside his establishment had long been engulfed by the Green Line’s fervid vegetation.

The real estate in the area must be next to worthless, yet I can just imagine property developers salivating are at the prospects of the island’s re-unification one day. With it, this bizarre netherworld in the heart of the capital will no doubt vanish. (Nicosia—both halves—is indeed already benefiting from an EU-funded ‘master plan’ to restore its city centre.)

A few days later at our stone house in Lyssos, a village in the quiet western corner of the island, I eagerly wrote up my impressions of Nicosia, spurred on by the historic anniversary Germany was celebrating in my absence: twenty years since the country’s re-unification on 3 October 1990. It seemed to me, in light of that joyful occasion, that Cypriots of all hues ought to put aside their differences, leave behind their grudges, and take the bold step into a joint future. Surely the obstacles were no greater than those facing the eastern bloc in 1989? “On this day,” I elegised, “when Germans are celebrating what for 28 years they could only dream of, I take solace in the way history can sometimes take our dreams and, when we least expect it, make them happen.”

Ten months on, I am back in Lyssos and, as chance would have it, Germany is commemorating another event, this one rather more sombre: the construction of the Berlin Wall, begun on 13 August 1961—forty years ago today. Pessimism is an attitude to life and the world that does not come naturally to me, yet it is hard to suppress a cynical chuckle at the cruel coincidence of these two anniversaries. For if, in the autumn of last year, there seemed to be some hope for a solution to the island’s woes, today the picture is a lot bleaker.

On 11 July, a colossal explosion at a naval base here left thirteen dead and destroyed a brand-new power station. The outrageous cause of the blast—several dozen containers-full of confiscated Iranian munitions that appear to have been carelessly stored—has unleashed an unprecedented wave of rage amongst many Cypriots, who have been demonstrating for weeks against President Dimitris Christofias, whose head they want to see roll. There is little doubt he will be defeated in the 2013 presidential elections in favour of a right-wing candidate much less dedicated to reconciliation with the Turks than him.

Meanwhile, daily power cuts have hit tourism and the financial sector; some have estimated the explosion has wiped out 20% of the country’s GDP. Most worryingly, in recent days there has been much talk about Cyprus, whose banks survived the financial crisis in good shape, becoming the next euro-country requiring a bail-out.

In this context, resolving the island’s division has somewhat lost momentum. Germany has the fortune of commemorating its erstwhile partition from the standpoint of a society largely healed. Stasi collaborators exposed and unemployment in the former east still make headlines; but the country faces other challenges today, and those it meets as a united nation.

Of course Cypriots, even if reunited, will remain divided by ethnicity, language and religion. But how not to retain hope? There’s a saying here that goes: ‘An egg cracks an egg,’ which apparently has a meaning similar to ‘an eye for an eye.’ But it seems to me it could also mean that if you try hard enough to hurt another, you may end up hurting yourself.

not flagging

2010-07-07T18:18:00.004+02:00

Keen to tap into the Deutschland-mania currently gripping the country and its capital, journalists in Berlin have been going nuts about a bizarre case of acquired patriotism and inverted racism.

Anyone strolling in recent weeks down the Sonnenallee, a humble yet colourful avenue in my neighbourhood full of men-only shisha bars, Arab travel agencies and halal butchers, can't have missed a gigantic Germany flag, some twenty metres in length, suspended from the fifth floor of one of the elegantly decrepit buildings. Since the start of the World Cup the city has been drowning in flags, but this one has already been dubbed Germany's largest.

The quirk is that the flag was put up by the Lebanese-born owner of a mobile-phone shop on the ground floor—a fact that, in itself, has caused endless amazement to many here. On two occasions over the past weeks, radical left-wingers, with which Berlin abounds, have set it alight or torn it down or otherwise defaced it. Each time, the owner had it replaced. At 500 euros a pop.

The German media has reacted to the story with a mix of condescending curiosity and jingoistic delight. Personally, I'm not so interested in the tale of a naturalised immigrant defending his acquired home against indigenous anarchists opposed to the very idea of patriotism. Of course this is what the media was most interested in (including, incidentally, numerous foreign correspondents; when I was there I bumped into Steve Rosenberg of the BBC).

No, the problems start with the most basic of issues: how the media report on the heterogeneous and, well, un-German spirit of the neighbourhood. Even the enlightened, liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung couldn't help noting the Oriental exoticism of the area, though I suspect this has more to do with the relative uniformity of Munich, where the paper is based, than anything else.

Meanwhile, the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit referred to the Sonnenallee as Berlin's "Arabtown". Without meaning to be politically correct, you just can't imagine London's Bethnal Green (a comparable borough) being described in a serious paper as "Banglatown," for instance. And shamefully, the link to the online version of the article (http://www.zeit.de/2010/27/Tuerken-Linke-Berlin?page=2) erroneously refers to the Arab Berliners in question as 'Turks'.

I wonder what this whole affair says more about: a narrow failure of successive German governments to integrate migrants and their children, or a more broad and shocking inability (or refusal) by the society as a whole to accept the notion of German-ness being diluted. Observe the mere fact that third-generation Germans are still widely referred to as 'Ausländer' (foreigners) just because they are bilingual and don't look Arian. It doesn't help that the law discourages dual citizenship, forcing many to choose between two nationalities: you're either with us or against us.

With the numerous bureaucratic, educational and social obstacles hindering integration, it's hardly surprising there is a lot of resentment around. But of course it takes two to tango. Calls for the Turkish and other communities to do more themselves to aid integration and assimilation are legitimate—as long as they recognise the primary duty of the local and national authorities to create the framework for this to happen.

Last year, a huge scandal erupted after a local politician in Berlin, Thilo Sarrazin, made critical remarks about (post-)immigrant communities in Germany not being serious about integration. He eventually resigned following immense public pressure, but is now in the press again for talking about "differing levels of education" between immigrant groups and natives, and saying that the society as a whole is becoming "dumber" as a result.

The scandal highlights not just the tensions and divisions within German society (many have come to Sarrazin's rescue while others have proclaimed a witch hunt on him). The most frustrating thing is that the debate appears to revolve around the right to say such things openly, rather than examining the reasons behind the lack of integration and what can be done to improve it.

I think things are slowly changing in Germany. Only in recent years has it become normal (but by no means widespread) to refer to non-ethnic Germans as "Turkish Germans" or "Lebanese Germans" and so on, rather than simply Turks or Lebanese—despite being German citizens. Such a colourful national football team would have been simply unthinkable just a few years ago. And the wild joy and pride amongst Berliners of all stripes for their team during the World Cup has been a truly moving spectacle. The enormous flag on Sonnenallee that caused the media rumpus is only the loudest manifestation thereof.

Having said that, I couldn't help noticing that before matches Podolski, Özil, Khedira, Boateng & Co didn't sing the national anthem. That may take another generation. In the meantime, Germany's out of the World Cup. I'd better go check on that flag on Sonnenallee.

Yours sincerely...

Lights out

2010-05-30T15:52:00.002+02:00

This I wrote a while ago but it is still very relevant. In fact, it will be increasingly so.

***

Phasing out incandescent light bulbs

Forget crooked bananas and butter mountains. The European Union's gradual phase-out of the common incandescent light bulb, which began in September 2009, in favour of low-energy equivalents will affect people's lives in ways unimaginable. For over a century in the developed world, man has been accompanied from cradle to grave by the familiar glow of a delicately coiled wire within a glass bubble. Light bulbs illuminate our nights as sunlight our days.

But the environmental concerns of our age are unprecedented, and growing electricity demand means sacrifices must be made. With the economies of crisis-hit Europe being dependent on carbon-heavy industries, mandating the use of low-energy light bulbs is a relatively simple way for the continent to reduce its impact on the climate. And lower utility bills are an alluring argument for credit-crunched consumers.

The benefits are tangible. Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), the most common low-energy bulbs, use up to 80% less electricity for the same light output and last more than four times as long as incandescents. Replacing ten old-fashioned bulbs with CFLs can save 500 kilowatt-hours over the space of a year⎯the equivalent of a television set running continuously for seven months.

Yet Europeans have reacted with a mixture of nostalgia and hysteria, buying old-fashioned bulbs in bulk. There is a sense that an epoch is drawing to a close. To aesthetes, the very sound and meaning of the word ‘incandescence’⎯light from heat⎯has a distinctly poetic, almost mystical tone to it; ‘compact fluorescent lamp’ sounds as clunky as its light is cold, flat and pale.

If only it were merely a question of euphony. CFLs contain mercury, which is harmful both to humans and the environment. They also aggravate epileptics and those who suffer from light sensitivity. While the EU has acknowledged there are issues it believes the broader benefits outweigh individual health concerns.

Old for new

Technological advancement has always meant the gradual exchange of the outdated for the modern. When electric lighting became current it too seemed to cast off a harsher, less intimate shine than gas lamps, which in turn had replaced candles decades earlier.

Unlike other advancements in technology, however, the catalyst for change here is not market pressure but regulation. It is indeed for ideological reasons⎯a belief that their removal will reduce our power consumption and thereby our impact on the environment⎯that the EU is consigning incandescents to the scrap yard of history. Yet demand for illumination that is both green and aesthetically pleasing will encourage the industry to come up with new technologies. Already, bulbs such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are available that are even more efficient and less hazardous than CFLs.

While governments elsewhere have announced plans for similar schemes, the EU with its 500m electricity consumers is setting a weighty precedent for others to emulate. Brussels regulation, however opaque to laymen, enjoys respect around the world. As policymakers search for ways of going green, they could do worse than follow the EU’s example and ditch incandescents.

Yet change, however positive, will always engender nostalgia for what is being left irretrievably behind. There is a generation of Europeans that knows no national currencies between their countries. Incandescent light bulbs, and the hearty reassurance of their soft glow, will likewise soon be history. A relic of cosier, if less efficient past.

germany and serbia put history behind them...

2010-02-12T13:24:00.002+01:00

My newest article published in Business New Europe.

For the record, the reference to football in the lead paragraph was added by the editor...

http://www.businessneweurope.eu/story1953

Serbia's territorial integrity: continued

2010-01-21T17:34:00.005+01:00

Written before Christmas, this article was published on 18 January on Business New Europe. In it I deal with Serbia's continued issues of territorial integrity, something most countries don't have to worry about nowadays.

I hate to use a cliché, but Serbia's at a real crossroads at the moment: the most liberal, pro-Western government since - well, a bloody long time, and a real desire to move on and be given a chance. It's in a tricky position, however: there is much good will from the US and the EU, who are keen to orientate it further westwards, but who at the same time have recognise diplomatically a chunk of Serbia's land that has declared independence following an illegal invasion...

http://businessneweurope.eu/story1914/Serbias_territorial_integrity_continued

steamy truths

2010-01-19T00:12:00.010+01:00

The other day I went to the sauna - incidentally, at the swimming pool on the site of the former Görlitzer railway station (see my last entry).

To enter you have to take your receipt from the till with you. Willy-nilly I was reminded of the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, who described in hilarious vignettes the absurdities and surrealism of everyday urban life in 1920s Soviet Russia. In one, the narrator laments complications encountered during a recent venture to the public baths. Having stripped and deposited his clothes and belongings for safekeeping, he must hang on to his ticket, failure to present which, he is assured, will prevent him from retrieving his things... The difficulty of preserving this precious scrap in a steam sauna, naked and with no pockets, is just as hilarious as it must have been to Zoshchenko's contemporaries. Anyone familiar with today's Russia will recognise the sense of helplessness of the individual before bureaucratic inanity.

Luckily, my sauna experience of Berlin anno 2010 was much more of an agreeable experience, though laden with tradition and ceremony. Courteous explanations on the wall help the uninitiated familiarise themselves with sauna etiquette: "No sweat on the wood" (bring a towel); "Do not cut your toe nails in the sauna"; "As the Finnish proverb says, behave in the sauna as you would in church".

The high proportion of gentlemen of alternative persuasion made the last instruction all the more pertinent. But I must say the few interested glances I received were positively ascetic compared with the scene that unfolded before my eyes the time I innocently walked into a public bath in Budapest on a men-only day... I shall leave the details to imagination but I can guarantee whatever your dirty mind could dream up wouldn't beat the real thing.

Had I had a hat on as I sat there reeling from the 95C degree heat, I would have taken it off: everyone behaved with the greatest reverence and decorum during the ceremony of 'Aufguss', when the attendant pours scented water on the stones and then - like a priest giving a blessing - waves the burning-hot air at you with a towel. The process is repeated several times and at the end the attendant is thanked with a round of applause.

Awkwardness, self-consciousness and irreverance are equally alien here. The Germans' openness towards nudity and the seriousness of the sauna ceremony strikes me as something fundamentally oriental.

So after the infernal heat of the sauna, a stroll in the snow-clad inner courtyard and a splash in a pool so icy you fear this may be your last living moment...you lie down in a quiet room, and as your head spins and your heart races while your body sinks into the deck chair, you truly do feel something akin to a religious experience.

I can only recommend it.

Yours sincerely...

My Sorbian adventure

2010-01-08T17:47:00.012+01:00

Last summer I had the chance to research a topic I'd been interested in for a while, a little-known quirk of German history and geography: the Sorbs, an indigenous Slavic people who have inhabited these lands for 13 centuries. I was keen to hear their language and to understand what their relationship was with modern Germany - after all, their only home.

I was doing an internship at the English-language service of dpa (Deutsche Presse-Agentur or German Press Agency) and the editor liked my idea, so I went about organising a trip to Bautzen, the Sorbs' historical capital just 20 kilometres from the Czech border.

Until Germany's post-war occupation and division, travellers to this corner of the country (as well as those continuing on to Prague and Vienna) would have caught a train from the Görlitzer station, one of Berlin's many more-or-less intact railway termini that were torn down because the enclave that was West Berlin had no need for them. In its place in the cosy, colourful district of Kreuzberg now stand a park and an indoor swimming pool.

Instead, at the crack of dawn one morning in early September I caught a train from Berlin's shiny but characterless new central station. This was my first journey into the provincial heartland of the GDR; I'd heard that, unlike so much of West Germany, it had not been mercilessly modernised and homogenised. I was not disappointed. The picturesquely monotonous plains of Brandenburg eventually gave way to the suburbs of Dresden, graced with a grandeur from another era. I changed at Dresden-Neustadt, a station that had escaped the brunt of that city's Allied bombing in 1945 and that was once a stop on the Berlin-Constantinople line.

From there a regional train took me to Bautzen, halting en route at countless country stations, where narrow grassy platforms separated the tracks from little station buildings with broken windows and peeling wall paint, fading away into the surrouding woods and into history. The one thing one could sadly not escape was the ubiquitous corporate blue of the Deutsche Bahn (German Railways) signs - and warning of inexorable post-reunification homogenisation.

Anyone dropped in Bautzen and with no local knowledge would be excused for thinking (not too mistakenly) they were in the German equivalent of Wales or in some relic of Europe's pre-First World War heterogeneous empires. Street signs and plaques in both German and Sorbian plastically demonstrated the ethno-linguistic cohabitation in these parts.

What followed was a busy and blissfully hot late-summer day meeting Sorbs of all professions and walks of life. After returning to Berlin I soon wrote up and dispatched my article but for one reason or another it only appeared in mid-December. The 900-word piece cannot of course do justice to my impressions of that day (have a look at the photos for that) but, more importantly, it doesn't reflect the tremendous hospitality with which I was welcomed. Is it some rare mixture of German openness and Slavic warmth, with a dash of old-worldly community spirit blended in? The cynic within me suggests there might have been a wish to get some (good) publicity on the rare occasion of an English-language reporter being in town, but I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.

For copyright reasons I couldn't post the article on my blog, so here are some links to websites that subscribe to the dpa and published the story (if one of the links no longer works, try another):

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/features/article_1519036.php/Sorbs-a-resilient-minority-in-modern-Germany-Feature

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/discover/2010/01/06/239555/Sorbs-ethnic.htm

http://www.newcomers-network.de/newsfeed_dpa/091214FEATURE_Sorbs_a_resilient_minority_in_m.php

Yours sincerely...

2010

2010-01-04T12:02:00.003+01:00

I did not set up this blog to keep a regular 'web log' of my daily life and inner ruminations: I can't imagine too many people will have enough time or interest for that and in any case these things are I believe better noted in one's personal diary.

Primarily I want this to be a place to post my pieces (or, for copyright reasons, links to them) published elsewhere. Perhaps, in time, I will start writing original material destined only for the blog.

Having said that, I'd like to say that 2009 brought great personal and professional changes to my life: I parted with the City of London and have created for myself a humble abode for both work and play in the distant outpost of European civilisation that is Berlin.

Berlin... The city that first welcomed, resentfully raised and finally bitterly abandoned my father seven decades ago; that was a refuge and a patch to grow roots - and hopefully a family - for my brother; and finally the place where chance or fate felt it fitting for me to meet the love of my life.

So it is with some trepidation but above all with enthusiasm, courage and humour, so indispensible in life, that I have moved to this city and that I look forward to 2010 and the coming decade.

Yours sincerely...