The Places With The Names Of The Early Morning News

Can you relate these places to the war? I asked Jan when walking back to the hostel after the trip to Krka. I really couldn’t, I didn’t know enough about what happened in these exact places and there was no visible destruction left. He pointed out how some parts of the city we just passed had to be completely rebuilt. I already knew the connection would be different, closer, for me in some other places.

The Yugoslav Wars were what made me realize that war is not a phenomenon of the past. Grandpa had been in the war, I knew that as a little child already. But a war now, in Europe, a civil war at that (what does that mean, I asked my mother, how does that happen?), I had to process that. I don’t remember when exactly German Broadcasting stopped announcing every part of the news with the name of the city it came from. But they still did so in the 1990s and so I’ve been familiar with the names of many places in this region for some 20 years. In my primary school years both breakfast and dinner would be accompanied by “German Broadcasting, 6:30, the news. Sarajevo…. Zagreb…. Belgrad…. Banja Luka…. Tuzla…. Mostar…. Srebrenica….” Children from these places (and from Iraq, Somalia and Rwanda, Baghdad, Mogadishu and Kigali were often mentioned on the news, too) filled the preparatory classes in my school and small caravan refugee camps were erected in my town. Much later I’ve been working with traumatized refugees from the Balkans, many of them still in a precarious legal in-between situation. Apart from my interest in Slavic cultures, Europe and twisted histories in general, it is one aim of this trip to get, if only a tiny bit of it, a first-hand perspective of these countries and the places with the names I got to know such a long time ago. To try to understand some of the realities in this region of crossroads and to think of something else first when I hear the names in the future than of war news in 1993 and frustrating German immigration laws in 2013.

Because every place should be appreciated in its own right. Some of what I will remember first from now on when I hear these names is what you find here.