Belgrade, 25 years later

The ruins of the General Staff building still stand on Nemanjina Street. Concrete is shattered, stairwells lie open like wounds. Every few years, rumors flare up about tearing the complex down. An investor here, a return-on-investment fantasy there. By the end of 2024, things got more concrete. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić wants to clear the way for demolition. Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner plans to build a luxury complex on the site: apartments, hotel, offices.

The resistance came unexpected. Staff at the Republican Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments refused to strike the building from the central register of immova le heritage. The ruins still stand. As a warning. A disruption in the business model.

Evening light drifts over the Sava at Kalemegdan. The victor looks west. Those who follow his gaze see the shadows. The skyline of New Belgrade sparkles. But beneath the trees, old men sit in silence, looking at a country that no longer exists. The future is built on stilts. The past lives next door, beneath a sagging clothesline. Two Belgrades in one image: the gleaming, the crumbling. One for the investors. The other for those who stayed.

Spring 1999. NATO begins its air war against Yugoslavia. Without UN mandate. Without legal foundation under international law. In Germany, they called it a “humanitarian intervention.” Minister Scharping stood before parliament and presented the so-called Horseshoe Plan – supposedly a Serbian masterplan for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Later it became clear: the plan was a fabrication by politicians and intelligence agencies. A deliberate manipulation to justify the first German military combat operation since 1945.

SMRT NATO PAKTU, is written on the wall – Death to the NATO Pact. Next to it: parked Fiats, lowered heads, quiet conversation. Those who bring war get words in return. The writing remains, long after the bombs have fallen silent.

May 7, 1999. In the evening, five precision bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three journalists are killed, 20 people injured. Washington speaks of a navigation error, of outdated maps.

Later, The Observer and Politiken investigate: The attack may have been deliberate. The CIA is said to have provided false coordinates. Official agencies deny it. The truth remains in the fog. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia drops the investigation – no criminal offense, they say.

After 78 days, the war was won. For the UÇK. Just recently labeled a terrorist organization, the Albanian nationalist guerrilla had become a partner of the West. The price of victory: 200,000 people – mostly Serbs and Roma – leave Kosovo. Some call it “ethnic correction,” others a cold exchange.
Peace is asymmetrical.

 

 

A narrow passage: graffiti, neon light, crooked signs. A leftover of Yugoslavia. The city breathes through backyards. Where no camera looks, history stands still. A mural with the gaze of a footballer. Miloš Milutinović of Partizan Belgrade looks right through you. The face of the past stays young.
Everything else ages.

 

 

March 23, 2025. 4:00 p.m., Generalštab. Protest. In Cyrillic script beside it: ПОБУНА – Uprising.
Today, the Generalštab is more than just a ruin. It is a monument to what cannot be said but must not be forgotten. A sign of those who, to the Kushners and Vučićs of this world, are superfluous, bad for business, a nuisance.

Concrete knows more than the official reports. But it remains silent. A wall reads: Сви у штрајк! – All on strike. No one stands in front of it. The slogan remains. The strike has yet to come.

Maritime writing

Ever since I did research for my reportage "Rearguard action in Gdansk" at Stocznia Gdanska in 1996, I have written again and again about the connection between men and  sea. Reasons are simple. The ocean breeze, the wide horizon, seagull cries, fish, salt water. All that does me good in every respect. I don't have any romantic idea about working in the maritime logistic complex. Navegare necesse est - seafaring is a must, but it is most beautiful if you can do it for pleasure. Unfortunately, it is one of the pleasures I cannot afford as often as I would like to. Far too seldom I manage to spend my vacations on the coast, at sea and on islands. So what can I do? I just have to find some suitable work ...

Endlessly traveling to Honolulu

"Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased. I remember a man in Salinas who in his middle years traveled to Honolulu and back, and that journey continued for the rest of his life. We could watch him in his rocking chair on his front porch, his eyes squinted, half-closed, endlessly traveling to Honolulu."

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Fixing up things

I've done a lot of different things journalists do over the last 25 years, but my favorite discipline is still to drive around the country and write stories about unspectacular people - workers, refugees, hillbillies of all kinds. Unlike politicians, artists, scientists or people who want to sell something, they don't push themselves forward. On the contrary, they have a certain basic mistrust of "the press," which, in my opinion, has increased in recent years.

This is not surprising. Since we have the internet and above all the "social media", people pay much more attention to their privacy. Today, nobody can be photographed as easily as 15 years ago. Those who are not already people of public interest prefer not to read their name in the newspaper (i.e. on the internet).

The other point is that they perceive journalists - if at all - either only as scurrying piecework workers in a media industry that seems incomprehensible but suspect to them (with which they are intuitively perfectly correct) or as part of the elites - no less suspect to them. They rarely, if ever, come into contact with the latter type in their world, but if they do, it seems self-evident to them that there is an unbridgeable gap between them and those "alpha journalists" that has rapidly widened in recent years.

The crazy thing is that most of the people I've written about in the last 25 years, when they've read my lines afterwards, have reacted with an overwhelming and touching thankfulness to me (at least if I haven't allowed myself any major mistakes in my job and haven't written any nonsense about them).

ITF Baltic week of action, Sept. 2018, Wismar