Before we headed out we’d had the idea that there must be a fourth country, on the borders of Germany, France and Switzerland; out there in an area of juncture, on their margins, a marginal country beyond all clear definitions.
The trip began when we stepped out of our front door. Carrying backpacks and photo equipment with us we switched from residents to travelers. What followed was a four days’ walk and we stayed overnight in three different hotels, once in every country – and directly at the border to the next. We traveled as if we were far away although our home was never more than an hour’s walk away. We had a look on our immediate vicinity as if we’d never seen anything similar before. We have rarely felt as alienated as on this walking tour when we were at any time in the immediate vicinity of our home. We were passing melancholic sets of a film we didn’t know. We found abandoned landscapes, staircases leading into the unknown, enclosed paradises, paths into the thicket, evil houses. We were walking through parallel worlds: through wild and romantic groves along the motorway, from the recreation and holiday idyll of the “Langen Erlen” to the deportation prison, passing the mental hospital, through allotment gardens to the smoking chimneys of the waste incineration plant. Our hotel rooms were anonymous places, dubious, bleak or entirely removed from the outer world.
We were constantly crossing borders and checkpoints, or we were walking along borders. Yet the insurmountable borders were the motorways and main roads that cut our way and forced us to turn around. Our encounters with the residents of the fourth country were strange, some were hostile. All the way suspicious looks accompanied us. As wanderers with photo equipment walking through areas generally avoided by tourists and hardly regarded worth depicting, we were suspect.
Once, two senior citizens who had secretly observed us the evening before approached us. When we explained what we were doing, they became communicative and told us about Bijou-Max, who’d once run a posh bar in the high rise near the border. An Italian woman explained all the photographs from times long past that were on display on the walls of her café. She mourned the passing of the good old times and complained about the large number of foreigners. Eventually, she said: “Thank you very much for the privilege to enthuse you.” A wild man with a beard who had entrenched himself in the forest with a caravan and railway carriages shouted at us when we approached him. “Have I invited you?” Even when we were already in the retreat for quite a while he was still shouting. An old man in an allotment area told us about thefts, and that they had to cordon off the area for this reason. Two posts had been stolen on his premises – yet the thief could have also been his neighbor. Near the deportation prison a woman who counsels asylum seekers told us about the neighbor who’d initially always wanted to shoot them. But by now he’s by and by made his peace with them. And it was in the sun-drenched park of the mental hospitals, which was scattered with flowers, where a man was restlessly walking shouting “Because you’re afraid, because you’re afraid!” With a loud voice and not directed at anyone in particular he was repeating this phrase like the chorus of a song.
Collaboration with Max Philipp Schmid, 2010
Text published in the magazine “The 4th Country”, produced by Audiorama for the Dreiländeroper, Strassbourg