ATLAS 05 english

ATLAS

THE WORLD IN MOTION: THE GEBRÜDER WEISS MAGAZINE

Freedom RAINER GROOTHUIS

A work in progress EVA HAMMÄCHER

Unleashed!

RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI

‘Form that takes shape throughout life’ ENRICO RICCABONA

‘The freest people are often those who get by with the least’ HARALD MARTENSTEIN

No pain, no gain Plus: Panama, Columbia and the Land Rover of the skies

ISSUE 05

2 ATLAS

‘You

have only really been to a place if you set foot in it.’

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Yamal Peninsula is a storm-swept region be­tween the Arctic Ocean and the Siberian tundra.

Yamal means ‘world’s end’ in the language spoken by the Nenets who have populated this region for many centuries. As one of Russia’s last remaining nomadic peoples, they live mainly off meat and fish, and drive their cattle north during the short Polar summers and south during the long winters, keeping one step ahead of the biting cold.

Nobody knows how long they can maintain this way of life: climate change and its consequences are making the tundra unpredictable. Moreover, huge oil and gas reserves have been discovered on Yamal.

Today streets, railway lines and pipelines are en­croaching on the ‘end of the world’.

‘The

slightest movement is of significance to the whole of nature; the whole sea changes when a stone is thrown in.’

Blaise Pascal

The home of the Bajau lies in the so-called Coral Triangle of the Malayan archipelago, where the sea is shallow and diverse in species. Many may have abandoned their original way of life – in boats on the open sea – but the Bajau’s bond with the water remains as strong as ever. It is still their primary habitat and source of sustenance. Traditionally they wield harpoons and clam knives as they dive into the deep in search of food. They do not typically need breathing apparatus – as skilled divers they can hold their breath for minutes at a time.

Most of the Bajau now live in houses built on posts above the sea or in houseboats, and have no birth certificates, passports or even nationality.

Many of their children have never set foot on land.

Einstieg: Fahrende VÜlker, z.B. die Bajau, Seenomaden im malaiischen Archipel, europäische Sinti, die Hadza aus dem Norden Tansanias.

4 ATLAS

‘We all live under the same sky, but we don’t have the same horizons.’

Konrad Adenauer

The estimated 700 Hadza live scattered along the banks of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, an inaccessible and largely infertile area of some 1,500 square kilometres. At least a quarter still survive as hunter-gatherers. The Hadza do not cultivate crops and have hardly any possessions, no livestock and no permanent homes. They do not wage wars; nor do they have no leader. As such, they are the only ethnic group in Tanzania that pays no taxes.

They eat leaves and berries, roots and fruit, and occasionally bush meat and honey – the Hadza live from hand to mouth. Nevertheless, even during droughts they can maintain a balanced diet. Retaining their traditional hunting and gathering grounds is crucial for their survival.

Rudolf Irsiegler has been working for GW in Wels for 16 years. He loves the big outdoors and wide horizons.

Away from work, he can often be found hiking or skiing in the mountains. But he inspires confidence when visibility is low as well: before transferring to swap body management, he spent eight years driving a truck – at night.

Wikipedia: Freedom (Latin: libertas) is generally understood to mean the possibility of deciding between all the available options and making one’s choice without any constraints. Karl Kraus: Thoughts are free but the hassles remain. Abraham Lincoln: The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. En vogue: Free your mind and the rest will follow.

F

reedom – can mean many things to you: free­dom of speech, freedom of action or trade, the c­ onquest of gravity. One thing is certain: freedom is a great idea that is indispensable in our world today.

Is life really possible without constraints? That is the question asked by GW coach Enrico Riccabona. When are restraint and renunciation worthwhile? Do we ­really need to keep up to date on what is happening in the world? The poet Goethe had a clear answer to this question, as Rüdiger Safranski explains.

What’s more: seeking to free yourself or others always involves a risk. Freedom and absolute security are never fully compatible, writes Harald Martenstein – but it doesn’t have to be as dangerous as scaling rocks without a rope.

This fifth issue of ATLAS is devoted to these, and other, facets of freedom. Here’s wishing you a liberating and entertaining read.

Best wishes, Gebrüder Weiss

SAVED

SOLD

STIRRED

Petrol that the courier service UPS saved by avoiding left turns on its routes between 2004 and 2012. In millions of litres:

Sales in the European B2C e-commerce market rose by over 14 percent last year. The new total:

Cement production in the USA between 1910 and 2012. In billions of tonnes:

Source: brand eins

Source: 25th GW MarketMonitor

423.8 billion euros

38

GW POWER MIX IN 2014

In 2014 the market share of goods transported by rail in Switzerland rose again by 3.5 % to 67.3 %. Road transport services declined by 2 %.

2013

37.1 %

2013

67.3 %

59.8 %

FOSSIL ENERGY SOURCES

2014

RENEWABLE SOURCES

Source: Verkehrsrundschau

FREE TIME

FREE FALL

41,000 m 39,000 m

1, 32

Annual holiday entitlement in days

33

5 7.

25

/ m

h

12 US

Sweden

18

Japan

6k

/h km

1, 3

2 .9

The Austrian Felix Baumgartner’s spectacular skydiving record of October 2012 only survived for two years: In 2014, 57-year-old Alan Eustace from the US jumped from an altitude of approx 41,000 metres – 2,000 metres higher. However, Baumgartner retained his free fall speed record of 1,357.6 km/h; Eustace reached a peak speed of ‘only’ 1322.9 km/h. Happily, both daredevils landed safely.

Austria

NUCLEAR POWER

27.7 %

Source: brand eins

63.8 %

51.1 %

2014 12.7 %

6.2

MORE RAIL

Given the construction work in Austria, electricity consumption was slightly higher than in the previous year at 18,688,343 kWh.

11.8 %

5.2

Cement production in China between 2010 and 2012. In billions of tonnes:

BY AIR

The ‘Freight 50’ list ranks the busiest international air cargo carriers in 2014 by freight volume.

In millions of tonnes: FREE SPIRIT

Federal Express

7.13

United Parcel Service

4.24

Emirates

2.29

Korean Air

1.52

5 Cathay Pacific Airways

1.50

In June 2011, the Australian Penny Palfrey set a new world record in long-distance swimming in the western Caribbean Sea. She covered the distance between Little Cayman and Grand Cayman without outside assistance:

Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers

SALES DRIVERS IN THE AREA OF TRANSPORT AND LOGISTICS IN AUSTRIA DURING 2013 (IN EUR BILLIONS):

2.6

Goods forwarding by road

4.1

3.6

17.5 BUILDING STARTED

Transport-related services Post and courier services Roadbound passenger services Air travel

108 km

9.1

In Austria work began on the construction of the Brenner Base Tunnel which is due to become the world’s longest subterranean railway line. Once completed, it will connect the Austrian town of Innsbruck with Franzensfeste in South Tyrol/Italy and extend

64 km

The world in motion:

RAINER GROOTHUIS

A work in progress

10

A slice of home

Building bridges for trade

FRANK HA AS

The Land Rover of the skies

46

HARALD MARTENSTEIN

51 No pain, no gain

ENRICO RICCABONA

‘The freest people are often those who can get by with the least.’

K ALUZA

44

MIRIAM HOLZAPFEL

26 The refugee trail

‘Form that takes shape throughout life.’

MARTIN

Update

25

RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI

38

ADRIANA ALTARAS

22

28

IMKE BORCHERS

31 The new centre

‘Moving mountains: the sky’s the limit’

34

‘Let freedom ring …’

52

EVA HAMMÄCHER

54 Unleashed!

FAMILY FUN

62 Space Post

Orange network

64

CARSTEN KNOP

The Internet of Things is coming

36

66

72

ULRICH WALTER

In a world of our own

Imprint

A work in progress A tale of booming bass, faith and freedom, trade and togetherness, promise and pride: Belgrade, the city on the Danube and Sava is emerging as one of southern Europe’s most vibrant urban centres

A WORK IN PROGRESS 13

At Kalenica Market

reportage: Rainer Groothuis

I

t’s summertime, and the sun is cloaking the city with its dazzling heat. The whole of Belgrade is a happening at this time of year, and everyone is outdoors. On the banks of the Danube and the Sava, in the broad pedestrian thoroughfare Knez Mihailova ulica, up at the fortress in Kalemegdan Park, at the Mali Tasmajdan recreational grounds: the very young and very old are out and about. The clock is irrelevant on days like this. The Serbian beer is full-bodied, the ice cream delectable, the service attentive. ‘A friendly word will open gates of iron’, they say in Serbia.

At three or four in the afternoon, people start flocking to the sidewalk cafés that are soon filled to capacity. Friends get together, couples meet up, families stroll along. Every few 100 metres there is an ice cream or popcorn cart; women sell traditional embroidery, people play guitars and violins. One man is offering his digital scales for hire at a price of about five euro cents.

In the midst of the melee is an old woman, her little, birdlike head swathed in a scarf. She stands out wearing a black coat. Hers is a face that tells a story: a lifetime of toils and tribulations, probably labouring on the land. She seems lost in the hubbub of the new age, puzzled by the freedom in this country that is still finding its way. She has surely noted some of the Asians too, striding through Belgrade with an air of superiority, as though they already owned Europe – and as though their stock markets were not currently flirting with the devil.

Men loll about at the cafés, tracking the beautiful women with their eyes, commenting with glances, gestures, words – and sometimes a snigger shared with their mates. They are tanned, buff and bearded with the obligatory four-day stubble.

But the women, especially the young ones, have been there, done that: they play along in the game of the sexes, confident in the knowledge that, at the end of the day, they will be the ones wearing the proverbial pants in their relationships and families. There are four women to every man in Belgrade, which explains why members of the fairer sex – of all ages – are carefully groomed, styled, made-up and bejewelled, while the males exude an air of casual carelessness.

The mosquitoes are waltzing in clouds over the Danube, the night chills creeping clammy from its black waters. The younger generation takes full advantage of their youth, night after night, all summer long and basically all the other seasons long as well. The booming bass from the disco boats echo out over the river, threading into the cacophonous tapestry that forms Belgrade’s distinctive soundtrack. Serbia is unique in many ways. Take this pop music with its historical roots, integrating instrumentation, melodies and rhythms from Ottoman times. Songs sound and resound: everyone knows the words and sings along with gusto. By 11 pm at the latest the air is throbbing.

Acapulco, Rio, Amsterdam, Zabar, Shake ’n’ Shake – the names of the restaurants, cafés, clubs and discos lining the banks of the Danube promise a nightlife of energizing entertainment.

And they deliver, no less than Berlin or Barcelona, and not seldom until dawn.

Yet this summer of 2015, the world is off-kilter. There are sixty million refugees on the move around the globe: more than ever since World War II. Thousands of them end up in this park, at a European train station. Belgrade has become a stopover on the hope-fuelled journey to the EU, now a mere 200 kilometres distant. Here people wait for any – for their – opportunity to move on. The grass is long gone; men, women and children sleep on the bare earth, wash in the two fountains, make do with the porta-potties that are in desperately short supply. Daytime temperatures reach 34°C. Some guests at Mr President, a ‘design hotel’ directly opposite, watch from their windows as though they had won front-row seats to this horror show produced by misguided politicians.

Before Prime Minister Vučić recently visited this square, it was completely cleared of the detritus that accumulates when hundreds and even thousands of people are left to their own devices. ‘We’re talking about people in despair, not criminals or terrorists’, Vučić said and added, ‘Serbia will act responsibly towards the refugees. Serbia has the desire and ­capability to help these good people even more than before.’

In the meantime, tankers full of fresh water have pulled into the train station.

14 A WORK IN PROGRESS

Some 2000 desolate souls arrive each day, seeking salvation. On one day their number swells to nearly 7,000. ‘The Serbs are the ones who treat the refugees most decently on the transit routes’, CNN reports. In Macedonia they are mugged, in Bulgaria robbed by border policemen, in Hungary tortured.

The exhortation ‘Believe in the Reality of your Dreams’ on a stained T-shirt feels like a sadistic joke.

SERBIA The Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia broke up during the wars of the 1990s. Serbia and Montenegro merged to become the largest successor state to former Yugoslavia. By the time Montenegro and Serbia split in 2006, all of the Yugoslav states had attained independent status, and Serbia became the former country’s ‘sole legal successor’. hungary

croatia

romania

Belgrade Save

Donau

bosnia and herzegovina

serbia

Niš

montenegro

Priština kosovo

adriatic sea

albania

bulgaria

macedonia

CAPITAL

POPULATION DENSIT Y

Belgrade

91.9 inhabitants /km2

INHABITANTS

ca. 7,121,000

AREA

TYPE OF STATE

(including Kosovo)

Parliamentary ­republic

88,361 km2 77,474 km2

(without Kosovo)

To stay or not to stay?

Milos is 31, his wife Helena 25 and a nurse, their daughter ­Adriana seven months old. With a degree in engineering, Milos belongs to the best-educated generation in Serbia, one that seeks suitable employment at home yet more often than not comes up empty-handed. There is not enough work for the young people. Many leave the country, many against their will – purportedly some 30,000 aged under 35 emigrate every year: the bloodletting of the highly educated elite. What use is this ‘new freedom’, Milos asks, ‘if you don’t have a job in a society where money opens almost every door?’

What about self-employment? For Serbs, this option is still fraught with convoluted bureaucracy and a lack of trans­­ par­ency. While foreign companies are offered numerous incentives to invest in the country, its own citizens encounter obstacles at every turn. No wonder many prefer to simply take their hopes and dreams abroad.

That is something of a tradition in the largest state to issue from former Yugoslavia. The second biggest Serbian city is actually Chicago, home to some one million Serbs, while the third is most likely Vienna with its 150,000 exiles. Yet the Serbs love their homeland and would rather not leave; they maintain strong ties to their families, history, culture and re­ ligion. Milos raves about Bozic, the Orthodox Christmas celebrated on 7 January in our calendar, when thousands of Belgraders flock to the Church of St Sava, the largest Orthodox cathedral in Europe. They raptly follow every word as the Serbian-Orthodox patriarch preaches; there is no need for a microphone, as silence reigns on the square. The worshippers all hold candles as they sing Christmas songs. ‘Those are wonderful hours of togetherness’, Milos says, and the deep roots he cultivates to his religion and his faith are palpable. Some 85 % of the population subscribe to the Serbian-Orthodox confession, and it comes as no surprise that the influence of this conservative church is growing again in today’s uncertain times with their high unemployment rates and rigid, unchanging structures.

Those who live abroad enthusiastically and nostalgically support those who have remained behind, helping their families to the tune of some five billion euros annually. It is money that is sorely needed, given an average monthly income of around 400 euros.

Basketball is Serbia’s national sport

16 GESTERN IN MARIENBAD

The invisible people Yet this makes the Serbs rich compared to the uncounted lost souls in this Balkan state. The figures range from 100,000 to 500,000, i.e. the number of Roma reputed to live in Serbia.

Some 80 % have not finished primary school, the illiteracy rate is high, unemployment guesstimated at 70%. The Roma are the dregs of Serbian society, the ones who collect old cardboard for a few cents, the ones who hawk scraps of cable at Buvlja pijaca, the top bazaar for the lower crust. Photography is forbidden in this trough of human misery.

Our taxi driver Duško calls them ‘the invisible people’.

Which seems apt: although at least 30,000 live in Belgrade, one rarely sees them. They live under bridges, camp amid shrubbery, stay anywhere and everywhere: living in shanties built of wood and cardboard, without water, heat or electricity.

There are allegedly a hundred such slums in Belgrade.

Begging is not allowed in Serbia. The rare Roma children who try to sell flowers or earn a few dinars with accordion tunes are shooed away from the cafés by the staff like scrawny street cats.

Roma, however, are of course allowed – particularly when clichés and tourist expectations demand their presence. They traditionally provide the musical accompaniment whenever ‘Original Serbian Food in a Bohemian Atmosphere’ is on offer.

That being said, many Serbs are only marginally better off: the jobless rate is currently at 30%. And being unemployed means being poor, dirt poor; income support falls far short of subsistence levels. They cannot buy anything: travel, educa-

tion and the arts are all out of their reach and they have no way of participating in society. The many who have so little are the ones frequenting the markets and bazaars.

One finds them in every neighbourhood, these bazaars large and small, remnants of the old Ottoman Empire. Public squares full of permanent stands, some with roofs, where you can buy almost anything under the sun. From food – fruit and vegetables galore, meat and fish, honey, spices, tea – through shoes and clothes to cleaning and sanitary supplies, brushes, carved wooden household goods and knick-knacks.

The many who must subsist on so little also shop at Kale­ nica Market: the old pensioner who treats herself to a few scraggly flowers, the man in tattered rags searching for shoes.

Old people above all frequent these bazaars, not least for a bit of gossip, a chat with the neighbours.

East and west, west and east ‘The Serbs would like to have the best of both worlds’, says Milos with a sly grin. He means the best of Russia and the best of the EU; the Russians have some things, the Europeans others. Serbia has been a candidate for accession to the EU since 2011, but the process is stalled, and Russia’s influence is growing again. That country is still Serbia’s most important military technology partner, and Serbia refrains from supporting EU sanctions against it. That country is also its largest import partner; witness Vladimir Putin gazing out from T-shirts sold at markets throughout Belgrade. But Germany and Italy are the most important buyers of Serbian products.

2

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3

4

5

6

5

7

8

9

MANCHES GESCHAFFT, VIELES ZU TUN 19

1 Couple in Kalemegdan Park 2 Dusk falls over the Danube 3 Chess is popular in the parks 4 Rise and shine – Serbia’s new dawn 5 The Church of St Sava 6 Faith in practice 7 Protests against the US and EU 8 Old meets new 9 View

of the urban motorway

‘Our future lies in the West. If you ask our people whom they prefer, the Russians or the Western Europeans, 90 % would say the Russians.

But if you ask what kind of society they prefer to live in, up to four-fifths would choose the western model.’

ALEKSANDAR VUČI Ć, PRI M E M I NI S T E R OF SER B I A

A quarter century of turbulent, terrible years lies behind the country. When the walls between east and west fell, Yugoslavia broke up and privatisation began. By 1992 two-thirds of businesses were closed; by 1995 the entire economy had ground to a virtual standstill. The purchasing power of an average month’s wages plummeted to the equivalent of 56 deutschmarks and 80 % of the population was living below the poverty line. Most survived the passing years by engaging in smuggling or bartering, by becoming self-sufficient with smallscale farming, by using up the last of their foreign currency savings, and by tapping the support of family and friends abroad. Then life slowly began to improve: from 2001 to 2009, some 12 billion euros were invested in Serbia, and in 2010 around 800 companies with foreign partners were registered in the country. Today Serbia’s exports include iron, steel, textiles, rubber products, wheat, fruit, vegetables, honey and wine.

Few traces of those arduous times remain in these halcyon summer days. People wear the same clothes you see everywhere else in the world, fashion from H&M , Zara and other international brands. The markets are packed, the mood is upbeat.

The infrastructure has improved as well – an indispensable factor if the economy of a centrally-located transit country is to prosper. Serbia is situated at the intersection of key trade routes that connect Hungary and Eastern Central Europe with Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Turkey and beyond.

Over the next two decades, some 22 billion euros are due to be

invested in renewing and extending these routes. The lion’s share will finance roads and motorways, but funds have also been earmarked for expanding rail, port and airport facilities.

The extension of the highway connecting Požega and Montenegro is designed to spur growth in the entire south-eastern part of Europe and the Adriatic port of Bar. The new motorway from Belgrade to the Southern Adriatic Sea is to become part of the Trans-European Transport Corridor No. 10* which runs from northwest to southeast, linking Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Hungary to Bulgaria and Greece. Its main axis passes through Salzburg, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade, Niš, Skopje, Veles and Thessaloniki.

Belgrade can boast an international airport (Nikola Tesla), an extended orbital road and two navigable rivers with access to the Black Sea via the Danube. Additionally, four railway stations offer connections to Bar in Montenegro, Istanbul in Turkey and several EU countries, including services to Sofia and Budapest with through carriages to Munich, Zurich and Vienna. As such, the city has become the ‘main communications and logistics centre of the region’ and ‘the city of the future in Southern Europe’, according to the homepage of a Belgrade investment agency.

Above the clouds Bosko, a former combat pilot, is showing me his country from the air. We see scores of new buildings, new roads, new squares. He is patently proud of his Serbia, of everything that has been achieved in recent years, even if there is still much * The Pan-European transport corridors, aka the ‘Helsinki corridors’ or ‘Crete corridors’, are part of the larger Trans-European Network (TEN). With some 25,000 kilometres of railway lines and 23,000 of roads, they extend a total of 48,000 kilometres. Airports, major train stations, inland ­harbours and seaports form the crossroads in this wide-ranging network connecting Europe’s central and eastern countries.

The ‘Automat Club’ and one of the many ice cream vendors open ­until late

more to be done, and relations with its neighbours rest on a fragile peace.

Yes, they are a proud and stubborn people, the Serbs, Bosko says, probably made that way by centuries of fighting for their freedom, an experience etched deeply in the national psyche.

When the Ottomans invaded Europe in the 14th century, they met with resistance from the Serbs as well. The legendary Battle of Kosovo waged in 1389 in Amselfeld not only gave a popular red wine its name; it also went down in Serbian folklore as a defining moment with an enduring impact. Serbian nationalists still hark back to it today.

But by 1459, Serbia too was occupied by the Ottomans and remained part of the empire until the First Serbian Uprising in 1804. The last Ottoman regiments left the country in 1867 and in 1882 the Kingdom of Serbia was founded. After 1918 the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was formed, christening itself Yugoslavia in 1929 yet never really fusing to form a whole. With its various internal rifts, the country hoped to remain neutral during World War II, but was occupied by the Germans and Italians in 1941. The German bombardment of

Belgrade in April of that year cost 20,000 lives and ignited a terrible partisan war. Backing the nation’s subsequent founder Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, thousands of Serbs waged battle against the brutal German and Italian occupational forces. The partisans were able to liberate their country in 1944 with the help of the Red Army, and the non-aligned Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was born. Under Tito’s leadership it defined its own brand of socialism until 1980.

Yes, there is a great deal still to be done in this country whose beautiful scenery drifts past beneath our plane, radiating peace and tranquility. There is plenty of room in Serbia, where about 7.4 million people live on 88,000 square kilometres, i.e. only 92 inhabitants per kilometre.

‘City of open heart’* Belgrade is a place of intriguing beauty. In the city centre, juxtaposed between the remaining Baroque and Classicistic edifices, are the incongruous office buildings of the Tito era, bearing witness to a past superseded by the anything-goes * Official slogan of the Belgrade Tourism Board

years that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain. The towers housing Gazprom, the banks and the insurance companies sport an overabundance of (reflective) glass and steel that announce an intention to dominate. But in 20 years’ time this faceless architecture built on moneyed power will be derelict and dilapidated.

In Novi Beograd, the housing estates of the Tito era stand in monumental blocks, built tall and long and wide. Their concrete shells are dingy and dirty with age, the façades crumbling. These laying and living batteries, based on ideas from Le Corbusier, are grim reminders of the attempt to create a ‘new man’ whose foremost allegiance was to the state and society.

The hotchpotch of architectural styles lends the city an atmosphere all its own, as if it were constantly on the move, constantly on the verge of change – and this too recalls Berlin.

In the many open spaces and parks that green between the buildings, old men play chess and children laugh.

Which is not to say that Belgrade is a quiet place. Taxi ­drivers gladly exploit the avenues of freedom offered by bus

lanes: on straight stretches, the speedometer hits 100 km/h, all the windows are open and your thoughts threaten to fly out.

With a little luck you are sitting in an ancient Mercedes Benz 200 with a steering wheel made of wood and a rear seat ostensibly stuffed with straw. It goes without saying that the driver is jabbering nonstop on his cell … Welcome to the ‘City of open heart’.

Rainer Groothuis, born in 1959 in Emden / East ­Friesland, is managing partner at the communications agency ‘Groothuis’. www.groothuis.de With sincere thanks to Dragan Simovic, Bosko Todorovic, Duško Čupković

22 ET CETERA

A slice of home The echo of the Balkan War at the opera

The ‘generalni direktor’ He went to college in Halle an der Saale in former East Germany – majoring in German so that he could become a teacher. But when he discovered the profits to be made from selling CD recorders and more to the Russian troops stationed there, he switched to trade and logistics. Today Dragan Simovic is the regional director of GW in Serbia and one of the most successful managers in the entire group. In his five years at the helm to date, GW Serbia has grown its turnover to nearly 26 million, engaged 160 employees at the locations Dobanovci and Strojkovce near Leskovac, and significantly expanded its customer base and reach.

His assistant Ana is not to be envied.

Her job is to coordinate his schedule, ­appointments, trips and engagements: the man is a human whirlwind as he ­races from date to date, phone call to

phone call. His motto seems to be: ‘If you want to move goods, you can’t a­ fford to stand still.’ It is hard to believe that he still has time for his children at college and his wife.

The boss’s energy seems to infect his employees, for GW’s Serbian head­ quarters in Dobanovci, thirty kilometres outside Belgrade, is like a beehive.

Serbs, it seems, like superiors who seize the initiative and make things happen.

The sign on his door reads ‘generalni direktor’ for good reason.

In being awarded the Kapetan Misa Anastasijevic Prize for ‘promoting economic activity, entrepreneurial culture and social values’, Dragan Simovic earned one of his country’s highest accolades. Twice GW Serbia has already received the ‘Brand Leader Award’ in the category of sustainability. Most recently it was also distinguished as ‘Business Partner of the Year’.

And all that shortly after the tenth anniversary of the GW national subsidiary. GW Serbia had launched operations in 2004 with only three employees. In 2009 it acquired Spedition Eurocargo – incorporating a long-distance haulage fleet, a modern logistics facility and some 100 employees.

A few weeks ago GW Dobanovci added 9,000 square metres of warehouse and 1,300 square metres of office space to its site. The prospects look good for the company’s continued growth.

Gebrüder Weiss D.O.O. Dobanovci Beogradska bb | 11272 Dobanovci Serbia T +381.11.3715.200 | F +381.11.3715.201 gw.serbia@gw-world.com www.gw-world.com

text: Adriana Altaras

W

hen my family had to leave Croatia, it was still called Yugoslavia, and Marshal Tito was a powerful figure. Large and imposing, his portrait hung in our ­kindergarten – in colour no less. We had to salute him every morning, though he never saluted back – rude man, I thought.

When he died in 1980 – we were long since living in Germany by then – his state funeral was grand and accompanied by general mourning. But then the unrest began, and soon afterwards a ­civil war had come to Europe.

My parents followed the news from the Balkans day and night. My mother supported Serbia, my father the Croats, while my aunt said she hated the Communists even more than the Fascists.

Everybody was taking sides and arguing, at home and abroad.

Several things had changed when I visited my homeland a few years later.

In Sarajevo there were more cemeteries than churches or mosques; in Zagreb

ET CETERA 23

Away over there you’d follow me, if you loved me!

There you’d not be dependent on anyone; there’d be no officer you had to obey, and no retreat sounding to tell a lover that it is time to go!

The open sky, the wandering life, the whole wide world your domain; for law your own free will, and above all, that intoxicating thing: Freedom! Freedom!

FROM THE LIBRE T T O OF ‘ CARM E N’

­ ationalists would jump out of their cars n if they spotted a driver with a Serbian l­icense plate. Football matches would erupt into pitched battles between players and fans.

I had the impression that the war had made things worse – but that won’t come as news to most people now.

At the theatre I rarely tell anyone I am from the Balkans: things are too complicated there for small talk over a latte macchiato. Besides, in German musical theatre – I direct operas – so many different nationalities converge that trying to boast about any particular origin would be futile. What would the poor tenors say, who come from far-away Korea to perform, as Almaviva in Rossini or Belmonte in Mozart, as if they were bornand-bred Europeans?

Within the past two years, though, I have met three strong women singing the roles of Tosca, Carmen and Violetta from La Traviata. All three of them were stunningly gifted and, above all, possessed by extreme desires to express

themselves and champion the cause of freedom. Only gradually, in retrospect, did it dawn on me that all three were from the Balkans.

Tosca is a jealous woman, an extremely jealous woman. That is not something alien to me. On the contrary, it’s something I can relate to, although I know, of course – as Tosca most likely does – how stupid, pointless and even downright dangerous jealousy can be.

Anyway: Tosca is a celebrated opera singer in Rome, and she has a lover, the artist Cavaradossi. They meet occasionally in secret, for a tête-à-tête and more, in his cottage in the country. These are usually moonlight trysts, or so they sing.

Then Cavaradossi is arrested by the ­police. He is suspected, correctly, of supporting the revolutionaries. But he re­ fuses to reveal anything, even under torture. The chief of police, a cunning and malicious fox named Scarpia, resolves to exploit Tosca’s jealousy to find out where the revolutionary leader Angelotti has his hideout.

Miri is from Albania and looks like a cross between Maria Callas and Sophia Loren. Pronounced facial features. That comes with being Albanian.

I liked her right away, and she too has no time for reticence. Inside my kitchen she instructs me on what to do and what not to do. We have known each other for exactly five hours.

When Miri was eight, her parents died in a fire – an arson attack by a militia. She was taken in by her uncle’s fami­ ly and they emigrated to the US when the girl was barely 14. She had no choice but to accompany them, but at 16 she ­returned to Europe alone to pursue a career as an opera singer.

She struggled along, usually supporting herself as a waitress or chambermaid. In Austria people have grown used to personnel from the Balkans.

Miri is my Tosca for the opening of the 2014 season.

She doesn’t need detailed stage directions. I say the words ‘chief of police,’ and she plays the act from start to finish.

24 ET CETERA

Between the musical phrases, I can hear the fury she feels at the pain inflicted on her as a child, the humiliation of not being able to defend herself. Now an opportunity for freedom finally offers itself on the stage. She takes the steak knife and stabs Scarpia, Rome’s loathsome police chief, to death. ‘Muori dannato, muori, muori!’ Die … she cannot sing it often enough. Then, before she can be arrested, she leaps to her own death.

Alma plays Carmen. It has been her wish for a long time, but as a young singer she was not considered ready for the role.

Alma is from Bosnia – her father is Croatian, her mother Serbian. During the war her father was arrested and tortured. The family applied for asylum and ended up in Gelsenkirchen in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

At first, Alma was not allowed to leave the state. She could only vacation in church retreats and under strict surveillance. Alma is tall, with long dark hair and green eyes. She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, it is in a serious voice with a local, Ruhr-region accent.

Carmen makes fun of the soldier Don José for wanting to ‘possess’ her and ­exist for him alone. The dashing torea­dor Escamillo shares his desire. ‘Who­ever loves me comes to me!’ he sings with a passion.

Alma’s eyes narrow when anyone wants to constrain her. In my view, Carmen yearns to decide things for herself.

And Alma sings aria after aria about life

during the war and the freedom she enjoys now.

To celebrate the premiere, she treated me to Balkan Beats and pounds of grilled lamb wrapped in tin foil. We gorged ourselves and there, on the theatre steps, basked in nostalgia for our homelands.

Lilly is Serbian and wants to have a Russian Orthodox wedding in Berlin.

‘For each of the three artists, their profession has become their salvation.’

In her village that suddenly became impossible – after the war it was enemy territory. The shenanigans that followed seemed to have no end. In her village the Serbs were all expected to leave. A few miles away, Croats were suffering similar fates at the hands of the Serbs. It was hard for Lilly to abandon her home by the coast. She wound up at a refugee centre in Giessen near Frankfurt.

Lilly endows the courtesan Violetta with great dignity. She plays her as a radi­cal woman who is prepared to go to great lengths for her love – and even cross the narrow boundaries of convention. The outcast becomes the moral victor. Lilly invokes her entire past when­ ever she sings Verdi’s aria ‘Addio del passato’. Morality and dignity are Lilly’s chosen themes.

Lilly’s family home still stands on the Croatian coast. It is now heavily boarded up, like all the adjacent houses that belonged to Serbs.

Actors and singers always tap their ex­ periences and emotions, incorporating them into their monologues and arias.

It may sound cynical, but the Balkan war has provided my three leading ladies with a quite unique education. They share painful pasts, pasts that they did not choose for themselves – experiences that, in their theatrical careers, now translate into wealth. And for each of the three artists, their profession has become their salvation. They have found refuge not only in a foreign country but on the stage as well. They are no longer defenceless against aggressive male forces, no longer subject to claims of ­familial or political ownership. Nor are they victims of religious tribalism.

Art has granted them freedom; their Mediterranean temperaments take care of everything else. And the world of opera has gained leading ladies who sing about more than mere love.

Adriana Altaras, who now lives in Berlin, was born in 1960 in the Croatian city of Zagreb. In 1963 her parents were forced to leave their homeland for political reasons, and Adriana was smuggled into Italy on the back seat of a small Fiat. Since 1982 she has been working as an actress in theatre, film and television; in 1991 she also began directing, mainly in the area of musical theatre. Her debut novel Tito’s Spectacles was published in 2011 and became a best-seller. It was followed in 2014 by Doitscha.

25 NACHGELESEN

ATLAS 25

Update Heidi Senger-Weiss inducted into Logistics Hall of Fame Heidi Senger-Weiss has become the first woman represented in the Logistics Hall of Fame. Having selected the GW partner and supervisory board member from 31 candidates, the jury described her in its laudatio as a ‘pioneer and successful logistics entrepreneur who has played a key part in professionalising the industry.’ We send her our heartfelt congratulations and are delighted that Ms Senger-Weiss now numbers among this elite, 19-strong group of logistics experts worldwide.

A new world record – an even New location opened in bigger container ship Bulgaria When the ATLAS issue for Spring 2015 was released, the MSC Oscar had the highest cargo capacity of any container ship worldwide. But that didn't last long: the MSC Zoe – which was launched in Hamburg during July – accommodates 19,244 standard containers, 20 more than the previous record-holder.

And with major shipping lines still vying to build ever larger ships, prepare to read about yet another new record in the next edition of our magazine.

The waiting was almost over when the last issue of ATLAS went to press. And in May the ceremony was held to mark the opening of the new hub in Musachevo/Elin Pelin, ­Bulgaria – replacing the existing facility in Sofia. The new termin­al now serves as a distribution point for the Balkan region and a depot for goods bound for Central Asia. With Gebrüder Weiss steadily extending its presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the modern logistics centre, office block and transhipment areas have all been built with expansion in mind.

‘Freedom is a library.’

Joan Margarit, a poet and architect from Catalonia, embellished our world this idea. And inspired us to compile some more reading tips for this issue of ATLAS.

JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ THE SECRET HISTORY OF COSTAGUANA Bloomsbury Paperbacks

J. K. MOORHEAD (ED.) CONVERSATIONS OF GOETHE WITH ECKERMANN First Da Capo Press

26

The refugee trail Working along the routes taken by the migrants

text: Miriam Holzapfel

F

or Europeans long embedded in their countries of birth, it may seem inconceivable to leave your family and homeland behind, and to embark on an uncertain journey to a destination where the climate, culture and everyday life are radically different – as is the language. But for thousands this is reality. In the past year, 422,500 people around the world felt they had no option but to seek refuge elsewhere. Although only a fraction of that number arrives in Europe, the dream of open borders within the EU is facing its greatest challenge to date as a result.

The situation along the various ‘escape’ routes is dramatic and chaotic. And it is sparking different responses. The peoples of Europe are torn between compassion, engagement, fear and helplessness. This quandary is evidenced at every turn: a GW truck driver who regularly travels to England reports that he no longer wants to stop in Calais because somebody might enter, or get injured by, his vehicle. Several thousand refugees,

mostly from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan and the Sudan, have gathered in the French port – hoping for an opportunity to reach the UK. The car parks all around the docks have been fenced in and placed under guard, and the police are making their presence known at the city’s roundabouts. Yet attempts to break through are common, despite the fact that they might cost refugees their lives. If the British authorities discover a stowaway in a vehicle entering the UK, fines of up to 2,700 euros, and even prison sentences, can be imposed on the driver.

In July 2015, a high barbed-wire fence was installed to prevent people from jumping onto the lorries outside the ferry port in Calais. Some desperate souls have therefore relocated to the entrance of the Eurotunnel – which, at 1,600 acres in size, is hard to monitor. There they try to climb onto freight trains, and even the Eurostar express trains, in their quest to get to the tunnel and cross the English Channel. Several migrants have tragically lost their lives in the process.

THE REFUGEE TRAIL 27

The situation differs slightly in the Mediterranean, but is no less problematic for everybody working there: every day the crews of merchant ships rescue refugees from the waters – not only for reasons of humanity, but also because interna­ tional maritime law requires them to. The smugglers know this and deliberately steer their floating death traps in their direction. In 2014, commercial vessels rescued 40,000 refugees in over 800 incidents; in 2015 the number is expected to rise significantly. Many shipping companies are taking precautions by keeping additional supplies of food, blankets and emergency medication on board. These rescue operations have a huge psychological impact on the crews. The ships lack the space, toilets and medical facilities for the refugees. And worse still: crew members are sometimes forced to look on impotently as, despite their best efforts, p ­ eople drown before their eyes or even die of hypothermia after they have been rescued.

Notwithstanding the scepticism, uncertainties and unfair expectations often faced by drivers, crews and railway work-

ers, the willingness to help is overwhelming in some countries.

Frequently, official refugee policies cannot be enforced without the support of volunteers: courageous people who lend a hand where it is needed and remain steadfast in their determination to help, no matter how daunting the challenge. And their efforts are crucial, given the almost impossible task of looking after the throngs arriving. Often the refugees lack the barest necessities – food and clothing – and are in dire need of human sympathy and solidarity as well. And hope for the future.

Miriam Holzapfel, born in 1975, is a cultural s­ cientist and a journalist for ATLAS.

29

‘The freest people are often those who can get by with the least.’

A conversation with Enrico Riccabona about ­responsibility and restraint, direct routes and detours

interview: Frank Haas

E

nrico Riccabona has known Gebrüder Weiss for a long time: as an experienced coach, he has been assisting the group’s executives for years in the areas of training and organisational development.

Mr Riccabona, your profession consists largely of helping people make their own decisions. Isn’t the issue of freedom overrated when it comes to ­attaining happiness?

No. The desire for freedom is rooted

deep inside us, like a genetic code. It’s like the self-fulfilment of a plant when it has to force its way up through asphalt to survive and blossom. In my view, we humans too go to great lengths to exploit our full potential. There is a longing within us to determine how we want to be, to take our own decisions, to shape ourselves, and we will move mountains to reach that state. In a way freedom – along with the good health that allows us to enjoy our freedom – is humanity’s supreme value: we differ from the animal kingdom in our ability to make our own, conscious choices. Freedom in the abstract sense is quite another matter.

Nevertheless, we in the western world often delude ourselves when it comes to our perceptions of freedom: we imagine that we are free, yet end up bowing to

fashion, convention or mainstream attitudes. That has nothing to do with freedom. For me, freedom has always meant a decision to accept a specific type of dependence. Marriage is a good example of this: it represents a voluntary constraint, an act of consent that we won’t take a different partner, a statement of choice. That’s what makes freedom paradoxical.

So a free decision is an authentic decision, one that comes from within us?

Yes. To decide freely means to act autonomously and independently, and to shape our lives in such a way that we can say “yes” to it in our own minds.

What are the obstacles to free decisions?

Above all, the idea that we have to live up to others’ expectations, to obtain a particular status, to play a specific role or offer something particular. Presumptions that force us into a straitjacket, although we have no desire or need for some of them at all.

Could that be a greater problem for us than it was for previous generations?

On the one hand it isn’t, because, from generation to generation, we are becoming far less authority-minded and allowing our children a lot more leeway. So children can embrace their own freedoms much more easily. On the other

Enrico Riccabona was born in 1947; he holds a Master’s degree in Sociology and Economics and a PhD. He works as an advisor to ­organisations, as a group trainer, supervisor, coach, psychotherapist and bioenergetic analyst and has an outstanding ability to raise even the most difficult subjects – something that everybody appreciates. He is married and has four grown children.

hand, there are a great many pseudofreedoms around in today’s world: the internet, Facebook, smartphones, and jobs that allow people to choose how, when and where they work. With all that, it is easy to forget what we really want, because we conform to a system without feeling pressurised to do so and without consciously registering the external factors influencing us. These silent thieves steal our freedom and take decisions out of our hands. That’s why we always need to be asking ourselves whether we are really deciding how we use our time and energy, and whether these activities are the result of unquestioningly bending to external forces.

Doesn’t the overabundance of options complicate our decision-making processes?

For sure! When I started my studies there were a limited number of fields open to me, so my choice was not really difficult. By contrast, there are so many options available to today’s young generation that they have a hard time deciding which course of studies to take.

In a nutshell: the array of possibilities does not necessarily make life easier.

We want free choice but, with the growing number of options available, are becoming – in subjective terms – more and more overwhelmed and less and less free.

But how, in this predicament, can we still find peace of mind?

Above all through the awareness that everything ultimately involves an im-

plicit decision between yes and no, and that a decision for something simultaneously means a decision against something else. For me, accepting that fact is a sign of maturity. So if I choose to share my life with a partner, this means that I will renounce the attractions or temptations of other women in favour of her, despite the fact that I might like them.

‘Freedom is the product of a paradoxical concept.’

Freedom means the ability to deliberately constrain ourselves; so it is no accident that the freest people are often those who can get by with the least.

How can we practice renunciation?

In lots of seemingly trivial ways, and by repeating them. That helps us attain a degree of spirituality: being grateful, being satisfied with less, renouncing the need to achieve certain worldly goals, recognising the value of restraint.

Rhythms and rituals also help people keep grounded: daily rhythms, eating rhythms, moving rhythms, bodily rhythms. These rhythms form part of almost all religions: regular prayers, regular fasts – all these things are ­strategies for coping with life, rituals that generate quality of life by helping us learn to liberate ourselves from short-term sensitivities and transient feelings.

Isn’t that paradoxical? A ritual is really the opposite of freedom, isn’t it?

And yet it paves the way to freedom?

Exactly! Freedom is the product of a paradoxical concept: freedom demands renunciation, renunciation allows freedom.

Do people tend to become less or more free as they age?

Both! I think it’s really miraculous that people can approach old age and death with such optimism, although their freedom is becoming more and more limited, especially physically speaking.

Our bodies and minds don’t work as dependably as when we were younger.

Plenty of things become more arduous; we become increasingly restricted, and increasingly aware of our new limitations, some of which even render us dependent on carers and outside help.

And yet there are benefits to getting older too because we are no longer subject to other, qualitatively different dependencies – such as the pressures of achievement. This allows us to feel more detached, so that things bother us less. Experience makes us feel much freer. And more serene. And serenity and freedom are kindred spirits.

31

The new centre Connecting the Atlantic and Pacific

U The gates of the three locks alone weighed 730 tonnes each

ntil the end of the nineteenth century, Panama – at that time the easternmost tip of Colombia – was a remote, inhospitable patch of land, at least in the eyes of Europeans and North Americans. That was to change when the French became the first to attempt – unsuccessfully, as it transpired – building a canal that would link the Atlantic on Panama’s north coast with the Pacific to its south, allowing shipping to cross from one ocean to the other. All of a sudden, this tropical region with its many islands became a flashpoint of western rivalries over power and wealth.

The Colombian Juan Gabriel Vásquez penned an adventure novel about the harsh conditions faced during its construction.

The Secret History of Costaguana is a fascinating and humorous depiction of both the region and the political and historical motives behind the construction of the canal.

EXCERPT FROM JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ:

‘The Secret History of Costaguana’

M

aybe it was around then that people in Colón began to speak of the French Curse. Between May and September, as well as the Madiniers’ son, twenty-two Canal workers, nine engineers and three engineers’ wives fell victim to the killer fevers of the Isthmus. It carried on raining – the sky turned black at two in the afternoon, and the down-pour began almost immediately, not falling in drops but solid and dense, like a heavy wool poncho coming down through the air – but the work carried on, in spite of the earth excavated one day being found back in the trench the next morning due to the weight of the rain.

The River Chagres rose so much in one weekend that the railway had to stop running, because the line was under 30 centimetres of water and weeds; and, with the railway paralysed, the Canal was paralysed too. The engineers met in the mediocre restaurant of the Jefferson House Hotel or in the 4th of July, a saloon with tables wide enough for them to spread out their topographical maps and architectonic plans – and perhaps play a quick hand of poker on top of the maps and plans – and there they spent hours arguing about where they’d carry on the works when it finally cleared up. It would frequently happen that the engineers would say adieu at the end of an afternoon, arranging to meet the next morning at the excavations, only to discover the next morning that one of them had been admitted to hospital with an attack of chills, or was at the hospital watching over his wife’s fever, or was with his wife at the hospital attending to their child and regretting ever having come to Panama. Few survived.

And here I enter conflictive terrain: in spite of all that, in spite of his relationship with the Madiniers, my father (or rather his strange Refractive Pen) wrote that: ‘the rare cases of yellow fever that have presented among the heroic artisans of the Canal’ had been ‘imported from other places’.

And since no one stopped him, he carried on writing: ‘No one denies that tropical plagues have been present among the non-local population; but one or two deaths, especially among the workers who came from Martinique or Haiti, should not be cause for unjustified alarm.’ His chronicles/ reports/articles were only read in France. And there, in France, the Relatives of the Canal read them and were reassured, and the shareholders kept buying shares, because all was going well in Panama … I have often thought that my father would have made himself rich if he’d patented that invention: the Journalism of Refraction, so much abused since then. But I am unjust in thinking that. After all, in this lay his extraordinary gift: in not being aware of the gap – no: the immense crater – between the truth and his version of it.

Yellow fever carried on killing tirelessly, and killing French recent arrivals most of all. For the Bishop of Panama, that was sufficient proof: the plague was choosing, the plague had intelligence. The Bishop described a long hand that arrived at night in the houses of the dissolute, the i­mpious, adulterers, drinkers, and took away their children as if Colón were the Egypt of the Old Testament. ‘Men of upright morals have nothing to fear,’ he said, and for my father his words had the taste of old battles against Presbyter Echavarría: it was as though time was repeating itself.

But then Don Jaime Sosa, the Bishop’s cousin and administrator of the old cathedral of Porto Bello, a relic of colo­nial times, said one day he was feeling bad, then that he was thirsty, and three days later he was buried, in spite of having been bathed by the Bishop himself in a solution of whisky, mustard and holy water.

During those months funerals became part of the daily routine, like meals, for the fever dead were buried in a matter of hours to prevent their decomposing fluids from carrying the fever on the wind. The French began walking around with their hands over their mouths, or tying an improvised mask of fine cloth over their mouths and noses like the outlaws of legend; and one afternoon, masked to his cheekbones, a few metres from his masked wife, Gustave Madi­ nier – defeated by the climate, the mourning, the fear of the incomprehensible and treacherous fever – sent my father a farewell note. ‘It is time to return home,’ he wrote. ‘My wife and I need a change of air. You know, sir, you will always be in our hearts.’

Well now: I would have understood. You, hypocritical readers, my fellows, my brothers, would have understood, even if only out of simple human sympathy. But not my ­father, whose head was beginning to circulate on different rails, pulled by independent locomotives … I invade his head and this is what I find: a multitude of dead engineers, a number of other deserters and an abandoned half-built canal. If hell is personal, a distinct space for each biography (made out of our worst fears, the ones that are not interchangeable), that was my father’s: the image of the works abandoned, of the cranes and steam-powered excavators rotting under moss and rust, the excavated earth returning from the deposits in the freight cars to their damp origins on the jungle floor. The Great Trench of the Inter-oceanic Canal forsaken by its constructors: this, Readers of the Jury, was Miguel Altamirano’s worst nightmare.

Workers from Jamaica, Trinidad and Barbados took the main strain at the Culebra Cut

France had launched an initial attempt to carve a canal through eastern Colombia in 1881. Heading this project was Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had already managed the construction of the Suez Canal in north Africa. But nobody had foreseen the pitfalls of the region’s climate: the heat and humidity, along with malaria and yellow fever, cost an average of seven workers’ lives every day. The work therefore progressed far more slowly than planned. Moreover, Lesseps had assumed that no locks would be needed in the new waterway.

By the time he realised his error and had ordered them from Gustave Eiffel in Paris, the costs of building the canal had already exploded. In 1888 the French construction company went into liquidation and Lesseps had no option but to abandon the project.

In 1902 the Americans bought the bankrupt French com­ pany’s assets and embarked upon the gigantic endeavour.

As negotiations with Colombia were proving difficult, the US government incited a revolution in Panama, leading to its secession from Colombia. Having recognised the new, inde-

HUGE DIMENSIONS, HUGE IMPACT

14,300 ships carrying 320 million tonnes of cargo pass through the canal annually On average, sailing the entire length of the canal takes 15.2 hours Taking the canal shortens the journey from the east to the west coast of the US by about three weeks 68 % of all goods loaded or unloaded at American ports pass through the Panama Canal; after the US, China is the second most important user 5 % of the world’s ocean freight is routed through the waterway In 2010 the Chinese general trader ‘Fortune Plum’ became the one-millionth ship to complete the passage through the canal

pendent state of Panama, the US secured control of the 15-­kilometre wide and 81-kilometre long tract of land where the canal was to run – a gambit that proved extremely suc­ cessful in commercial terms.

The actual construction work for the 82-kilometre long canal commenced in 1906. But the engineers soon faced unexpected technical and logistical challenges. Above all, drilling through Panama’s mountains proved exceptionally arduous.

Over a distance of 13 kilometres, the height of the Culebra ridge had to be reduced from 80 metres to just 13 metres. By the time the canal finally opened in August 1915. 28,000 labourers from the total workforce of 75,000 had lost their lives.

Yet they left Panama with a valuable legacy. Shipping became an important national industry and, today, revenues from the canal make up some eight per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Work to extend the canal has been underway since 2007 to enable ships of the so-called Post-Panamax class* to pass through with up to 14,000 containers on board. New access waterways are being dug, two new locks are being built and, at its narrowest section, the canal is being widened and deepened. Originally due to finish by the end of 2014, the construction work has proven much more costly than anticipated; ­completion is now not expected before 2016. Notwithstanding the enormous technological advances of the past century, man’s struggle with the jungle is still no walkover. * Panamax dimensions: as vessels cannot exceed the size of the locks, the carriers are a maximum of 294.3 m (965 ft) long and 32.3 m (106 ft) wide with a draught of 12.04 m (39.5 ft) in tropical fresh water

Imke Borchers, born in 1982, is a literary scholar and a jour­nalist at ATLAS.

34 LIEBER NACH BAUCHGEFÜHL

‘Moving mountains: the sky’s the limit’

S

ince time immemorial people have been embarking on voyages of discovery to explore new horizons. Some are driven by a quest for freedom, others by a pioneering spirit and still others by a basic desire for adventure. Or they are restless – for while their comfort zones may make them feel safe and secure, they aren’t necessarily exciting and stimulating.

Thankfully, many free spirits have shown us that even the most daunting mountains can be moved.

TOM SAW YER UND HUCKLEBERRY FINN Like no others, these two worldly and streetwise characters from Mark Twain’s novels have come to embody an unquenchable thirst for adventure, unbounded friendship and an all-consuming yearning for independence. With his two eponymous novels, which were penned in the late nineteenth century, Twain wrote literary history. The two boys, orphans both, grew up in the everyday world of small-town America. They reject conventions and make friends with slaves and poor folk – a bold emancipatory statement at the time that helped to create a more enlightened society.

THOR HEYERDAHL The Norwegian geologist (1917–2002) is one of the best-known representatives of modern cultural transmission. In 1947, in his daredevil ‘Kon-Tiki’ expedition of 1947, he demonstrated that Americans could have reached Polynesia on rafts – and colonised the islands long before the age of Columbus. He recreated their traditional rafts using authentic techniques and completed the journey almost completely without modern equipment. In doing so, he proved that people had the capacity to cover the 9,000 kilometres to the Pacific islands as long as 5,000 years ago – using the most primitive materials available on the planet.

AMELIA EARHART With her audacious flights, the North American pilot (1897–1937) sought to prove that women too were capable of outstanding achievement in the realm of technology.

Unfortunately, rather than being crowned with glory, her attempt to become the first person to circumvent the earth along the equator ended with her death. Earhart, who had previously become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, allowed herself the liberty of living in an open marriage with her mentor George P. Putnam.

She used her fame to campaign for equal opportunities and to liberate women from the constraints of marriage, something she described as a ‘cage’.

HERODOTUS This ancient Greek (historian), who most likely lived from 490/480 BC to 424 BC, spent much of his life travelling. He explored Asia Minor, Greece (within its boundaries of the time) and southern Italy. He travelled east as far as Babylon and north towards the shores of the Black Sea; he also explored Egypt. Wherever he went, he observed the people and their countries, their politics and history, their arts and society, chronicling his impressions in travelogues. Herodotus’ nine volumes of Historia established him as a pioneer of science and philosophy of history – paving the way for today’s globetrotters.

EVGENIY GVOZDEV This Russian ship mechanic had to wait many years before he could satisfy his wanderlust. As a citizen of the Soviet Union, he had no chance of sailing the seven seas before 1992. However, with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the 58-year-old finally fulfilled his dream and set off in a tiny, old boat with just three nautical maps and a hundred dollars in his pocket. And, although it took him four years and three months, he really did manage to sail around the globe. In the years that followed, he embarked on two other adventures traversing the world’s oceans. Sadly, he failed to return from his third ­voyage.

36

THE INTERNET OF THINGS IS COMING An end to people power? Things that previously had to be controlled ­by ­people will soon be able to communicate directly with each other – online.

And these network systems will change the way industry works.

text: Carsten Knop

S

ometimes life holds the most unlikely surprises. The film and camera manufacturer Kodak discovered this to its cost, as did the cellphone company Nokia. You have a global brand and a long history. You’re a major driver of innovations. And then, all of a sudden, it’s all gone, seemingly overnight. Nobody needs the company’s products any more.

In a specific area of technology, the market has unexpectedly changed direction. Photography has gone digital, and everyone is using smartphones. Experts describe this as ‘disruptive innovation’. And the world is now facing a new phenomenon, a force so powerful it could subject every single company at once to a similar seismic shift: the Internet of Things.

For good reason, German-speakers refer to the upcoming upheaval as ‘Industry 4’. For the Internet of Things is nothing less than the fourth industrial revolution, a new dimension of control and organisation that impacts the entire value chain and transcends mere product life cycles. Its cornerstone is the availability of all relevant information in real time – distributed automatically by products and equipment that are constantly connected to the Internet. The boundary between the real and virtual worlds is blurring, indeed disappearing. As a consequence, logistics too could end up conforming to the principle of ‘real world awareness’. Intelligent, networked

products will share the information available to them across the entire supply chain, allowing operations to be adjusted to changing conditions if required. Rather than comprising a predetermined sequence of steps, the logistical process will evolve flexibly and dynamically. A delayed delivery could therefore be rebooked onto a different aircraft, or a truck ­diverted around a traffic jam. When products sell out in a ­supermarket, they could order new stocks themselves!

The remarkable thing: only half of all decision-makers at companies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland have heard of ‘Industry 4’. And only a quarter know what it refers to and appreciate its likely consequences. These statistics are based on a survey of 900 decision-makers which was con­ ducted by the IT company CSC and published at the start of 2015. It demonstrates that the respondents were not aware of the risks – and are not seizing the opportunities that the Internet of Things offers.

‘The challenge consists of being alert enough to recognize changes quickly, while remaining calm and collected enough to make the best decisions and not back the wrong horse.’

Gebrüder Weiss is making in-depth preparations for the ­impending changes. Andreas Pichler, the Director of R&D in the company’s IT services department, is among those charged with finding answers whenever new technologies put traditional business models in question. The challenge consists of being alert enough to recognize changes quickly, and to appreciate their full possible ramifications, while remaining calm and collected enough to make the best decisions and not back the wrong horse. In conversations, Pichler makes the impression of being perfectly cut out for this task.

One question Pichler’s team is examining in a dedicated research project actually goes beyond the Internet of Things. It concerns 3D printing, a technology allowing goods to be manufactured both locally and in minuscule quantities. This could have dramatic implications for providers of logistics services.

As customers would be able to ‘print’ the products they need themselves, transport services might become largely redundant.

This phenomenon really could spark a Nokia or Kodak moment for logistics companies, above all in the context of Industry 4. But Pichler’s team is already developing a plan for adapting the company’s business model. He expects 3D printing to radically change the value chains of manufacturing companies too. Production would no longer be performed at a limited number of central factories, but could take place almost anywhere around the globe. ‘And in this brave new world, we would take responsibility for coordinating both the distribution and manufacturing phases’, Pichler says. In short, Gebrüder Weiss would not only deliver goods to end customers. Before doing so, it would commission their production locally. The company would ensure that players at both ends of the supply chain can fully exploit the new opportunities without having to worry about the complexities of production.

That sounds like a good idea – but nobody knows for certain if our world really will evolve along those lines during the next five to ten years. Pichler points out that the technology of radio frequency identification (RFID) certainly hasn’t lived up to expectations. He soberly concedes that his plans too ‘depend on various hypotheses proving correct’. Remaining abreast of developments is therefore key – above all with an eye to keeping the company’s existing processes at the cutting edge.

‘We already manage all the distribution logistics for some customers. We are fully integrated into the interfaces of their

production planning, and therefore aware of every new order from the moment manufacturing begins’, says Pichler. The processes are automated and the communications with customers exclusively electronic: ‘That already holds true for 85 percent of the shipments we handle’.

And what does the future hold? Pichler knows: one way or another, the entire logistics process will end up completely transparent. Then we will be able to alter the geographical corridors being used for deliveries. And we will be able to prove incontrovertibly that a truck hasn’t lost any freight en route and that the cold chain has not been interrupted. And default transportation parameters can be established for individual customers. But Pichler refuses to be swayed by the hype: ‘95 percent of our customers still want standard appli­ cations.’

But if that should ever change, at Gebrüder Weiss we want to be able to respond immediately. Whether the hype is justified or not, we will be facing a fourth industrial revolution – which will culminate in a flow of goods that autonomously controls itself. Fresh supplies will already be in transit to consumers before they even register the demand. In a few years, that will be standard procedure.

Carsten Knop was a correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Düsseldorf, New York and San Francisco. He became the senior editor for the news­ paper’s Companies section in the start of 2007 and ­assumed responsibility for all economic reporting at the end of 2014. He is particularly interested in the digitalisation of the economy – and the companies that are driving this process.

Andreas Pichler

THE INTERNET OF THINGS IS COMING 37

Sketch from Goethe’s treatise on the theory of colours – the longest of his many works.

When the 1,400-page tome appeared in 1810, it met with polite reserve. The majority of scholars ­regarded the poet’s ideas as misplaced and a ­ mateurish. The work has nonetheless retained its relevance to this very day.

It documents Goethe’s holistic approach to Nature and his keen powers of observation.

39

‘Form that takes shape throughout life.’

A conversation with RÜDIGER SAFRANSKI about Goethe’s experience of life part 2: self-determination and the art of living

interview: Frank Haas

I

n part one of our major Goethe interview, which appeared in the ‘Tradition’ issue of our magazine, we spoke to the literary critic, writer and philosopher Rüdiger Safranski about Goethe’s experiences of the world at home and abroad. In this second part of the interview, we continue and explore the bio­ graphical platform and principles that allowed Goethe to shape his life in such an artistic way.

We cherish Johann Wolfgang Goethe as a great poet and thinker; what is less well-known is that he wasn’t a bad ­psychologist either and evidently possessed an extremely keen awareness of psychological processes, 80 years before Freud. What was Goethe’s childhood like? He seems to have had a relatively cheerful relationship with his parents, especially with his father.

That is probably true. Of course, there are always going to be conflicts, but Goethe’s father greatly admired his son from a very early age. Perhaps the relationship between father and son was also fairly relaxed because the father only had limited authority over his son: young Goethe was a ‘mummy’s boy’.

And as he grew older, he became aware of the deep respect his father held him in. When he was 14 or 15 years old, Goethe noticed that his father was saving every single word the boy had written, no matter how trivial it seemed.

Contemporaries describe this young Johann Wolfgang as a rather spoiled and conceited young man who was self-assured and had no need to kowtow to his father. As a well-to-do man of independent means, the father was able to watch carefully over his son’s education. Goethe epitomises the syndrome

of a highly gifted child who grows up feeling that everyone likes and esteems him. As expected, he became a lovingly cared-for child who had the opportunity to develop the unhindered self-confidence needed for self-affirmation.

Fundamental self-doubt played little part in his world.

It was all the more regrettable for the young Goethe that his father increasingly succumbed to pedantry as the years progressed. He attributed it to the fact that his father did not have the civic duties needed to occupy him and hence began withdrawing more and more into himself with age. To Goethe that was a humiliating kind of atrophy, and he rarely returned to Frankfurt as a result. And when his father finally died, Goethe did not seem to mourn his passing greatly. It was as if, in his mind, his father had died long before.

40

‘It’s the father with his child …’

The young Johann Wolfgang with his father

‘It is the pious wish of all fathers to see what they have ­themselves failed to attain realized in their sons, as if they could live their lives over again in this way, and at last make proper use of their early experiences.’

F ROM » P O ET RY A N D TR U TH « , 1 8 1 1

Mourning was never one of Goethe’s strongest suits. His confidant Johann Peter Eckermann describes, for ex­ ample, how he once returned alone from a trip to Italy – without Goethe’s son who had been accompanying him.

As Goethe would have known from the papers, his son had died. Eckermann had hardly dared to enter Goethe’s house. But Goethe received him cheerfully and without so much as a word about his son’s death. That is surely an astonishing act of repression.

Nor did he go to any funerals. He had

no love for the ‘parades of death’, as he called them. Goethe believed that one should cherish life while one lived and not dwell on death so much: death would come soon enough. He had a downright truculent attitude to mortality. When his wife Christiane died, he offered no direct support to anyone.

Instead he withdrew into his chambers and became ill himself, thereby effectively avoiding the situation. But that all happened quite consciously, so that it wasn’t a matter of repression – repres-

‘Cherish life while you can’ sion being a generally unconscious processes. No, he rigorously shut death out of his life. He simply said: ‘I refuse to recognize death!’ And when his son died and he received the news, he merely said: ‘I knew that I had fathered a mortal.’

On the other hand, there is a saying by Goethe that he was such a workhorse and engaged in such intense mental activity because he felt his mind would continue to function at full speed even after it had shed the ‘mortal coil’.

At the point of death, his spirit would

have to find itself a new home. That seems to have been his recipe for immortality.

This reflection appears in several places in Goethe’s work, as well as in his conversations with Eckermann. We must not imagine, however, that Goethe had developed a solid theory involving the transmigration of souls. Rather it was the hope that Nature would be smart enough to not simply squander such vital energy but to recycle it. In fact, one of his basic convictions was, that there was a unity of Nature and Spirit, and that the principle of ‘Spirit’ – which broadly encompassed all things metaphysical – was not simply a function of the brain as we mostly see it today. It was not synonymous with ‘mind’ in any way. That kind of idea was totally alien to him. For him, Nature, from the plant world through to humankind, was a single manifestation of spirit

41

Goethe’s sketches of a prism and lens, 1796/1806

‘I am under no misapprehensions as to my modest ­achieve­­ments as a poet. […] However, I give myself credit for being the only person in my century to understand the complex science of colours.’

QUO TED B Y J O H A N N P ET ER EC KER MA N N FR O M A C O N V ER SATI O N WI TH G O ETH E

in diverse states of aggregation. And in man, this Spirit becomes conscious of itself. This principle provided the cornerstone of his research into the natural sciences. He could ‘read’ Nature as he did a book, and he viewed that in thoroughly positive terms. He felt more than an affinity with his body: he saw it as a friend. When he fell ill, he was always inquisitive and sought to understand exactly what was happening to him. He consulted physicians and made observations on his own body, almost becoming a scientific student of himself. That made him quite different, incidentally, from Friedrich Schiller – his friend and fellow writer – who struggled with his body in an almost athletic sense and sometimes seemed to be fighting against it.

At a very advanced age, Goethe said: ‘I have learned to live; now eke out,

ye gods, my time.’ What lessons did life teach him?

You can’t really do justice to that ques-

tion in a few sentences. Goethe made some wonderful notes on things toward the end of his life. In these he says that the purpose of life is to develop the form that is within you: ‘form that takes shape throughout life’: by ‘form’ he means what we now call ‘aptitudes’ – which go far beyond mere genetic factors although these, of course, exist too. All of that must and can be developed, under the limiting and fertilising conditions of

‘To sense what is happening inside you’ the circumstances you find yourself in.

Irrespective of everything, what matters is to sense what is going on inside you and to do everything to ensure that the

basic impulses can grow and reach fruition. To achieve this, you need to be curious about yourself and on friendly terms with your body. This allows practical wisdom to evolve within you.

Goethe himself was pretty successful in this, although he periodically experienced what we would describe today as periods of depression. In his autobiography he uses the expression taedium vitae, a ‘loathing of life.’ There were regular moments when his underlying affirmation of life was challenged. And there were times when he felt empty inside. When they dampened his mood during old age, he would spend time on his collection of stones. Organising it comforted him until he felt capable of devoting himself to other things again.

Turning to stones to combat the fear of self-petrifaction – it’s impossible not to be impressed by that! Goethe, you can

42 ‘FORM THAT TAKES SHAPE THROUGHOUT LIFE’

‘Since I stopped reading the newspapers, I have become a much freer spirit.’

G OE T HE I N A L ET T ER O F 2 3 MA R C H 1 8 3 0

see, had developed his own forms of therapy.

Speaking of the art of living and selftherapy: you write in your book that when Goethe received newspapers, he always set them aside for a few days before reading them. And you surmise that if Goethe were living today he would use modern communication techniques, but only in moderation – you are probably thinking of the iPad or e-mail or cellphones. Of course, there’s no doubt that being a news addict can be exhausting too.

Goethe was ambivalent in that respect.

He often railed against newspapers, but

‘Always determine the time when something matters for yourself’ that didn’t prevent him from subscribing to them. He was far too inquisitive not to follow – avidly – everything that was happening around the world. He acquired a toy guillotine, got somebody to give him a model train. And he found all that really exciting, if somewhat ambivalent. He talked about the way the world was speeding up, about modern haste, and so on. So while modern communication techniques would have fascinated him, one thing is clear: he wanted to use them, not be used by them. Availability at all times was something only required of servants. And there’s the nub: not becoming a slave to something, but to have things serve your needs. What mattered to him was the ability to control things, not to surrender

that power. He always wanted to decide when something was important to him.

That’s a very attractive trait, this unconditional desire for self-determination and self-assertion.

He tells his friend Eckermann that every ascendant culture focuses on the objective and produces objective things, and that every declining culture becomes progressively more subjective. That applies to poetry, to music, and so on. What would Goethe have to say about people, especially young people, who are constantly snapping selfies and posting them on Facebook? As far as subjectivity is concerned, we seem to have reached our Everest there.

Yes, I quite agree. But he only made the statement you are referring to later in life, by which time his views had changed. After all, as a young man he was immersed in the mood of the Storm and Stress movement. His early works seem to be written by someone shouting ‘Look out, here I come! I’m going to blow you away!’ And he perceived the ossified cultural environment that awaited him as an old boys’ club for art, something that should yield to the subjective, the refreshing, to things that were overflowing with life. In your youth, when you are part of a new and exciting movement, you naturally assume that old things are passé, on their way out. And that subjectivity is the true strength. Today I myself incline toward the view that it’s the object that really counts. But as part of the generation of 1968, I also thought we were

building a whole new world. That said, our subjectivism extended beyond the production of inane selfies.

Am I mistaken in thinking that, even during the nineteenth century, Goethe’s life may well have been seen as the epitome of success – in the way ­Nietzsche was to describe it later?

Does that explain why people are still fascinated by him today?

Nietzsche’s figure of the superman describes a type of human being who is in complete control of himself, can express himself consciously, ad lib and to the full, and whose behaviour is not the product of instincts or urges that he cannot control. And somebody who is not dependent on anything.

And in describing that type of person, ­Nietzsche surely had Goethe in mind, quasi as the embodiment of a successful life. Goethe will always remain relevant to people who lack modesty about the evolution of their own lives. You only have to look a little closer, and he will never stop amazing you. The belief that Goethe’s fires are still burning beneath his ashes is fully justified. With Goethe, in his work as in his life, you are constantly striking new sources of inspiration.

News addicts?

People are still writing. And reading. But differently.

Number of different people who received ­letters from Goethe: 17,000 Letters written by Goethe during his lifetime:

20,000

Number of letters received by Goethe:

24,000

1.5 billion

There are nearly active Facebook users worldwide who visit the social media site at least once a month.

94 %

of young smartphone owners in Germany have installed WhatsApp. On average they view the application 26 times a day.

Number of photos shared daily on Facebook:

350 million

1,000,000

There are WhatsApp users in Austria. The country’s ‘Standard’ newspaper and the football platform ­ 90 minuten.at send WhatsApp messages daily. Some 10,000 readers have already ­registered for this service.

Media usage by young people today: Newspapers 32 % Radio

73 %

Television Internet

83 %

94 %

Number of photos sent daily using WhatsApp:

700 million

44

Martin Kaluza was born in 1971 in a port close to the German border with Denmark. He has been passing through customs points since he became a teenager. Today he is happiest writing about travel and music.

NAFTA

T

rade has always been part and parcel of human civilization.

For more than a millennium spices, silk, glass, scholars and even religions travelled the fabled Silk Road connecting the Mediterranean region with Eastern Asia. From the Bronze Age to modern times, traders drove livestock from Denmark down to the River Elbe along ox trails. Multiple salt roads thread through central Europe. And just as old as the trading routes are the tolls charged by the powers that be in the countries along the route – so that they, too, could share in the profits.

The tolls had their heyday in the age of mercantilism between the 16th and 18th centuries. Yet with the onset of industrialization, they posed an obstacle to the evolving system of world trade. As a result, the barriers were systematically dismantled around the world, particularly after 1948, when GATT – the forerunner of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – went into effect.

Independent of global treaties, regional groups of nations have sealed agreements to define their own trade zones and single markets. But what exactly do these terms mean? Here is a brief summary of the various stages of trade accessibility – as defined by economists as the degree of economic integration.

EFTA

text: Martin Kaluza

ICELAND

EUROPEAN CUSTOMS UNION

EAST AFRICAN COMMUNIT Y

From trade agreements through the free-trade zone and single ­market to monetary union – charting the staging posts on the path to European economic integration

SOUTH AFRICAN CUSTOMS UNION

Building bridges for trade

EU

SOUTH AFRICA

KENYA

TURKEY

SWAZILAND

UGANDA

ANDORRA

LIECHTENSTEIN

USA

LESOTHO

TANZANIA

MONACO

NORWAY

MEXICO

BOTSWANA

RWANDA

VATICAN

SWITZERLAND

CANADA

NAMIBIA

BURUNDI

SAN MARINO

STAGE 1

STAGE 2

When countries unite to form a FREE TRADE AREA , they eliminate barriers to trade within their defined zone. However, these barriers still apply to countries from outside the area. Usually the member states levy their own import ­duties. The European Free Trade Association (EFTA) is one example: its members include Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. The UK, Portugal, Austria, Denmark and Sweden were also part of the EFTA, but have since joined the EU. The North American free trade zone NAFTA is comprised of the US, Canada and Mexico. And TTIP, currently the subject of heated debate, basically establishes a free trade for the EU and US.

A CUSTOMS UNION goes one step f­ urther. Its members agree on uniform tariffs and import limitations. Some ­examples are the South African Customs Union (South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Botswana and Namibia) and the East African Community (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi).

The European Customs Union (EUCU) is comprised of the EU member states plus Turkey, Andorra, Monaco, Vatican City and San Marino.

MERCOSUR

EUROPEAN SINGLE MARKET

BUILDING BRIDGES FOR TRADE 45

EU

BRAZIL

CHILE

ICELAND

PARAGUAY

ECUADOR

NORWAY

URUGUAY

COLOMBIA

LIECHTENSTEIN

SWITZERLAND

GERMANY

VENEZUELA

PERU

SWITZERLAND

LIECHTENSTEIN

VIETNAM

STAGE 3

STAGE 4

STAGE 5

If a customs union also allows prospective employees to seek jobs in any of its member states, it is called a SINGLE MARKET. More precisely: in a single market, the members have agreed on freedom of movement for goods, people, services and capital. The Mercosur bloc is one example. Its full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela; the associate countries are Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. The largest such organization is the European single market. It consists of the EU countries along with Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

A MONETARY UNION – such as that of the Eurozone – has the added dimensions of joint monetary and economic policies. There are currently three such monetary unions in Africa, with plans for others pending. Sharing the Swiss franc as a currency, Switzerland and ­Liechtenstein form the smallest monetary union.

If two countries have already agreed on a customs and monetary union and further operate a functioning single market, there is only one way to forge even tighter economic links: FULL ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL INTEGRATION , i. e. the creation of a new political entity in the shape of a single state or a confed­eration of states. In terms of foreign trade, this does not differ from a customs union.

However, in this case the central insti­tu­ tions of the merged state assume respon­ sibility for all economic affairs, so there is one minister of commerce, one head of government and one parliament only.

The past century has seen very few examples of this. However, the reunifications of Germany in 1990 and Vietnam in 1976 are two cases in point.

POLITICAL ENTIT Y

BOLIVIA

SMALLEST MONETARY UNION

ARGENTINA

ATLAS 47

The Land Rover of the skies Taking an Antonov from Bucharest to Qatar

48 ATLAS

text: Frank Haas

F

lying in a legendary AN-124 is one of the highlight experiences in the life of any transport employee.

Even if you’ll never relax again on a plane.

Airlines do a great deal to convey a feeling of safety to their passengers. This includes keeping planes spotlessly clean, flight attendants well-groomed and safety instructions perfectly choreographed. The look and feel on board leaves little room for doubt as to the airworthiness of the aircraft and its staff.

But here I am at the airport in Bucharest, standing in the shadow of an Antonov AN-124 … and asking myself: Can this thing really get off the ground? With its nose and tail hatches open, this legendary flying machine looks like a gargantuan, squashed pipe with an incredibly thin exterior. The paint is peeling, the inside worse for wear. Everything is completely exposed: cables, wiring, insulation. The repair and maintenance equipment is stowed where there is room in the cargo compartment, next to the Ukrainian flag. Hammers, screwdrivers and assorted spanners – a standard DIY toolkit. Is that all? It doesn’t inspire confidence.

The Antonov AN-124, as I am told by a seasoned colleague, was first designed as a cargo plane for the Soviet military and built until the turn of the millennium. After the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet army sold off several AN-124s. Today, commercial and civilian operators deploy most of them in charterbased international transport where, due to their huge cargo capacity of up to 150 tonnes, they can perform Herculean tasks. Another advantage: the AN-124 does not need a regular runway for takeoff or landing. A flat stretch of land – like the African plains – will suffice, my colleague tells me. Following four crashes in recent years (including two during attempts to land in the savannah), there are still 40 Antonov AN-124s in service. Not that I needed to know this.

But as we aren’t travelling to Africa, I climb aboard this artefact of an aeroplane early on a Sunday morning after prolonged discussions with the Romanian authorities (‘This is not a boarding pass!’). In the meantime, the pilots are ensuring that our cargo is correctly stowed and fully secured. We are delivering a complete laboratory for analyzing ammonia to a fertiliser factor in Qatar. I help the crew load our provisions for the journey. An adventurous-looking suspended ladder leads

Available in case of emergencies: a standard toolset plus the Ukrainian flag as a talisman

up to the cabin. This too is reminiscent of a military museum, conjuring up memories of bizarre films like The Hunt for Red October and Dr Strangelove – How I learned to love the bomb.

‘Is that really what freedom means?

Is a normal life – i. e. on the ground – even possible in this job?’

Our ‘flight attendants’ divest themselves of their navy blue boiler suits, don comfortable shorts and lie down on their spartan bunks without a word. Bob, the flight manager and the only person on board who speaks English, quickly packs away a few souvenirs, including a remote-control combat helicopter, and points me to an empty seat. I am given very brief ­instructions on how to use the oxygen mask. I am grateful for small mercies.

In conventional planes, Bob explains, the oxygen supply lasts until the cartridge on the mask is empty. Depending on body size and breathing rate, he says, it sometimes runs out after seven minutes but sometimes after just three. However, in this military aircraft, we were conveniently connected to the plane’s own oxygen system, so I could breathe freely as long as we were in the air. ‘Finally, a bit of cheerful news,’ I think to myself.

The last time the plane unexpectedly lost pressure was six weeks ago, Bob confides. If it happens again, he says, I should do what the crew does. If they run around and pull at handles protruding from the ceiling, I should simply follow suit.

‘Hmmm. That’s less comforting,’ I muse. The plane fires up its engines, rolls forward and takes off with a thunderous roar.

Somebody offers me ear plugs.

The 14-man crew of this Antonov works three months at a stretch. During this period they circumnavigate the globe countless times and transport the most incredible equipment: gigantic turbines, entire lorries, military hardware. Incidentally, the German armed forces used Antonovs when they pulled out of Afghanistan.

‘We are stupidly in demand,’ Bob tells me. He lives near Stansted Airport outside London and has been working for the Ukrainian airline for 20 years. In his view, it’s the ideal job: ‘Because I have no boss up here,’ he says, an expression of amusement on his face. His job is to organise everything: he negotiates with the local authorities, caterers and hotels. He supervises all the processes, manages the bookings and pays the bills. In short, he does the works. Even deciding on the route seems to be part of his remit. He shows me an e-mail to that effect. I needn’t worry about flying over ISIS territory on the way from Bucharest to Qatar, he adds. We will be taking

No armrest, no belt: a window seat in the Antonov

a detour over the ‘safe parts’ of Iraq – and for that matter, of the Ukraine as well.

The other men hail from either Russia or the Ukraine. All short-haired or with shaven scalps, they are powerfully-built specimens of mankind. Their main work is on the ground, loading and unloading. Basically they don’t talk at all, not even among themselves. I am dying to ask how the war on the home front has affected the crew’s mood. There are so many things I’d like to know: How can anyone get enthusiastic about this back-breaking work? On the move – from time zone to time zone, country to country: is that really what freedom means? Is a normal life – i. e. on the ground – even possible in this job? What is it like to be welcomed at every airport in the world by aeronautical aficionados who gather to marvel at your plane? And how do you solve the unavoidable day-to-day problems that come from being squashed into a 15-square-­ metre space furnished with a few bunks?

Bob is the only one I can ask. But now is apparently not a good time. He tells me to focus on my provisions. ‘Eat something,’ he commands. ‘Enjoy yourself!’ My lunch package, which he organised shortly before takeoff, consists of a fish and seafood platter, a generous plate of cheeses, fruit salad

ANTONOV AN-124 – SPECIFICATIONS MAXIMUM PAYLOAD 150 WINGSPAN 73.30

tonnes

metres

LENGTH 69.10

metres

HEIGHT 20.78

metres

MAXIMUM RANGE 15,700

kilometres

MAXIMUM TAKE-OFF WEIGHT 405 LOADING via

tonnes

front and rear hatches

with fresh berries, loads of sandwiches, rolls and baguettes, a selection of croissants with and without filling, assorted small biscuits and baked sweets, a can of cola, another of Fanta and a litre of apple juice – not to mention the aluminium-foil ­wrapper containing a dinner for heating in the on-board oven.

For afters there’s a big tub of Bavarian yoghurt with fruit and a bar of chocolate. More than enough for the entire crew – but they are all similarly supplied.

Bob turns out the light in the cabin. He takes off his shoes, trousers and shirt and stretches out on one of the old bunks.

I spend the rest of the six-hour flight in the dark. Occasionally I head to the toilet in the back, where a folding chair is positioned next to a small window. There is a fantastic view, with snow-covered mountains bordering an ocean. Where are we?

Unfortunately, I can’t ask Bob right now.

Despite a desert storm, the touchdown is so smooth that I can’t even feel it. Our descent is accompanied by none of the discomforting changes in pressure that are so familiar from commercial flights. I suspect that an Antonov produces the same decibel level cruising along the runway at 30 kilometres

per hour as it does in mid-air. The crew immediately sets about unloading the cargo. Bob, clearly refreshed after his nap, issues me a document (‘Declaration of Health’). He says it will help me at immigration. If it doesn’t work, I can call him anytime. They will be here until tomorrow. Then the Antonov will chug onwards like a robust old Land Rover – to Dubai, where its next mission awaits.

And I would climb aboard again at the drop of a hat, even without the choreographed safety instructions.

Frank Haas was born in 1977. He studied History and Ph­i­losophy and, as head of corporate ­communications at­­Gebrüder Weiss, is editor-­in-chief of ATLAS.

51

No pain, no gain HARALD MARTENSTEIN on freedom and danger

I

haven’t kept a spare can of petrol in my car for years. The wife prefers that I don’t. In her teens she did an apprenticeship in the oil industry.

She says that, in the worst case scenario, these things can explode. If someone runs into your back, for instance. This has been known to happen. So we don’t have one of those jerrycans, and the day will come when we run out of fuel somewhere. It will probably be when one of us has suffered a stroke and we need to drive to the hospital. Or on the way to the airport to catch our plane to San Francisco. That would be a pain.

Other people don’t have their children vaccinated. Very infrequently, children can get sick from the shots. This has been known to happen. Some children, very few, even die. But the risk of an unvaccinated child falling ill or dying is many times higher.

That’s the thing about avoiding risks.

Every time you do it, and I mean every time, you run another risk.

None of the good things in life are risk-free. If you visit exotic countries, you might catch some disease or lose your luggage. When you fall in love, you might end up being distraught because your partner leaves you. If you establish

a company, you might get rich – but then again, you might go broke too.

Most Germans are deathly afraid of taking risks. They demand protections.

And clamour for prohibitions. A case in point: a survey has shown that 64% of Germans are in favour of banning all unhealthy foods. That made me wonder: what is an unhealthy food? The reality is, almost every kind of food can be unhealthy if you eat too much of it.

That’s the problem with freedom.

Freedom always entails risks. Predictably, surveys of Germans show that ‘security and safety’, ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ are the values they cherish most; freedom ranks lower. That means that the ideal habitat for most of my compatriots would be a prison. If you abide by the rules behind bars, you will be safe and secure. You get justice in the form of your sentence, and all prisoners are treated the same. It’s the ultimate in social equality! Everyone gets paid the same. The wages are, it must be admitted, low but the profit from your labours goes to the government which uses it to build daycare centres and finance all manner of other beneficial things. It’s wonderful. Prison is our paradise in Germany. Pity it’s so difficult to get in, but

that’s the way things are in utopian countries.

It goes without saying that I read this text out at home – and asked if it sounded too self-righteous, too patronising.

That’s another risk we Germans tend to take without noticing: we love being right so much that we become self-righteous. Ultimately, Germans can never get enough justice. My wife said, ‘All well and good, but you forgot that we really did run out of petrol that time.’

It happened on a road in Berlin – unfortunately at a set of traffic lights. Back then I had my convertible, a Saab. There was no shortage of comments from the other drivers – along the lines of ‘drives a cool convertible, but can’t afford a spare petrol can!’ What could I say? ‘I just didn’t want to take the risk’ sounds a tad lame in that predicament.

Harald Martenstein authors the column ‘Martenstein’ in Germany’s ZEITMagazin and is an editor at the Berlin-based newspaper Der ­Tagesspiegel.

His most recent book is entitled Die neuen Leiden des Alten M.

52

‘Let freedom ring …’

Few concepts have captured our imaginations like freedom. From the French Revolutionary call for liberty to the aspirations of civil rights movements, ­people around our world have united behind it. But the awareness of freedoms also shapes our thinking in more personal matters that affect our daily lives.

For this issue of ATLAS , we found out what freedom means, and what forms it has taken, for the employees at GW.

LENA HAUBOLD GW LAUTERACH, AUSTRIA

SERGIU GRAJDEANU

MIKLÓS BALÁZSY

GW ARAD, ROMANIA

GW DUNAHARASZTI, HUNGARY

Before somebody tries to write a few words about freedom, he should make sure that he perfectly understands the key terms. Thus, freedom has two distinct shades, one negative – independent individual behavior – and one positive – being your own master, as defined by Isaiah Berlin. Freedom is usually somewhat limited, it is constrained by responsibility. At GW, I associate the notion of freedom with free will. I feel free when I can choose between several options to develop our business.

When I think freedom, I think of the year 1989, when I was still at university.

That summer I had travelled to former East Germany and West Berlin as a tourist. Although we had only planned to visit the western half of the city, curiosity lured us into East Berlin as well.

The facial expressions and mentalities of the people on the opposite sides of the Wall could hardly have been more different. I had the feeling that everything in the West was more vibrant, more colourful, freer. Add to that the intimidating Wall: its height, the menacing barbed wire, the checkpoints. I found all that very oppressive. Remember, that was the year when political upheavals began to reshape the former Eastern Bloc countries. You could feel the mood of change – there was something in the air.

Freedom to me is a picture, a situation with a clearly discernible structure that still allows me to draw my own con­ clusions and initiate my own responses.

A picture that provides orientation yet always remains open-ended, alive with energy.

MARCO GRANER GW ESSLINGEN, GERMANY

I feel free when I’m on holiday. Then I can spend my days without watching the clock or browsing my appointment calendar. The day starts when the night ends.

‘LET FREEDOM RING …’ 53

DAVOR JURAGA

NADYA CHUDALEVA

MASATO UENAKA

GW ZAGREB, CROATIA

GW MOSCOW, RUSSIA

WR OSAKA, JAPAN

I am a member of the Croatian Com­ posers’ Society. While I am composing I think of clapperboards or singers who will sing the music at some festival, accompanied by an orchestra. That’s a long way: from the piano in my room to a festival orchestra. But it is worth ­waiting and experiencing it. Twenty instruments, integrated in the orchestra, unleash my notes and that liberates my soul.

Freedom – is the right to make decisions and be able to stand by them. In our lives we are surrounded by rules, standards, manners, conventions, religions – all of which limit and control our behaviour.

Freedom is when you are outside of these structures, outside the box. But ultimately I think that it is something unattainable. It is also to do with time – your OWN time, which only belongs to you.

On the other hand, rules and structures keep us safe and fully-fed, and this is the other benefit of abiding by the rules of the game!

Travelling always gives me the feeling of freedom – no matter what the destination. It can be a voyage to Brazil, a sightseeing trip to Kyoto, or going for a walk in a local park. When I regard it as travelling, it offers me extraordinary experiences and transports me to a stress-free world. Every journey has different characteristics and that satisfies my senses of curiosity, creativity and liberty!

JULIA HAGEN

STEFAN PARTINGER

WR ATLANTA, GEORGIA, USA

GW SALZBURG , ­AUSTRIA

Freedom, happiness and fulfillment go hand in hand for me. The freedom to make my own decisions, to take charge, to choose which path I want. Living my dream in the USA is the ultimate feeling of freedom to me. My heart still jumps each time I see the Atlanta skyline when driving home from work. Travelling in general allows me to be free. The opportunity to discover and experience different cultures is an indescribable feeling.

For me, freedom means being able to freely define my life with my family, spending time together and enjoying it.

I feel free when I’m skiing down virgin slopes in deep powder snow, or cruising along deserted country roads on my old Vespa, far from the madding crowd. At least then you can escape from the daily grind with all its do’s and don’ts – and get in a break before you settle down at the office to earn the money that makes it all possible.

SIMON HOLDERIED GW WELS, ­AUSTRIA

To me freedom means charting my own path through life, taking independent decisions and being responsible for my actions. This obviously only applies as long as my scope is not limited for health reasons and I am not doing any harm to others in the process. One of my favourite proverbs is: ‘Life is what you make it.’

54 ATLAS

ATLAS 55

Unleashed!

‘I take a little time to compose myself again. The final hurdle, the climax of the ascent. Mustering all my energy, I climb inside.

With an energy that you only have when confronted by death, I swing through it, and dangle from the first hand jam on the final headwall. Now I am free.

I relax a little and enjoy the moment. That’s what we in the ­Valley call ‘hero climbing’: cruising up a dead cert of a crack on an absolutely vertical and otherwise completely smooth granite rock face, 80 metres above the ground. I feel electrified!’ * JOHN BACHAR

UNLEASHED! 57

Climbing in its freest form

text: Eva Hammächer

T

he climber exulting in his journey across the granite in free solo mode – which means unsecured, with no ­ropes or safety harnesses – was John Bachar as he ascended the Nabisco Wall in California’s Yosemite Valley in 1979. Bachar was not only known for being the first to scale tough rock faces and cultivating an uncompromising approach to style. With his wild free solos he also built a reputation as America’s most daredevil climber. He offered 10,000 dollars to anyone who could follow him for a day on his free solo tour.

Nobody took up the challenge. The stakes, presumably, were too high.

Why risk your life?

But how can somebody waltz – seemingly without a care in the world – across a rock face when they know that death is but a slip away? How can a setting electrify you, when it makes others’ blood freeze? Why voluntarily expose yourself to a situation that defies all common sense? Alone on a sheer rock face with just a bag of chalk around your waist and climbing boots on your feet – in two words: free solo?

The responses to these questions range from denunciation to admiration, from incomprehension to fascination. Free solo is the purest yet most uncompromising form of climbing, and therefore the most controversial. It is even rejected by many of the world’s top climbers. So its practitioners are limited to a small, elite group of devotees. Bachar compared climbing without ropes to walking on the moon. In 2009 he paid for his excursions into uncharted territory with his life.

Without a care in the world?

A relaxed John Bachar smiles as he traverses a Yosemite Valley rockface in 1982

Because you can?

Why dangle from life on a thread when you could use a rope made of synthetic fibre? Because you can? Yes and no. Because not even a free solo climber can control every eventuality. But the key to understanding the appeal may well lie in the conviction that you can: ‘Because nowhere else is physical

58 ATLAS

‘I am pumped up with motivation, energy and self-confidence.

This cocktail will give me the strength I need. From this point onwards I will be plunging into a different world. I slip into a shallow trance. Somehow I seem to lose track of my surroundings. I have one goal in mind alone. Nobody can stop me.’* HANSJÖRG AU ER

Who was more anxious? The free solo climber or the photographer with his rope? It’s impossible to tell from Hansjörg Auer’s expression on the so-called Fish Route on the south face of the Marmolada, the highest mountain in the Dolomites

strength so insignificant and mental strength so exceptionally crucial.’ That’s how the extreme climber Alexander Huber summarizes the sport in his book Free Solo. ‘You are completely alone on the mountain, climbing a steep rock face, and proving to yourself that you can survive is the only thing that matters.’ For Huber, free solo climbing is the most intensive way of exploring the medium of rock: ‘It’s an overwhelming feeling to move up the rock face completely freely, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s like moving around in a different universe, in a realm between being and not being, and you feel so conscious of it that you think you can hear the air crackling with excitement. That’s why free solo climbing has less to do with ascents. Rather it takes you on a journey inside yourself.’

Go with the flow Psychologists use the term ‘flow’ to describe this alternative reality which Huber enters during free solo climbing. The happiness expert Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a non-reflexive, holistic absorption by a smooth-running activity that you still have under control, despite its high demands. It’s a balancing act which requires absolute concentration and conjures up a state of ecstatic abandon. Time and space cease

to exist, and the mind and body fuse into a harmonious whole.

The risk then becomes the extra ingredient that lends the situation its intensity, its ‘spice’. However, what people perceive as the risk is extremely subjective. Using a deliberately overstated analogy, John Bachar described his perspective like this: ‘Everybody free-solos. When you walk to the store, you’re free-soloing. It’s just a matter of the difficulty of the route.’

Immersing yourself in a different world ‘The moment I reach the point of no return and close the door behind me, I enter a kind of intermediate world. I seem to focus on myself, intensively, driven by the situation I find myself in: man against the undiluted forces of Nature. I am free, yet incredibly vulnerable. More than usual I am aware of myself; at this moment I find myself at the epicentre of my own life. It is this exploration of myself that drives me to take risks like these. And, simultaneously, it provides a rationale for subjecting myself to seemingly brainless undertakings like this.’ The intensity of the experience and the total focus on yourself – these are the forces that drive Alexander Huber onwards, that move him to repeatedly enter the forbidden zone that almost all climbers avoid. Hansjörg Auer from Tyrol also entered this zone when he set out on the morning of

60 UNLEASHED!

‘The ability to keep it together where­ others might freak out.’

ALEX HONNOLD Sweaty hands are guaranteed in this video: Alex Honnold climbing El Sendero Luminoso without a rope

29 April 2007 to climb the so-called Fish Route on the south face of the Marmolada – without safety ropes. A 900-metre rock face, 37 lengths of rope high, technical difficulty IX–.

Anyone familiar with the route feels terrified at the prospect of completing the first few steps without a rope. Bad hand and footholds, and acrobatics that would stretch any climber make the Fish a serious challenge, even with ropes. If Auer’s thoughts en route to the rock face revolved around success or failure, his focus soon narrowed to the situation awaiting him.

The ability to disregard disruptive thoughts, concerns and fears, to concentrate exclusively on what you happen to be doing while remaining aware of your own limits, that appears to be the recipe for success when it comes to seemingly im­ possible physical challenges. Fear constrains you. A mere smidgen of doubt translates into hesitation. If free solo climbers feel physically liberated – countless metres from the ground, usually with no way back – they need the inner freedom vital to blocking out the apparent hopelessness of their plight. Their attention is fully focussed on one thing alone: the next move. It may seem paradoxical but, for free solo climbers, fear is an insurance policy. It is the ‘loyal companion who leads, guides and warns us’, as Alexander Huber writes in his book Die Angst, dein bester Freund (Your Best Friend: Fear).

Freedom begins in your head ‘An incredibly intense journey into your innermost self ’ was how the climbing icon Wolfgang Güllich described climbing without ropes in his biography Klettern heißt frei sein (Climbing Means Being Free). The man who shaped the world of climbing more than anyone else during the 1980s and pushed back the sport’s frontiers during the early 1990s sparked an earthquake within the climbing community with his free solo traverse of the horizontal Separate Reality roof in Yosemite Park – almost literally opening up the door to a ‘different realm’. A realm where absolute concentration allows climbers to feel subjectively safe in an objectively perilous situation. Freedom, it can be concluded, begins in the mind. And it cannot exist without the most intense preparation. Because the spectacular free solos are typically the product of a long-term physical and psychological engagement with a route: risks are pondered, *quotes from: Alexander Huber, Free Solo, 2009

fears channelled, hand and footholds memorised, potential errors analysed, series of movements practiced, until the whole sequence is off pat. And can be rolled out almost automatically when Day X arrives.

The professional American climber Alex Honnold masters this art better than almost anyone else at the moment. He makes regular headlines with his spectacular free solos on high and difficult rock faces. In January 2014 he managed to climb El Sendero Luminoso, an over 700-metre high rock face in Mexico, most likely the most difficult free solo on a big wall since Hansjörg Auer completed the Fish Route. Honnold – also known as ‘Mr No Big Deal’ – makes little fuss over his achievements. Nor does he view his climbing skills as superior to others’. But if there is something that sets him apart, it is mental toughness. In an opinion piece for the New York Times in November 2014 he described the sport as ‘the ability to keep it together where others might freak out’. He had written this piece after a company had cancelled a sponsorship agreement with him. The sponsor had justified the decision by pointing to the risks entailed and arguing that it wanted to ‘draw a line’. Honnold’s response: ‘I draw the lines for myself; sponsors don’t have any bearing on my choices or my analysis of risk.’

And that is likely the essence of the freedom people ex­ perience when climbing – whether with or without ropes: the freedom to define your own goals, to live your dreams, to take decisions and to embark on an adventure – wherever they want, whenever they want. How much am I willing to risk for something? That is a question that we all need to answer for ourselves.

Eva Hammächer is a freelance author and copywriter who lives in Munich. Her favourite activities: moving around letters, words and – of course – herself. Ideally high up in the mountains, equipped with running shoes or climbing boots. But never without a rope.

An unsecured view of the abyss below: Alex Honnold at Glacier Point in the Yosemite Valley

FAMILY FUN 63

The winners will be notified by post or e-mail, and will receive their prizes by the end of March 2016. For legal reasons, we sincerely regret that Gebrüder Weiss employees are not permitted to enter. The judges’ decision is final. Prizes cannot be exchanged for cash.

E YO U ’ R TO FRE E !

E S O CHO

S

ometimes stories don’t end as we would want them to, and not everything happens as we would like it. But in our comic you can select which ending you want – and what should be in the final picture. E-mail us the letter of your favourite ending by 31 January 2016 at: redaktion@gw-atlas.com or send it in an envelope to: Gebrüder Weiss GmbH | Redaktion Atlas Bundesstraße 110 | A-6923 Lauterach Österreich

We will be raffling off three ‘Power Rockets’ Playmobil sets among the entries received.

COMPE­ TITION

3 ×

64 ORANGE NETWORK

SMARTER

FASTER

The auto manufacturer Daimler is planning to use lorries as ‘rolling datacentres’ in the future. By connecting the board computer with the Cloud, valuable information could be made available to both owners and government authorities. For example, the stress on the vehicles’ shock absorbers will reveal changes in the condition of the roads.

The new ‘Frecciarossa 1000’ (Red Arrow) – which can accelerate to 400 kilometres per hour – has been running on Italy’s high-speed rail network since June. The express train will be covering the route between Rome and Milan in just 2 hours and 15 minutes, 45 minutes faster than existing services.

CANADA The westernmost branch of the orange network has opened its doors in Vancouver. Adding to its existing locations in Montreal and Toronto, Weiss-Röhlig is now represented on the Pacific coast as well. From there it will be able to expand the existing air and sea freight services, integrate them into the Far East network, and coordin­ ate projects between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

SWITZERLAND The staff at the Gebrüder Weiss customs office in Basel/Weil faced an unusual challenge recently: managing the customs procedures for the female puma Mirca. This entailed obtaining special permits and ensuring compliance with the international convention on trade in endangered species. Happily for the big cat, her relocation from Basel Zoo to Saarbrücken Zoo passed without incident.

HUNGARY Gebrüder Weiss has created a central turnover facility for the Danish pump manufacturer Grundfos in the Hungarian town of Biatorbágy. A cross-docking hub and a logistics terminal accept factory deliveries and then export the goods to 16 different countries.

The Danish company benefits above all from the extensive GW network in eastern Europe, which extends to over 90 locations.

LIECHTENSTEIN Gebrüder Weiss offers full-service logistics capabilities to Hilti, the tools specialist from Liechtenstein, with a custom-designed control tower opti­mising its transport and ware­housing processes. The package provided is substantial. With Gebrüder Weiss performing some 650,000 deliveries to over 50 countries for the construction technology group every year, fast turnarounds are vital.

ORANGE NETWORK 65

WIDER

DEEPER

Costing several billion euros, the expansion of the Suez Canal has been completed following a construction period of one year. The canal – which connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea – can now be navigated in both directions on 115 kilometres of its total 193 kilometres. Egypt is hoping that traffic will double on the canal by 2023.

outside the gates of St. Petersburg the new multi­purpose port of Bronka has started operation.

Given its draught of 14.4 metres, even ships of the Post-Panamax class can dock there. The port has its own railway link that can take the approx.

475,000 TEUs inland – the majority of them to the Moscow area.

AUSTRIA The employees at GW in Austria feel happy in their jobs. Again this year, Gebrüder Weiss Austria was awarded the ‘Great Place to Work’ seal of approval. What's more, it also won a special prize for being the ‘Best Employer for Apprentices’.

The awards were based on surveys conducted among employees around the country.

GERMANY The GW site in Esslingen is welcoming a new warehouse. The construction is state-of-the-art in technological, environmental and safety terms, and will therefore cut transhipment times and offer customers even faster deliveries.

Of the location’s 300-strong workforce, 70 employees are charged with handling the goods.

SINGAPORE This autumn Gebrüder Weiss established its own national logistics subsidiary in the southeast Asian city state. Operating under the name GW Logistics Pte Ltd, the company will offer warehousing, local distribution and ancillary logistics-related services. WeissRöhlig will remain the company’s exclusive partner for air and sea freight in Singapore.

THE PHILIPPINES Two batches of special pipes – each 32 metres long and weighing 29 tonnes – were transported from Hungary to the Philippines for the country’s oil industry. The special freight was loaded onto lorries in southern Hungary and driven overland to Hamburg. From there it was loaded onto a container ship heading for Singapore – and finally forwarded to the port of Batangas, its destination in the Philippines.

ATLAS 67

N HE GERMA T F O Y R A E DI FROM TH

C H W A LT E R I R L U T U A N STRO S PA C E L A B A

68 IN A WORLD OF OUR OWN

text: Ulrich Walter

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER FLORIDA, USA SHUTTLE LAUNCH PAD 39A 26 APRIL 1993, 9:50 AM So here I am lying on my back, my legs angled up, some 60 metres above ground on the mid-deck of our Columbia, an American space shuttle that is taking us seven astronauts into space. This is the moment I have been working towards for years. I close my visor and all sound is gone, bar the staccatolike air-to-ground radio communications that themselves are kept to the bare minimum.

Then the countdown begins! Six seconds before lift-off the three liquid propulsion engines are fired up, pressing the nose of the shuttle forward. During these six seconds the astronauts move to and fro like a pendulum, a metre-and-a-half forward and then back again. At the same time the shuttle’s vibrations set your teeth on edge. It feels like an earthquake. I don’t register any of the booming thunder that makes spectators’ diaphragms quiver outside, none of the high, whip-like cracks of the solid fuel boosters. The only thing I hear is ‘SRB* ignition.

Lift-off!’ over the radio. The mission has begun, the shuttle is airborne. At first I feel nothing of the G-force of 3, the notorious thrust three times the force of gravity. As yet, the acceleration is no more powerful than that of an aircraft on the runway.

The solid fuel rockets are now the workhorses that propel the shuttle through the cloud cover. The slightly erratic power they produce, due to the uneven distribution of fuel in the tank, generates sudden thrusts of acceleration that make the shuttle judder, causing irregular vibrations. Everything on board is jiggled and juggled about. It’s like driving down a cobblestone road at 100 kilometres per hour. And then comes the silence. Only a few words are exchanged between mission control and the commander. Everyone involved knows that this is by far the most critical moment of the entire endeavour. * Solid rocket boosters: the most powerful engines ever built

D-2 MISSION The second German Spacelab Mission – dubbed the ‘D-2 Mission’ – was the 14th flight of the space shuttle Columbia. Scheduled for February 1993, it had to be postponed repeatedly until it finally succeeded on 23 April 1993. On 22 March the launch had to be aborted three seconds before lift-off – after the three main propulsion engines had already been ignited. The computer indicated that one of them had not developed full thrust. As a result, all three engines were replaced. The seven-person German/American crew worked round the clock in two shifts, executing 88 scientific experiments during almost ten full days in space.

IN A WORLD OF OUR OWN 69

The shuttle breaks through the cloud cover

If something unexpected happens now, there is no hope of escape. Even the many improvements made after the Challenger disaster have not changed that. The solid fuel rockets are like fireworks: once ignited, you can’t switch them off.

Their thrust is such that the aerodynamic drag would rip the shuttle to pieces if it were to stop suddenly. Even today, if a flash of fire from a porous booster were to shear through the external tank like an oxy-acetylene torch, as happened to the Challenger, nothing could be done. During these two minutes, the crew is completely and utterly at the mercy of the shuttle. Hence the breathless silence.

Meanwhile, the force pulling you into your seat has increased as the shuttle system’s fuel supply is depleted, lessening its load. Shortly before the solid fuel boosters finally burn out, exactly two minutes after lift-off, a force of 1.8 g has been reached. The thrust from the boosters instantly falls to zero and, a moment later, they are separated from the main craft.

Once that has happened, a collective sigh of relief passes through the shuttle. The danger is over! Problems that might still arise can be managed somehow: they are no longer lifethreatening and terminal.

After this liberating hiatus, in which the boosters are detached, the liquid propulsion system alone provides the thrust.

The combustion of the fuel is now considerably more even.

Moreover, we have left the dense, more turbulent regions of the atmosphere in our wake. The vibrations have virtually ceased. The full harmonious power of the propulsion system is now felt exclusively in the steadily increasing gravitational pull into your seat. After four minutes and 20 seconds, the ‘negative return call’ arrives from mission control in Houston:

*MECO Main Engines Cut-Off

IN A WORLD OF OUR OWN 71

A weightless Ulrich Walter in the Spacelab; Bottom: The shuttle’s loading bay with Earth below

in the event of an emergency, a return to the Kennedy Space Center would now be out of the question.

After a total of seven-and-a-half minutes, with the gigantic rust-red external tank now 90% empty and the weight of the shuttle down to less than 200 tonnes, the thrust of the three liquid fuel propulsion engines has raised the inertial pull to 3 g, making it very difficult to breathe. You need to push up your ribcage and the heavy spacesuit, which feels distinctly un­ comfortable. The propulsion level is then reduced, and there are another 60 seconds of 3 g force to endure. Then, just before the tank is entirely empty, the commander notifies the crew: ‘In ten seconds we have MECO*,’ and within just a few seconds he reduces total thrust to zero. And just as suddenly a G-force of three yields to weightlessness. I’m in space!

‘If you close your eyes and let yourself drift serenely through the cabin, with your arms and legs slightly bent, external influences cease to exist.’

Weightlessness is a sensation that does not exist on Earth in the same form. For some 70% of all astronauts, this new experience is not remotely pleasant at first: they suffer from a nauseous feeling known as space sickness. Often, their first instinctive reaction is to pull their heads between their shoulders, something that greatly restricts head movement. That helps but doesn’t completely remove the risk of your last meal climbing back through your gullet. For many the condition is accompanied by headache, backache and prolonged quea­ siness. Those who are completely unable to function get a colleague to inject them with a shot of promethazine, have the commander certify them as temporarily unfit to work, and seek out a quiet corner until the symptoms become bearable – preferably their bunks. After a maximum of 36 hours they are over it, and then can really start to enjoy the weightlessness.

If you close your eyes and let yourself drift serenely through the cabin, with your arms and legs slightly bent, external in­ fluences cease to exist.

In my youth I often dreamed I was running down a steep road that ran past our house. I became lighter and lighter and at some point I would lift off and, instead of flying, would float. And the feeling I had during my dream is nearly identical with that of weightlessness. Psychologists will tell you that the dream of running, lifting off and floating through the air is widespread among humans. Is this dream an unconscious ex­ * Main engines cut off

perience of weightlessness? How can we feel that something in a dream is real when we have never actually experienced it?

Up and down cease to mean anything. The absence of this dimension radically alters my sensory perceptions. I no longer feel embedded in the world that still surrounded me a short while ago. Instead, all of existence is reduced down to me. I am completely and utterly free. And I have the almost primeval feeling that I am completely alone. There is nothing else – I am the world!

I listen deep inside myself. What has changed in me? I notice that there is nothing encumbering any more. The clothing that still keeps me warm floats like a shell around my body: it, too, is weightless. But not only the weight of my clothes is absent, the weight of my body, too, is gone. It no longer presses on the soles of my feet when I’m standing, or on my backside when I’m sitting. Your arms no longer rest on anything in the usual way. It’s really strange: it’s only in this situation, where you no longer feel your own body, that you fully appreciate the stresses it is subjected to on Earth. Before this experience, I had never noticed the almost indiscernible drooping of my cheeks. And, as I now know, this slight feeling of butterflies in my stomach is the pull exerted on my intestines by the Earth’s gravity. In weightlessness none of that exists any more. There is nothing to hinder or encumber you.

How, if not from these external impressions, can I actually tell that I still have a body? The answer is a surprise: it really does seem that your body no longer exists! There is nothing to make you relate to it any more. How strange: a being without a body! But then what, in physical terms, am I? What is my ‘being’? I touch my index fingers with my thumbs. Am I still here?

Of course I am, I feel I am here, otherwise I could not be asking this question. But that is the nub of the matter! The only thing left to me, the only thing that gives me an identity and existence, is my thinking. I think, therefore I am! That’s what makes weightlessness truly unique: it distils you down to yourself, your mind, your soul or your spirit.

Ulrich Walter is a physicist and former astronaut specialising in research. He is currently the Chair of Space Technology at Munich’s Technical University.

He has been awarded two of Germany’s highest ­accolades: the German Order of Merit (First Class) and the Wernher von Braun Medal.

The next ATLAS : Drive

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ATLAS 73

taking liberties statues are erected to it hymns in its honour ring true it’s never sold out – or is it? that inalienable right – to sue? day after day, lip service is paid freedom touted in flowery phrases so many false promises are made though everyone sings its praises religion, drugs and the press but the best-case scenario’s the worst free to be as they will, fools are no less at liberty to be ‘me first!’

ingo neumayer pens poetry and a German language blog entitled Twelve Lines on Time (www.zwoelfzeilen.com). He lives in Cologne.

ATLAS issue 5: With news, views, interviews and pictures galore powered by a fascination with a world on the move