Category: Helmut Schmidt

Isolation

Utklippan is Sweden’s most south-easterly group of islands. There are two, Norraskär and Södraskär . Between the islands is a sheltered harbor, built in the 1940s as a refuge for fishermen. There are houses on Södraskär where the lighthouse keepers and their families lived from 1840 until 1972.

On the island Södraskär was a quadratic defense tower, which would be armed with four canons and defended by twenty men in times of war. A manned lighthouse was built between 1839 and 1842. An Iron framework mounted on the old lighthouse tower, was added.

Today the lighthouse is out of order. On Södraskär, the former lighthouse keepers buildings and barracks were converted to a youth hostel including sauna, a sailor’s bar and an ornithological station. The youth hostel and bar are closed. With fine weather visitor’s come with their own boats, with bad weather entrance into the harbor is too dangerous.

Erzberg

The Erzberg has provided the Habsburg empire and later Austria with iron ore for a 1000 years. They keep on digging. In 1890 they built a cog railway to bring the ore across the pass directly to the smelters in Leoben. It worked until 1978, mainly with the original engines. The old railway shed is still there, and the area is full of abandoned mines, foundries and towns so desolate that it took me a drive of 50 km to find a place to stay.

The old town of Eisenerz, the bell in the tower above town used to announce begin and end of the shifts in the mine,
Today a modern and automatic loading facility dumps the ore into modern trains
A wreck of one of the old engines of 1890 has survived in the old shed
The Erzberg looms over town and station with one of the modern trains

Maastunnel

Anke’s picture f the Elbe tunnel in Hamburg reminded me that there is a similar facility in Rotterdam under the Maas and in Antwerp under the Schelde. Both were built around a hundred years ago and many of the original features are preserved. This is the one in Rotterdam. Presently, the old wooden elevators undergo a renovation. There are separate floors for cyclists and pedestrians

The building with the green cupola in the back is the north entrance

There are lifts, but most cyclists use the old moving stairs

Memories of war

In 1991 Yugoslavia fell apart in a civil war that lasted until 1995. Especially affected was the region Krajina. In 1991 Serb troops moved in and drove other ethnic minorities out. In 1995 the Croats came back and drove the Serbs out. Results were destroyed towns and abandoned villages. Sometimes new buildings of the enemy were blasted to pieces. The remainders are still widely visible almost 20 years. The castle of the town of Knin played an important role in croatian history. While the castle is beautifully restored and houses three musea, big parts of the town are still in ruins.

An old woman sells produce from the villages around Knin in the rubble of the former town center
The former hotel in the center of town

The world in my town

The Hague likes to see itself as an international community. This refers mainly to the many international organizations which settle here. However, the majority of immigrants are not the prosperous members of this expat community, but those who came from poor countries, mainly from North Africa, in search of a better, safer, more well to do life. They settle segregated in some neighborhoods of the city and have changed the appearance of the shops in the streets