Beirut

If you are looking for a city guide to Beirut in German bookshops, pay attention to your pronunciation. “Bayreuth? Yes, we have it,” you may hear otherwise. It happened to me twice. There are yards of literature on the Wagner festival city, but hardly anything about the capital of Lebanon. The directory of the German bookselling trade does not contain a separate guide to the city of Beirut. There are guidebooks on Syria and Lebanon, which briefly touch on Beirut.

Information about this city would certainly have come in handy to this writer. I know near to nothing about it – well, only very little. What I know is not much more than the usual associations with which one reacts to the topic of Beirut: civil war, houses in ruins, but also photographs of feting young people in open cars. From somewhere in our long-term memories, phrases like Hezbollah militia or the Phalange suddenly pop up. Back then, over twenty years ago, you heard them in almost every news programme. The city’s reputation is apparently still marked by them today. There was hardly a colleague or friend who didn’t advise me to “wear a bullet-proof vest.” They also repeatedly mentioned beautiful women.

These opinions are not formed from personal views, so it is high time for a “close-up.” That is what the Goethe-Institut named the project that I am privileged to take part in. Journalists from Christian influenced Germany visit colleagues in countries of Muslim tradition, who will then return with them for a reciprocal visit. How do people of different cultures live together in a city, where and why are there conflicts and how do they deal with them? These are the questions we journalists are to examine in our host country and write about in their newspaper. So, it’s classic Frankfurt subject matter. As a first look at the existing books revealed, it’s the same subject matter in Beirut. Is it ever. Christians and Muslims fought one another in the almost 15-year civil war, although the conflicts were less about religion and more about politics.

It brings Belfast to my mind, where I was in 1991. The civil war in Northern Ireland between Protestants and Catholics also had no religious, but social grounds. Back then in Belfast there was a bombing the first night. No one was injured but 100 metres of shop windows were shattered. The Northern Ireland journey was an attempt to market the country for tourists.

Now it’s Beirut, the “Paris of the Orient.” A city whose inhabitants know all too well what destruction and reconstruction mean. Most recently the city was devastated by Israeli air strikes two years ago after the abduction of two soldiers. No one knows the exact population figure. It may be about two million and almost two-thirds of all Lebanese live in the capital city.

A multicultural metropolis to rival Frankfurt. There are eight different Christian groups alone, of which the Maronites are the largest. In addition there are Sunni and Shiite Muslims and the Druze. Fully veiled women walk alongside women in miniskirts. Almost like in Frankfurt. Or is it entirely different? To find that out is the objective of my journey. My articles will therefore be appearing – in Arabic – over the next four weeks in the Beirut newspaper Al Hayat (“Life”). The Goethe-Institut hired a translator just for this purpose. We’ll see what happens. There is only one thing that’s certain in the meantime and you don’t need a travel guide to know it: down there it’s warm, very warm.