My former roommate and I are spending a week in September on the island of Lesbos in the small town of Molivos. Our lovely landlady Maria baked us a cake to welcome us. Apart from a wide double bed, the apartment also has a sofa and a terrace. "We'll sleep outside," Nele decides, so we roll out our double mattress onto the terrace. It's a full moon, and there's a semi-eclipse. Is there anything better than sleeping under the clear sky on a Greek island?
However, we must not sleep on the balcony, says Maria's husband, who rents bicycles. Frowning, we take them from him, they cost us eight euros a day. In the evening, we return them to Maria. Conspiratorially, a little far from her husband, she waves her hand for us to approach and whispers: Girls, cool, you can sleep on the terrace. But don't tell my husband! He can hardly stop laughing, so all three of us stand laughing like three schoolgirls who secretly smoked cigarettes in the school yard.
In the meantime, the news reached our smartphones that the normally crowded Moria refugee camp on Lesbos had also burned down. About 5000 people on this island are now homeless. Friends ask on WhatsApp: "Are you noticing what is happening on Lesbos?" We answer: "No. And we find out everything online." Nele went somewhere to have fun, and I lie on our mattress on the terrace and sort out my thoughts.
So, how things stand: While for me as a tourist it is the height of happiness to sleep under a clear sky, a few kilometers from me thousands of people were left without the little roof over their heads. Is it okay for me as a Western European tourist to indulge in my tourist enjoyment, while such a tragedy is unfolding on the same island? Today, in 2016, I am a tourist, and since I speak German with Nela, they consider me German too. At the end of 1992, I myself was a refugee from Bosnia. I sat with hundreds of other refugees for hours in the port of Split and waited with my family for the opportunity to continue our journey to Austria. It was a time before mobile phones, phone cards were bought to call relatives at home and abroad from payphones, to inform them that we were alive, that we were still on the way, to agree on which route to continue.
There were definitely tourists in Split at the end of July 1992. What were they thinking in their hotel rooms then? Was their vacation hindered by us refugees occupying the port? Am I, now a European tourist, allowed to enjoy the starry sky aware of mass homelessness in the immediate vicinity? How was it with Kant: the starry sky above me, the moral law in me? As a European, do I bear the moral blame for the current refugee crisis? But yes, for sure. We all participate in structural violence, without exception, when we buy a T-shirt at H&M made in Cambodia for ten euros.
Once the refugees from Lesvos look back, will they wonder what the useless tourists were doing while they were left en masse homeless and left to their fate? Or they will not really care about those tourists from Lesbos, as we did not care about tourists in Split in July 1992.
At one time, sleep saved me from the thoughts that haunted me. I didn't even hear when Nele came back.
A saleswoman in a souvenir shop complains that the season is disastrous. Tourism has failed, the inhabitants of Lesbos are on the verge of despair. Leaving, Nele and I say: Good luck.
In the taxi to the airport, the driver starts talking about the refugee crisis: Yes, I understand that people need help. But if somebody comes and wants to break into my house, I have to protect myself. You know what I mean? What would you do if somebody comes into your house and puts his foot on your table? We remain indebted to him for an answer.
We drink coffee in the port. A large warship is anchored there. We wonder if refugees are temporarily housed on one of the ferries we see. We don't know. It's pouring like a cable.
