To reduce ignorance – coming of age on the road

… it contains nothing but the truth.

But what he told was only what

little he was able to remember.

Marco Polo The Travels

The traveller recognizes the little that

 is his, discovering the much that he

has not had and will not have.

Italo Calvino Le città invisibili

Take the exit

Take the exit to merge onto A2 and then continue for twenty-three kilometres.

“Can you turn this off?”

“Why?”

“I know the way.”

“Hm”

At the roundabout take the third exit and then follow the SS240.

“Can you please turn it off?”

“Why you make such a fuss?”

“As I just said, I know the way. And I don’t like being incapacitated. I ‘ve driven here many times.”

“But there can be unexpected congestions or accidents, and then they will lead you to the fastest route.”

“I don’t like others to tell me where to go, especially not algorithms. Plus, I find the voice unpleasant. She cannot even pronounce the place names correctly. All with an American accent, often so strong that locals wouldn’t recognize their hometown’s name. And there is just nothing endearing about it to compensate.”

“But it’s convenient.”

“Not everything has to be. Just live the moment! Believe it or not, maybe you can’t imagine it, but going on the road without GPS is possible.”

“Oh, come on!”

Just stay on the right two lanes to keep on the A 22 for 7 kilometres.

“I can tell you, but only if you turn this off.”

Take the next exit and turn left onto Market Street.

“How about taking your eyes off the screen for a while? You’ll see the world in a different way.”

Turn sharply left at the next

“Okay, I’ll try. But we’ll turn it back on afterward, right?”

“It’ll take a while.”

Before the ubiquity of GPS devices such a dialogue would not have been unlikely, but altogether impossible. How to translate this into the present? I once translated a book about translation. It comprised chapters about most ordinary words such as society, individual, beauty, love, existence, nature, among others, that one might think shouldn’t pose any difficulties for translation. But translation is not only about languages but also about time and space, different memories, scenarios, and values. Traduttore, traditore, it is said: translator, traitor. Wrong. What you read is never what I read, even if we are reading the same text in the same language. The book dealt with translating the aforementioned terms from European languages into Japanese at a time when Japan had isolated herself from the colonialist greed-driven West, a different world, as it turned out, where renai doesn’t mean quite the same as love, and shizen differs in characteristic ways from nature, but should be used as “equivalents” all the same.  Anthony, who knows everything about translation, confirmed this many years later, in 2025, when we met in Tarragona and had a chat – remember when chat meant to move your lips and say something trivial? – about translation.^[i]

“When you were in your twenties”, Anthony asked to start the conversation, “what were you doing back then?”

“Trying to find my way”, I answered. “Literally, you know. I actually set out on a trip eastward, without a fixed goal. I did not know how long I would be on the road. I just moved from one place to the next. Whether I was on the right path is hard to say because other than broadening my horizon I wasn’t really sure where this path should lead me. I just wanted to know a lot more to understand the world than I actually did.”

Our conversation then shifted more into a professional direction implicitly suggesting to both of us that somehow, I had found my way. When I was in my twenties, could I have imagined to look at myself as an object on YouTube? Even when I actually did, it was a one-off encounter distancing me from myself in a way that TikTokers, those who have never used a typewriter (“a writing-machine having types for the letters of the alphabet, figures, and punctuation-marks, so arranged on separate rods” (OED)), carbon paper to create copies, or a Ditto machine to run off their handouts for class could not possibly imagine. The low-cost spirit duplicating apparatus, which today you can find only in a technology museum as part of the Gutenberg Galaxy, helped knowledge transfer to go beyond blackboard and school textbook. Transparent plastic film on an overhead projector, yes, on occasion, but the screen hadn’t yet arrived in the classroom, imagine! How could one find one’s way without GPS, Web mapping and asking one’s smartphone for directions? But one could; especially when navigating without a set goal.

Eventually I did arrive, at least at a stopover, and without realizing it.

Unexpected encounters

I first met Whit listening to his summer-school lectures about aphasia in Salzburg. He was eloquent, entertaining and captured his audience without PowerPoint presentation. This software lay still a decade or so in the future, a future about which, having no training as a soothsayer, I knew little, surely not that one day Whit would tell me that Able was I ere I saw Elba. (How do you translate this?) Spending some time at the coast of Tuscany, I mentioned casually to Whit that I could see Elba from the beach. We wouldn’t have met – if “meet” you can call it, which however current language use allows – that is, met again, if not in cyberspace, which in fact we did more than four decades after Salzburg when we were unexpectedly involved in a common project, Whit as author, I as editor. Of my attendance in the Salzburg summer-school lectures Whit was not aware, but when I told him he started surfing in order to find out a bit more about his editor. And then he emailed: “You know what, when in high school, I spent a couple of years in Tokyo.”

He must have had a wild time there. Before he graduated at the top of his class in 1955, he got into “a bit of trouble,” as he put it. Because “a month and a half before graduation the admin of TAHS^[1] told my parents that I was being thrown out of school and sent back to the United States by myself!! for attempting to poison the history teacher.” That wasn’t true (unless you are a radical teetotaller and consider offering somebody a drink as an attempt to poison them), he wasn’t expelled, and after high school he launched a long and impressive academic career. In the context of their joint project, he mentioned that he would give a talk about the topic of his chapter, for which I wished him good luck and said how much nicer it was to remember palindromes like Able was I ere… and study aphasia than suffering from it. “So true, so true,” he replied.

Long ago, but unforgotten were Whit’s high school years in Tokyo then. The stories he told about his time there brought the immediate post-war era and the American occupation of Japan to life. To me who “was trying to find my way”, the Pacific War and its aftermath were by and large confined to maps and figures, the East Asian theatres of war just part of the limitless extent of my ignorance. WW II in Europe was enough of a challenge to confront in high school. In addition to weightier topics concerning war and peace, Whit also spoke about everyday happenings in Tokyo, like eating soba (noodles) from stalls at the station and watching the sunrise from the top of Mt. Fuji. He never returned to Japan though and was in his turn curious to know why and how his editor, I, got there. So, I told him the story.

Leaving the university

When I first came to Japan, in 1970, it was after a long journey, and Japan wasn’t the planned destination. In the wake of the 1968 student movement when protests against state of emergency legislation in Germany, police violence, remnants of Naziism, and the Vietnam war – a focal point of resentment in universities of many Western countries – were the order of the day, my university had come to a virtual standstill, especially in the social sciences where I had begun studying. Berlin was particularly bad because it was the epicentre of the Cold War, but in Paris, where I escaped just briefly, it wasn’t much better, although student demonstrators received friendlier support from the populace. So, I decided, like many others did, to leave the university and attempt to understand the world by looking at it myself, rather than reading books about it – and headed east. Ex oriente lux was a slogan I had once heard. What did it mean? To find out, I scratched together all my savings and bought an old post office delivery car with no windows in the back that could be smashed and wherein I could sleep. Aside from the fact that the steering was at the front and the engine at the rear, I didn’t understand much about car mechanics, but that was enough to hit the road. Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia and Istanbul were some of the first stops.

In Prague, physical remnants of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact invasion of August 1968 which put an end to the liberalising reforms initiated by Alexander Dubček, the Prague Spring, were still visible. The streets were potholed and deserted, the atmosphere gloomy and depressing. It was winter and unless you took a perverse pleasure in exploring the origins of the bleak mental state of frustration, confusion, hopelessness and lack of direction called “Kafkaesque”, there was nothing inviting to spend a few days in Prague. The lesser evil argument as an anchor for the relationship between politics and morality was far from common knowledge. Naiveté had told me that violence was bad, bad, bad. Sending tanks into Czechoslovakia to occupy its capital; dropping millions of tons of bombs on Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia – could these actions be compared, even be mentioned in the same breath? The former is today generally condemned; actually, much later even the last Soviet leader, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev called the invasion of Czechoslovakia wrong. But who could possibly justify the My Lai massacre of unarmed civilians which occurred in Vietnam just a couple of months earlier than the invasion of Prague? Could the so-called “domino theory”, which posited that if South Vietnam fell to the communist North, the neighbouring countries would also fall, convince that supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon by dropping napalm and millions of tons of bombs on rural villages in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was the lesser evil? Yet, opinions about the Vietnam War are still divided. Some describe it as a crime (by the U.S. to suppress Vietnamese justified anti-colonial nationalism), others as a just war (against the spread of communism). A stupid political mistake by the U.S. government or a proxy war within the framework of the global Cold War are yet other views. The fact that half a century later it is still so difficult to categorically exclude even one of these views illustrates the complexity of historical occurrences of such a large scale and the persistence of our own point of view, even when we try to be objective. Yet, should victory and defeat be measures of the legitimacy – justness – of wars? Where would that leave us? Many students’ views at the time were much simpler and in accord with the anti-war protests that were raging at American and European universities.

Don’t get distracted! Eyes on the road, find your way! That was the guideline. A snapping hip syndrome (which never bothered me) had allowed me to circumvent military conscription, never wear a uniform, bear myself a pacifist and, over time, become one. Twentieth century history must have taught every reasonable person that peace was the highest good that should not be compromised by anything, but what was the lesser evil they never asked, and the Just War theory, the reasoning that it might be permissible, sometimes even recommendable to go to war, was reserved to philosophers and other specialists.

Next stop Budapest. A day’s drive with my sluggish car on bumpy roads, it was friendlier than cheerless Prague, but I had no eyes for this beautiful city, the “Pearl of the Danube”, the bridges or the picturesque alleys. Sightseeing was not only not on my agenda. The last thing I wanted to be was a tourist, although “overtourism” would become topical only decades later. But even then, although much less than today, the very idea of tourism embodied voyeurism rather than desire for knowledge, the inequality between the traveller and the local. So, he deliberately avoided tourist attractions, such as the majestic Buda Castle towering over the Danube that incorporates so much of the history of the Holy Roman, Ottoman and Habsburg empires. I tried to be a mere foreigner, in Budapest and wherever I went. Thus, just a night in a parking lot.

Further southwards. Along the way to Belgrade, Novi Sad on the Danube, the first city where Latin and Cyrillic letters were used on signboards side by side, an unfamiliar sight of translation in writing, but no reason to stop, let alone reflect on the association of the former with Catholicism and the latter with Orthodoxy which would substantially contribute to the break-up of Yugoslavia two decades later by which time writing systems and scripts had gained some traction as instruments of nationalism. Not so then. Alphabets were tools, and countries had fixed borders. The idea that the two were not necessarily stable entities and might actually have something to do with each other had no place in the history curriculum at school, much less so in the car that passed these signboards and had to stop at the frontier.

On to Bulgaria’s capital Sofia, a poorly maintained city at the time. The fact that the slippery yellow cobblestones in the centre were laid there decades before to give the city a more European rather than oriental (Ottoman) appearance escaped me. But then I didn’t ask anyone for information on this misty day. Neither did I spend much thought on the fact that I was about to leave Europe behind, or on the conventionality of boundaries between continents, which plays such an important role in the self-image of the City.

Baklava and Gastarbeiter

Η πόλη (the City) – that’s how my grandmother, who was born there, called her, or maybe Constantinople. As time went by, Constantinople had to be translated into Istanbul, but she refused to make this step because she was Greek. More than five centuries had passed since the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire including its capital Byzantium/Kōnstantinoupolie was conquered by Ottoman forces and the Orthodox Cathedral Hagia Sophia – ‘holy wisdom’, what a wonderful name! –   transformed into a Mosque. However, some memories last a long time, especially when a magnificent building embodies them, and functions can be changed again and again. When I came to the city for the first time, the Hagia Sophia was, in fact, not a place of worship but a museum. Kemal Atatürk who founded the Republic of Turkey was anti-religious. To what extent this motivated the decision to dedicate this unique building to history rather than God is a matter of speculation. In any event, only half a century later it would be converted again into a mosque. Early in the 20^th century the Greeks of Istanbul still numbered in the hundreds of thousands accounting for perhaps a third of the city’s population. The multitude of languages, writing systems, religions and ethnicities was a hallmark of this megalopolis which had been the archetype of cosmopolis for centuries. When I arrived there, still dozens of Greek Orthodox churches were found throughout the city, but most of them weren’t much frequented, because the Greek population was down to 0.01%. This decline was largely due to the import of European nationalism as the political foundation of the Turkish nation state that replaced the Ottoman Empire, to genocide during World War I, and the traumatic ethnic cleansing, then euphemistically called “population exchange” between Turkey and Greece in the 1920s. The irony is that the Turkish name of the city, Istanbul, is derived from Greek εἰς τὴν Πόλιν (is tim bolin), which means “to the city”. Can you translate names? An intricate question.

However, rather than reflecting on philosophy of language or a history lesson, the first thing that struck me when driving into Istanbul – What’s in a name? Something, to be sure, for Istanbul no longer was Constantinople where automobiles never drove – was that the bustling traffic required some adjustment of northern European driving habits, the only indispensable part of every car seemingly being the horn and the only traffic rule paying attention to it. Exploring the city on foot would probably be less enervating. So, I looked for a place to park the car, not knowing whether there were any particular rules to observe. When I thus allowed myself a pause in the honking concert, someone knocked on the side window and advised me not to park the car where I thought I could leave it, pointing further ahead to what he told me was a better spot. The gentleman then also showed me a nice little grocery store around the corner where I could buy some food. “Berlin,” he said, since he had recognized the number plate which he took as a prompt to start a hospitable conversation, being, as he explained, a former Gastarbeiter. This odd term in a way applied to him because after working a couple of years as a “guest” in a coal mine in the Ruhr area, he had returned to Turkey and was now trying to sell the skills he had acquired there. At the time, labour migration was not yet a prominent subject in the sociology syllabus of university studies. Teachers and students were preoccupied with loftier issues, such as alienation, false consciousness, class struggle, social role theory, sexual liberation, and institutions.

“Gastarbeiter” – why had this inherently contradictory, if not cynical term, ever been coined? A guest is someone to be welcomed and treated graciously, not someone who is put to work and poorly paid. But that is pedantic, isn’t it? The meaning of words is expanded all the time. One shouldn’t take it too literally. Moreover, “Gastarbeiter” does not carry the same negative connotations as “outlander”, “illegal alien”, etc., which was ultimately a good thing. For, when they first came, it was quite beyond imagination that these guests foreshadowed a major transformation of German society. A few years earlier, in 1961, to be precise, a Recruitment Agreement had been concluded regulating labour migration from Turkey to Germany. It was not possible then and still when I drove to Istanbul with my post office minivan to foresee that this simple and pragmatic agreement would impact perspectives on Germany and Europe and initiate lasting sociodemographic changes. “They called for workers, but people came” would become a catchphrase that epitomised it. Many of the labour migrants decided to stay, waves of immigrants from other countries followed them fostering a bit more tolerance towards variety, or diversity, to use today’s topical term, which at the time had no political connotations. Germany still lags behind other European countries in this regard, especially countries with a colonial past such as the Netherlands for example, but more colourful it has become, which is reflected in the way people talk about it. Never heard at the time of his long trip, “diversity” has been adapted to German from English as Diversität in the 2010s, while “Gastarbeiter” has largely fallen out of fashion.

Istanbul still was a pretty diverse city then, although I wouldn’t have phrased it that way. From whatever I had heard about it at home, it was a mosaic of cultures, nationalities and ethnicities, where Turks and Greeks, Arabs and Jews, Armenians, Bulgarians and Kurds, among others mingled in the street, although, as mentioned above, peace between them was by no means always guaranteed. Reducing the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation state cost many lives. Indeed, the birth of modern Turkey is a chilling example of the dark side of the nation state as a form of political organization, where only nationals could be citizens. Discrimination and, in the worst case, genocide are the attendant phenomena of this concept, as attested not only by Greeks, but also Kurds, Armenians and many other heirs of the Ottoman Empire, and, ultimately by the curious category of the stateless. When military service was an issue, I briefly thought that this would be an attractive option, since the stateless have no army; yet once I examined the problem more closely, I quickly realized that the negative aspects weighed quite heavy. The world was ordered in categories, and those who didn’t fit in were left out in the cold.

Fixed categories also in geography. The cliché that Istanbul is the crossroads of Europe and Asia has taken deep root almost everywhere. We find it difficult to think in vague terms. If a Europe and an Asia exist side by side, the one must begin where the other ends. The width of the Bosphorus in the city when I saw it lend some credibility to this idea, but on this side of it, in Europe, were just five percent of Turkey’s territory, the rest being on the other side, in Asia. Is Turkey thus an Asian country? Whatever, in the Galata area north of the Golden Horn I was still on European soil, and that was that. Istiklal Caddesi (Istiklal Street), not far from the famous Galata Tower was very lively, albeit somewhat run-down. As I would learn decades later, my great-grandfather once owned a pub there when it was the most elegant street of the city – which, at the time, was called Grande rue de Pera, before it was renamed half a century ago. Or translated?

Turkish “Istiklal” means independence, whereas “pera” (πéρα) is Greek and means beyond. Beyond what? And why “Grande rue de”, in French? Istiklal meant as little to me as πéρα, or what these names and the idea of a city spanning two continents meant for cultural exchange and conflict, trade and geopolitics. Overwhelmed by the busy atmosphere of the city and the captivating architecture of buildings from the distant past to the present, I did not try to find out. Also, there were more mundane issues to be taken care of. One of the car’s headlights was broken and although I tried to avoid driving at night, I had to fix it before continuing the trip. That was more important than contemplating the boundary between Europe and Asia, geographic, cultural, political or whatever.

On my way to a garage, I then discovered baklava in a small shop on a side street. I love baklava. (Who doesn’t?!) I grew up knowing that baklava was Greek because the word μπακλαβά and the thing came to me from my grandmother. She lived in Athens and came by on occasion in Hamburg, where I lived, to bring baklava and call me paidí mou, “my child”. She enjoyed calling me this, but apart from that she also spoke fluent German, although, as already mentioned, she hailed from Constantinople. She preferred to remember the city as Greek, like baklava. My father, her son, had a more realistic view of the world and, therefore, didn’t see any pressing need to bother his son with learning Greek, which wasn’t much used in Hamburg at the time. Classical Greek, perhaps, so that I could read the original text of Aristotle’s Politiká, but the vernacular of a minuscule country that was still struggling to become a modern state – what for? Bilingualism wasn’t fashionable then, and was even thought harmful to the development of children, another disadvantage of the nation state or rather an education system grounded in an ideology that links language and nation. This is why my Greek does not go much further than paidí mou, and of course baklava. Which, however, I had to discover now, was Turkish not Greek, or wasn’t it? Its origin is contested, but mind you, a baklava by any other name would taste as sweet. The layered filo pastry confection—made of walnuts (or pistachios), honey and syrup—can be enjoyed in many places in the Middle East, Greece, Turkey and further east; and only identity-obsessed culinary nationalists would insist that “our recipe” is the original one. There is no pure baklava, as there is no authentic cultural artefact in a world of perennial encounter, exchange, adoption and blending. One must admit, however, that if racists, purists, xenophobes, supremacists and chauvinists etc. would limit themselves to claims of culinary authenticity, no matter how absurd, the world would be a much better place.

The baklava in the small shop weren’t exactly cheap, but I couldn’t resist and bought some to take with me to Asia. To cross over from the European to the Asian part of Istanbul I took a public car ferry. Construction of the great suspension bridge that now spans the Bosporus had only just begun and would take three more years to complete.

And there I was, in Asia. What then was Asian or Asiatic or Oriental, other than my point of view? It didn’t feel that different, probably because the road from Istanbul to Ankara is an important much travelled route with asphalt paving, and there is nothing Asiatic about the landscape or the settlements along the road (whatever Asiatic may be). A friend had given me the address of his brother in Ankara, but when I contacted him, the brother was in poor health and in no mood to accommodate a stranger. So, once again a night in the car and no sightseeing.

Back on the road heading to eastern Anatolia, a mountainous country which makes for hard travelling. From Ankara to Erzincan and then on to Erzurum, a high-laying city surrounded by mountains where ancient trade routes came together, from Syria in the south, the Caucasus in the north, and Persia in the east. From Erzincan onwards there were almost only trucks on the road making a minivan look rather out of place.

From Erzurum it was another 200 miles to the Iranian border. Last stop in Turkey at a truck rest area near Doğubayazıt in the highlands, from where you can see the majestic snow-capped Mount Arat. This was where a little mishap occurred. After a short break to stretch my legs back in the car, the engine wouldn’t start. I tried several times until I thought the battery was running low. A truckdriver saw me struggling and came to help. He put a woodblock on the rear bumper of the van and drove his truck so close that it touched it. “Put it in second gear,” he gestured, and then pushed it to get the engine running again. It worked, but the engine sputtered a bit at first and the truckdriver, who was so close behind, didn’t brake quickly enough. A small dent above the bumper was the result. Nothing dangerous, but it didn’t look nice and would ultimately not go unnoticed when it mattered.

Back on the road, now on a well-trodden trade route already travelled by youthful Marco Polo 700 years before. When he set out on his famous journey, he was only seventeen, but accompanied by father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo Polo who were more experienced, of course. And if you calculate a person’s age as a fraction of the years of their total life span, or as a proportion of the average life expectancy, Marco Polo was in some sense older than me, considering that life expectancy in Europe has almost tripled since the 13^th century. What did he know at this point? After crossing the border into Iran, he reached Tabriz, “a large city in a province called Iraq”, as Marco Polo put it in his famous Travels. “A market for merchandise from India and Baghdad, from Mosul and Hormuz, and from many other places”. Clearly, Tabriz already was a major thoroughfare at his time which in the 19^th century came to be called the Silk Road (also Silk Route), a term we still use. Today it is often given a plural form because the East-West connection between China, Central Asia and Europe is a web of pathways rather than a single track. I was a bit worried about the engine trouble and therefore stopped in Tabriz not far from a gas station and only long enough to notice that in addition to the famous Masjed-e Moẓaffariya Mosque (which wasn’t there when Marco Polo came through) and other Islamic places of worship there were also churches, synagogues and temples of faiths unknown to me. A place where trade, cultures and religions meet since ancient times, it still exhibited a wide range of monuments, even to the passing observer.

[1] Tokyo American High School

[i] https://www.youtube.com/user/AnthonyPym

Creativity, Culture, Identity