Croatia and Serbia lie behind us. We will ride exclusively in Romania until we reach Constanta. This is mid-term, the first seven days and almost the eighth are over. We have gone around 900 kilometres by bike, and the remainder should be considerably less.
We have – in the truest possible sense of the word – wound or way through Serbia and Croatia. Some time ago, these countries were part of Yugoslavia. For us children of the Cold War, Yugoslavia was somehow very special.
Yugoslavia was – although doubtless part of the Eastern economical block – officially neutral. They had great athletes and with Tito a leader who was hard to judge and yet in some way extraordinary. Was he a curse or a blessing for the country? Early on, Peter Scholl-Latour had predicted that Yugoslavia would disperse immediately after Tito’s death. In our youth, we had an ambivalent attitude towards Yugoslavia.
Emotionally spoken, however, the country seemed “better” than the normal “Eastern Block” countries to us. As opposed to this, Albania, for instance, was totally alien and strange and we considered it more sinister and backwards-oriented.
I myself have peculiar memories of Yugoslavia. The first time Yugoslavia gained any significance for me was when a young woman I vaguely knew went there in order to have an abortion.
In Germany, this was the “my abdomen belongs to me”- time. It was (still) illegal to have an abortion; famous women came out in magazines. In order to have an abortion, young women went to England or Yugoslavia, England being by far the more costly alternative. It was called “abortion tourism”. At the time, Yugoslavia was a model for many feminists.
Personally, I went through Yugoslavia for the first time in my life in 1973, on my way to Greece. For me, that was a sobering experience. I was shocked to see how the campgrounds looked and how poorly the distribution of necessities was organized. Consequently, I tried to get to Greece as fast as possible, where everything was different and it felt like paradise to me.
This experience was quite similar to my first visit to the GDR in 1989, before the re-unification. During the 1960-ies, we always mistrusted the official propaganda by the BRD on the “Soviet Zone”. We believed that there had to be some positive sides to the coin. I would never have thought it possible to witness the downfall of the GDR as I saw it early in 1989.
It seems to me that “communism” did its (poor) job in many countries of the Eastern block. Going through the successor states of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia, I was surprised about all the positive aspects I witnessed. A lot has happened. After what I saw, I would say that Serbia definitely belongs to the EU.
And today I went through the EU country Bulgaria and spend my first night in the EU country Romania. It is definitely an interesting development.
RMD
(translated by EG)
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