Süd-West Afrika, Neu-Guinea, die Solomon-Inseln, Birma, Samoa, Malaysia, Saudi-Arabien, Griechenland, und so weiter und so fort - they all left their impressions on me; they all shaped me and made me into what I became and am today.
Ooops! Here I was, deliberately writing in German for all my German friends in Germany and the former German colony of South-West Africa, and without even realising it, I've lapsed back into English. It would never have happened had I stayed in South-West Africa where German is one of the three official languages, where a lot of architecture is of the Wilhelminian era long forgotten in Germany itself, and where Germans still speak the German language as pure as it was before globalisation.
With the help of Google Map I've just found the staff house I used to occupy in Lüderitz and, just to be sure, had it confirmed by some nice people in Lüderitz that I found on facebook. Not that all that much has changed in Lüderitz in a physical sense; the really big change has been politically and spiritually with the demise of the dreaded Apartheid.
The view from my then staff flat along Hamburger Straße is still as desolate today as it was when I was there in 1968/69, and I can almost still hear my neighbour Karl-Heinz Herzberg playing his nightly dirge "As tears go by". Both Marianne Faithful and Miriam Makeba's more upbeat "Click Song" helped to drown out the endlessly blowing wind from either the ocean in the west or the desert in the east. Sand was everywhere - sand and boredom - and it was almost a relief to go to the Dickensian "kantoor", even though it was just as bleak inside as it was outside.
The whole time I was there, I never spoke anything but German and never needed the "Afrikaans-Duitse en Duits-Afrikaanse Woordeboek" which I'd bought at the Callesen bookshop in Windhoek for Rand 1.75.
More than fifty years later, the same dictionary is still in my library, in almost mint condition, together with dictionaries of Arabic, Burmese, Farsi, French, Greek, Indonesian, Malay, Samoan, and Pidgin Inglis.
On a more cheerful note, here's a beautifully made video clip of Luderitz and its natural surroundings. Baie goed gedoen, Liska!!
Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld!
P.S. She also shot a video of nearby ghost town Kolmanskop - click here.
