In Albania I am able to establish that all Europeans and Americans are one heart and one soul. Racial memories of liftboys and bundles of stocks and shares form an indissoluble bond that is finally cemented when a gramophone sounds and couples contort themselves to dance. Rival diplomats fight shoulder to shoulder against mosquitoes, malaria and the least attempt on the part of a native to approach the culture they are bringing him. All the rivals who have clustered round this tough but — until now — unspoken-for morsel, march together and take their profits separately. Even journalists generously pass on to one another their snippets of false news from real sources. Early in the morning you can see military attachés greeting a barber who happens to be in their sector, and hence at the mercy of their protection. Veritable excellencies leave calling cards at unimportant addresses. Outside the embassies are no dismissive guards but a humble policeman or kavass. Where in Europe an unmannerly secretary remains seated, here a friendly dragoman rises to his feet. Gentlemen are on occasion capable of sharing a bed together just to confuse the local bugs. The brotherliness of the masters is as great as it would be in the last hour before the end of the world. They tremble before the volcano on which they dance their Charlestons. A couple of distinguished locals have been adopted in the circle of the foreign gods. Tirana has a tennis club where anyone who swings a racket and uses toothpaste is admitted. An Albanian colonel and national hero of Austrian ancestry and Western character offers a welcome subject of conversation. A couple of Albanian officials venture on a round of cards with the wives of English officers. A German company director plays poker with the Vice Consul of a Balkan state. Americans are friendly to Bulgarians, because they have a deal to sell sponges to Sofia, and Tirana is not yet in the bag. The odd minister may be seen helping an au pair as she takes her little European charges on a walk.
On some evenings there are parties. The English, who would be instantly recognizable even in their lounge suits, come in tails. On one such evening it transpired that a feudal yachtsman who hates the press and indeed any piece of paper not bearing a coat of arms, sat down and talked to me for fully half an hour — which I did not reciprocate. We drank whisky and soda, mixed by the White Russian who is running the bar here till such time as the czar is resurrected. People told each other stories. Because Tirana has gossip — the foreign gods don’t even notice how humane they are being.
We hear that the attractive girlfriend of the Albanian president is a Viennese girl from Ottakring by the name of Franzi. She was seen driving a Fiat. When? This afternoon! What time? Twenty past four! What was she wearing? A new hat! Describe the hat! It was red! — Major X, adjutant of the President’s sister, refused permission to a young Albanian official to dance with her. When the young man did anyway, the Major had him arrested. He spent three days in Tirana gaol. The barbarousness of it! splutter the foreign gods. Even though in Bavaria writers often spent years behind bars, without ever seeing an adjutant. In America Charlie Chaplin is boycotted because he kissed his wife on the mouth and elsewhere. In France, remember, there was a certain Dreyfus. In Italy individuals with sound digestion are made to guzzle castor oil. But Albania — Albania is unspeakable.
Diplomats have to prove they are representing their national interests. They hover — extraterritorial as they are — like flies on a cheese cloche, buzzing back and forth in large automobiles, pay calls on one another, snoop on one another, take counsel together, make mountains out of molehills, encode them, and wire them home. Then the situation becomes tense. There is a rush to arms. Then a journalist trots along to the telegraph office. He hears a toot. It was the horn of an ambassador. In the newspaper it was the fire brigade of our special correspondent. The newspaper eavesdrops on the diplomat. The diplomat believes what he reads. What have you heard? Armed bands in Scutari? Have you spoken to the military attaché? Haven’t you heard? Salonica? Sazan? Gunboats? Hydroplanes?
In the meantime the Albanian peasants work their fields, the traders sell traditional opanci shoes, the blacksmiths hammer out saucepans, the saddlers stitch saddles. But every morning brings march-past, drums, reveille, knee-bends. Sooner or later, you’re going to get shot. By the Italians? By the South Slavs? — Who cares? War is war.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 July 1927
38. Article about Albania (Written on a Hot Day)
Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring. Its mountains are sometimes of an uncertain clear substance, so that you might take them for shards of glass painted green. It’s only on dull days, when the sky isn’t clouded over so much as swaddled in a thin overcoat of cloudy stuff, that you feel they might be rock after all. They have become more massive, implacable, and the whole country feels like a locked courtyard, ringed by the walls of a natural prison. Freedom is a relative concept, you sense that there are no railways at hand to lead us into our century, that ships two hours, four hours, twelve hours from here, only put in once a week at an Albanian port, and the exoticism of it is twice as hard to bear as a self-chosen torment. Viewed from the distance of Berlin, the phenomenon of the vendetta may well appear worth investigating. On its native terrain, though, it rather blurs into the background of filth, cockroaches, dark nights, broken oil lamps, fat spiders, malaria attacks and murky seaweed tea.
Under such circumstances, I am less receptive to the beauties of nature than those born optimists called tourists. At most, I might register: quiet blue days of simple sublimity; a hot sun that bakes even your shadow, and that is palpable in every cool recess; a few birds (a rarity here, because the shooters are so assiduous) in the air and of course also on the branches; forests of an unfathomable stillness, depth and darkness. A few houses, windowless, fortress-like, deaf and blind cubes of stone, coarse, enigmatic and tragic, redolent of destiny and secret curses. On each of these buildings that are so arranged as to offer rest to a murderer, refuge to a pursued man, security to a whole clan, lies the so-called charm of eeriness, which I would sooner not get too close to. Without the permission of the master of the house, one may not set foot in the meanest hut. But with his permission, the hospitality is life-threatening. Hospitality is a fine custom, among the noblest proofs of humanity. But there is every justification for it too in the selfish thought that among people who have instituted blood revenge for justice, a man needs to rest up somewhere, because sooner or later everyone will end up as a fugitive. If you are resolute in your sceptical thinking, then you will come to the conclusion that a good police force is actually preferable to hospitality. May Albanians and others forgive me that I am not sufficiently gifted to admire unproductive conservatism in the way it should be admired. Unfortunately, alongside other habits that I revere, the Albanians have one that I merely understand: they are utterly intent on preserving old habits, not only stressing their Albanianism at the expense of their humanity, but also cultivating their tribalism at the expense of their nation. Albanians who live outside Albania like to shut themselves away, marry only one another, and remain suspicious of their new settings. Even in America, they remain Albanians, talk to each other in Albanian, and at the end of a few decades away, return, why? — in order to go around in a cartridge belt in Albania. Like other small peoples, they have that kind of national feeling that causes the nation to die and keeps the national culture impoverished. Hence the fact that the Albanian language still has no word for “love”, no fixed terms for the colours of the rainbow, no particular word for “God”; that Albanian literature could be a richer or at the very least a more accurate representation of Albanian life today, but remains as simple as the first songs of European humanity and lags behind the development of even this laggardly country. The materials of the literature are bucolic family sagas. Alongside the patriotic conservatism, tribal rivalries exist at the expense of the nation, and religious fanaticism at the expense of religion. It’s not as though the Albanians are particularly devout. But their membership of a faith in and of itself leads them to look askance at members of others.