One week in Kutina (Croatia).

I am in the car all day, tired and tense. The entire drive from Jablonec to Kutina the radio remained silent, but not my thoughts. They jumped in every conceivable direction, bringing out a range of emotions. From happiness to anger. From fear to joy. From doubt to euphoria. Everything was there.

But all words fall silent, all feelings freeze as the town sign comes out of the darkness into the light. Black on dull yellow: Kutina. The exit to my destination. The place I am from. This is where my roots are. And now I am back.

My body is flooded with all kinds of positive feelings at this moment. There is not one ambivalent, doubtful thought left. Even though I can't imagine living here, not at this moment, arriving here, being here feels good. It really pulls me into this city, which is already covered by night.

After paying the toll, I immerse myself in a quiet city. It seems abandoned, sleepy. I am moving slowly through the center and then rest in an abandoned parking lot. I open the window and a warm breeze blows in. The air is thick, warm and it immediately reminds me of home. A home I had to leave decades ago. A home that still feels like one, but isn't one anymore.

Where is home? A question I struggled with all my life. Home always seems a partial thing to be. Often I didn’t feel home even if I‘d been there. In the last decade my wife has become my home, in my youth the small town in the Black Forest I grew up, in my childhood this city where I am returning to right now. And where will it be in the future? Will I ever arrive at a place and call it home again? The one thing that seems clear to me, I am here to connect with my past and not find a future. But isn't the past always a part in the future?

My days get a rhythm, not much different than usual. Most of one day is filled with work. I am sitting at my big white desk, which I took along with me last year. In front of me windows to the world. The world here consists of a field that separates two houses. It has never been built on. Once it was said that a road should be constructed on the property. But this was never realized. Also, no one has ever dared to build a house on it. Nobody even seems to know who the owners are. 

There are two trees in the field, broken in the middle. A few weeks ago, a heavy storm passed over the area. Within few minutes it broke trees or tore them out of the soil, stripped roofs, severely damaged buildings, frightened people. The heavy storm is said to have lasted less than 15 minutes. Roads turned into rivers, some of them have been impassable since then. A lot of things were swept aside, cleaned up, left lying around, never completely removed. A new reality some people have to face from now. 

I fill the afternoons with mostly short walks in the city center, the park and the sports field. Again and again, I pass the cemetery and visit the graves of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, other relatives and acquaintances. But also a small area containing Jewish graves, which have their own place at the edge of the old cemetery, like they don't belong to the rest of the population. And it seems there is no one left. I've never heard of Jewish people in this town. Maybe those where the last ones. 

Their gravestones bear German and Jewish inscriptions. They date from around 1900. They were citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and part of this city. Only a few of the stones are still standing, most of them covered by moss and grass, illegible. But because of this, they possess their own charm and have their own history. A history no one seems to remember. 

In front of the cemetery stands the old church, once one of the most beautiful and magnificent sacral buildings in Eastern Europe. So says a plaque in front of it. The richly decorated interior with countless figures and colorful paintings still bears witness to this day. But the outer facade has been crumbling and decaying for decades. Every evening when I pass by, a mass is being held. The heavy wooden doors are wide open during this time, and the chanting and steady prayers can only be heard when you stand at one of the gates. 

My grandmother was a regular visitor. She didn't have to go far. Just over a kilometer up the road stands the house where she lived and I spent my early years. The house is still there, but it is only sparsely held up by rotten wooden beams and broken bricks. Once my grandfather built it himself with his brothers. Somewhere near the house he put the year of completion into the concrete. The exact date I can't remember. Every time I visit the house, I forget to look for it.

The house looks miserable. The roof has caved in and the walls are cracked. I've wondered if the cracks were made worse by the fact that I loved to shoot my red rubber ball at it so much when I was a kid. Or they were simply caused by that, because that's the way things go. Things crack before they break and fall apart. And then become history. 

The cemetery overlooks the part of the city from which the chimneys of the chemical company rise into the sky. In wartime, this was a strategic target. I remember the sirens, the associated power outages with the completely dark and silent nights. The tense waiting. The sound of fighter jets breaking the silence. Artillery fire that lit up the night. The detonations. And the silence that returned afterwards. The cleanup the next day. The adjusting and preparing for the next attack. The rhythm of war. A rhythm that I surprisingly quickly got used to. Its history, too. 

Everywhere I go, I recognize history. History lies in time. Sometimes buried, sometimes only covered, but always there and to be discovered as soon as one stops, looks and observes. This is what I try. I stop now and then, take a deep breath and hope to feel myself, hope to perceive my own body and the environment I am in. And with this sometimes comes a surprise, like catching a sunset. The light so beautifully colorful and wide, from the horizon to the sky, clothed in yellow and red. 

And then I visit the living, my aunt, my uncle, the few I still have a connection to here and share a story with. And of course my parents. They are short, beautiful visits that remind me of the positive facets of my past. In their present I feel being home. With them, history comes alive. 

Some interesting, but also disturbing interviews on the YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly.

This two stood out: