Lebanon – The Queen of the World

On July 26, 1850, the French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) wrote to his mother: »Before us Beyruth with his white, half -based houses that were ranging to the edge of the waves, in the middle of the green of the mulberry trees and the pine. Then the Lebanon on the left. This means that a mountain chain with villages in the furrows of his valleys, crowned by clouds, and with snow on the summit. Uh! Poor mother, see, at that moment the tears stand in my eyes when I think that you are not there, that you don’t enjoy all these beautiful things like me, you who love them so much. How would I be happy if I saw your poor face, here, next to me, how it is amazed at these fabulous landscapes. «

In the anthology “Beirut” published by Dareg A. Zabarah-Chulak, published in the great series “Reading Europe” from the Wieser publishing house, Flaubert’s impressions of Beirut have not found any receipt. There is also no indication that Beirut in the 1960s was a center of contemporary art of global importance. An empty space is also the work of the well -known Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972), who died as a spokesman for the Palestinian Pflp by a car bomb of the Israeli secret service. Extracts from Jean Genet’s report »4 hours in chatila« are also missing. The French playwright and poet Genet (1910-1986) was in Beirut when in September 1982, one day after the Lebanese president Bechir Gemayel, under the eyes of Israeli militias in the Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila carried out a massacre. Genet went to Schatila and wrote: “When I saw those of chatila, I saw the horror.”

However, the anthology “Beirut” contains enough travel reports, poems and prose texts to create a wide -ranging picture of the city that was often referred to as “Paris of the Orient”. It is also considered a paradigmatic case of the urbicide, the destruction of a city, as well as a pioneering in terms of reconstruction after the civil war (1975–1990) and the devastation by the Israeli army (2006). However, the damage to the explosion of around 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the Beirut port in August 2020, a suspected episode of corruption, in which 300,000 people became homeless, have not yet been remedied.

The book was compiled by the Israeli Air Force in 2024 before the bombing of Beiruts. After the Hisbollah had attacked goals in Northern Israel during the Gaza War, Pager and Walkie-Talkies exploded alleged members of the Hezbollah in September, with at least 37 people killed and injured around 3000. Later the Hisbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah died in the Beiruter suburb of Dahieh from an Israeli air raid.

“Beirut” begins with travel reports from the 19th century: Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880) saw an “old dark, from loud rubble and caves assembled, black as if they were borrowing”. The city has “nothing recommendable”, but when you come from Damascus, beyond “highly civilized”. And: “By the way, Beirut is just as old, at least documented when his two famous neighbors Tyrus and Sidon, because the Bible leads it under the name Berytus.” Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer (1816–1877) found Beirut as “prison -like” and “breastbing”. And on top of that »an unbearable smell arises from the streets and vaults. The inconvenience was increased by the urging and bumping of the many people in the streets; The city was at the moment crowded with English and Turkish soldiers, Bedouins, Arabs, mountain peoples etc. «

The pacifist Alfons Paquet (1881–1944) from a strictly Baptist Wiesbaden family felt in a hint of anti -Semitism a synagogue in Beirut as “the church of strangers who live in our cities and perhaps add homesick”. For Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Beirut’s almond and apple trees in April “Like Nymphs in Snow White, such as heavenly brides, the mother nature sends nature to the poets and artists”. For him, Beirut was more beautiful in spring than in the other seasons; It is freed from both the mud of winter and the dust of summer «. The travel writer Kurt Faber (1883–1929), who had joined the NSDAP in 1926, was out of the question about the “pronounced nightlife”: “Of course it is cheap Montmartre, the back of Sankt Pauli, extreme Reeperbahn: Soldiers, sailors, dance locations, music boxes and loose women who already suffered from all the aforementioned species Until they finally found grace before Beirut, the last, the outermost, who Last hope.«

The Swiss writer, journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908–1942) enjoyed a Beiruter Volksfest: »There were dancers and jugglers, dressed monkeys, knife fighters, fortune tellers. The audience stood in the circle: Bedouins and men from the mountains – in a thousand fantastic headgear, in high boots, in long gold -striped robes. «The Syrian Romancerist Khaled Khalifa (1964–2023) introduces Uncle Nisâr to a gay Syrian from Aleppo, who was always looking for what he was looking for: Old house bar, where the gay community gave itself every evening. In her poem “War sun in Beirut”, Etel Adnan (1925–2021) describes the city as “dirty syphilitic whore”.

According to Machmud Darwisch (1941–2008), Beirut is not a city, »but concept, meaning, name, term. (…) Here the constant MPs of every new ideology, every new sound, every new trend. ”Hanan al-Scheich, born in 1945, describes the sexual relationship of a woman to a hedge shooter who holds hidden in the opposite house. Pierre Jarawan, born in 1985, quotes a young American (“Beirut is so amazing”) and lets the readers know that in an “International DJs Night” DJ Hammer from Wuppertal was behind the mixer. In the poem “Beirut, Du Queen of the World” by Nizar Quabbani (1923–1998), who was a Syrian writer between 1945 and 1966 Diplomat in Beirut, Cairo, Madrid and London, it says: “What should we say, / DA out of your eyes / suffering of the whole human war? (…) I still love you, you crazy Beirut, / you electricity from blood and jewels. / I still love you, you great Beirut, / you obeyed the anarchy, / the godless hunger and the godless satiety. / I still love you, you just Beirut, / you obeyed the tyranny, / you bad Beirut, you Beirut the murderer and poet. «

A. A. Zabarah-Ch. (Hg.): Euro Engineer: Beirut. Wieser, 268 S., geb., 14.95 €.