Letters from Liechtenstein (2): Newts and iridescent figures

There are some things I don’t understand, at least not without help. There is Karel Čapek’s famous novel from 1936, which is classified in the documentary fiction genre: “The War with the Newts.” Without Hans Ticha’s illustrations, I would know even less than before who the newts actually are. Fictional descendants of the giant salamander who were first made into willing slave workers and then – like Frankenstein’s monster – the scourge of humanity? In Ticha’s case, they are bizarre fighting machines that an immature artificial intelligence could have dreamed up. Then a defense conference takes place in Vaduz in Liechtenstein, but it does not bring any satisfactory results. This can be read as a parable of a world on the brink.

Why am I thinking about this now on my evening walk through Balzers on the Swiss border, where I am surrounded by expensive Swiss cell phone providers who are trying to displace the inexpensive Liechtenstein network as unnoticed as possible? Because a car parked on the side of the road speaks to me and the headlights melodically fade in and out to the rhythm of the language. This is pure apocalyptic documentary fiction like Čapek’s, except that the newt here is a souped-up car that speaks to me in a John Wayne voice. I walk faster, you can almost call it running. What did it say? So a talking car is pretty crazy, but if I stopped to listen to it, what would you call it?

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Yes, that is Liechtenstein too. You can do a lot to combat boredom. There’s also a Böhse-Onkelz revival band here that I listened to online and to my untrained ears it sounds like the original. Like a talking car on the side of the road that lets out battle cries like those you hear in small German towns. I realized how small Leichtenstein is when I read in the leading medium “Das Vaterland” what the most common children’s names were in this country in 2023: nine times Sophia and five times Julian. Clear conditions! It’s hard to believe that big politics is always at play here. Around 2008, there were serious disagreements between Germany and Liechtenstein at the highest state level. Prince Hans-Adam II had angrily called Germany (the current one!) the “Fourth Reich,” which for Berlin exceeded the limits of what was acceptable. The reason was German government attempts to break Liechtenstein’s banking secrecy in order to collect its own taxes.

People don’t like that kind of thing here. I, on the other hand, don’t like being woken up early in the morning by submachine gun fire at least once a week. The war with the newts? No, this is the tireless Swiss army that has rented a training area in Liechtenstein. It bangs and shoots for two hours, then all you can hear is the ringing of the cows’ bells up on the mountain pasture. It is said that armed soldiers from the Swiss Army have invaded Liechtenstein several times, which caused irritation in Vaduz. But the Swiss had simply gotten lost in the heat of the maneuver battle in the confusing borderland.

A whole series of dazzling figures also found their way to Liechtenstein. Probably the most famous was Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, born in Kherson in 1912, who died at the age of 106! – in his villa “Askania Nova” in Vaduz, unfortunately not peacefully, but in a house fire. His villa was called “Askania Nova” after the huge nature reserve with exotic animals and half a million sheep that his family owned in the Ukrainian-Russian border area – exactly where the front line in the war between Russia and Ukraine currently runs. The first time the area was devastated was after the October Revolution, the second time when Hitler’s troops attacked the Soviet Union. By then, however, the Falz-Fein family had long since fled to their summer residence in Nice. In 1936, as a sports reporter, Falz-Fein sat a few rows behind Hitler and saw how he reacted with consternation to the victory of the outstanding Jesse Owens in the 100-meter dash. It probably had nothing to do with the superiority of the Aryan race!

Baron Falz-Fein was a survivor of the kind we love here. Someone who celebrates the operetta of his life. The impoverished nobleman once again became a rich man in Vaduz – through his souvenir shop, where he sold postcards to day-trippers. His ultimate goal in life was to find the Amber Room. For this he offered a large reward.

But its whereabouts remain a secret, as do the customer data of the Liechtenstein banks or the further identification of the newts at Čapek. So let no one say that the modern world has lost its secrets. I think that’s good, because without secrets there would be no poetry.

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