What I love about this city are its wholly unexpected combinations. I had been introduced to them by the sentence: My name is Fatma and I work for Solidere. Which for us would be the equivalent of: My name is Matthias and I work as an investment banker for Deutsche Bank London. One half of the family supplies Lebanese Prime Ministers, the other half played an important part in the PLO. The minute she orders a hamburger or I make saltimbocca, she asks for ketchup while tugging her evening gown into place.

We spent the weekend at an old hotel in the Chouf Mountains. As Katrin and I walked through the restaurant, I was given very chauvinistic glances. I was looked up and down by each of the establishment’s 20 guests: There is no way this twatty tramp can afford this. What has become of our values. The pleasant colonialist arrogance of the French-speaking bourgeoisie. May it be placed under wildlife protection – if such a thing existed here.

Now the Hezbollah fighters are fighting in Syria; there are 10 casualties every week in Tripoli; or fighters pass through the city centre. During the civil war, the country was paralysed. Now the civil war is simply happening in parallel. One notices as much of it in Beirut as one does in Berlin. Only on television, on the Hezbollah channel, we see burials of fallen fighters in an incessant loop; yet it seems unlikely that the Ashrafieh shiksas are watching the Hezbollah channel.

It is the same thing with the fruit: it looks like nothing, yet tastes great. They are fruits from before the EU reform. Sprayed, but all of them original species.

Spiegel online is yakking about Taksim Square, writing that Turkey cannot be accepted into the EU under these circumstances. They don’t seem to notice that the point has long been the Sunni-Arabic union, and that goddamn fucking Europe has long fallen by the wayside.

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Translated by Maude Capelle

Two years ago, the public bus system was abolished. And now these buses are rusting away at the bus terminals. Most of them have a flat tire; or nocturnal visitors have taken what they needed.

Nobody gives a thought to scrapping or selling the vehicles. A strange thing, this neo-liberalism. All of Beirut’s pavements are fully parked up at all times. And over the course of four months in this city, I have never seen anybody issuing parking tickets. However, short-distance transport by share taxi works perfectly.

Together with my students, I am working towards a May edition of X Apartments, a project in which artists create installations in private homes. A project that makes the artistic gaze voyeuristically meet private reality. I developed X Apartments at the Theater der Welt festival in the Ruhr region; later versions were staged in Berlin, Istanbul, Warsaw, São Paolo. Spectators walk from one flat to the next. On each tour, they see seven pieces, each lasting around ten minutes. I don’t know how spectators in Beirut are supposed to walk from one flat to the next. It is impossible to manoeuvre on the pavement. And on the street one is grazed fondly by cars’ wing mirrors.

Searching for venues, we visited a very friendly Palestinian camp – Mar Elias. But I also want to see the camps in Sabra and Shatila. In 1982, Christian militias, covered by the Israeli army, perpetrated a horrific massacre. Jean Genet and Oriana Fallaci wrote about it; the Israeli animated film “Waltz with Bashir” is concerned with it.

The market in front of the camp is full of people. We eat warm hummus and foul for a song. One enters Sabra through a round arch. A few metres in, one’s nose fills with the stench of rubbish, the whole facility is totally run-down. Visitors are greeted with hostile glances. A few youngsters are sitting at the intersection and playing with their guns. We don’t really disturb the drug trade, but aren’t quite welcome either.

In the camps, the Lebanese police and the military hold no authority. We are happy to be back outside. Nobody has said a word. We can forget about staging our project here. For the Lebanese, it conforms to the cliché of foreign observers that they are always edging towards these camps. Anyway, no matter what a piece might tell here, it is just impossible, way too dangerous.

We go back to our bohemian ghetto. The weather is beautiful. We want to go to the sea, to a café. As we are driving through Downtown Beirut, I think: actually, the Palestinians should be resettled in this neighbourhood, in these fancy houses. The total lack of life on the streets seems absurd.

Palestinians have only been allowed to work for a few years, although not as doctors, architects, or lawyers. They have been living here since 1949. The Hezbollah may be fighting against Israel, but it wants no civic rights for the Palestinians: as fully-fledged citizens, they would shift the delicate balance in favour of the Sunni.

We want to form a party: the Palestinian Bohemian Party. Civic rights for all Palestinians, public beaches for all – and the introduction of sewage treatment plants!

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Translated by Maude Capelle
The German version of the text can be accessed here.