This trip was meant to be a relaxing trip to some fantastic places that I have come through on my cycling trip to the North (yes, back then, I kept it very vague where this ominous North actually is) a few years ago. This time, I wanted to travel together with my mom to enjoy a bit of mother-daughter-quality time after having lived on the other side of the world for almost two years. The idea was to hang out together, talk, read some books, and enjoy the incredibly rough nature of the North.
But the trip turned out to be touching something so big I would not have been able to anticipate before. It was not just a trip north; it was a trip to family history, a journey to contemporary geopolitics and to finding or maybe even losing oneself in the barren beauty of the tundra in the Finmark … and overall, a trip to the importance of human connections and to a tiny glimpse of understanding the way the world works.
Mom and I left Germany a couple of days after the European Parliament election, which unmasked a clear right-wing orientation, not just in Germany. We had two requirements to our way north: we wanted to stop for the day in Oslo to check out the new Munch Museum and the futuristic Opera House, which resembles an iceberg in the City Harbor of Oslo. Also, we wanted to fly to Kirkenes, an essential place for me during my cycling trip. So, we flew out of Berlin (never again: such a long trip to even get to the airport located in the south of the capital), had a stop-over in Copenhagen, where we spent the night, and caught an early morning flight to Oslo to explore the Norwegian capital before heading out to Kirkenes in the evening. Approaching our final airport in the northeastern corner of the European Union, barren tundra with its ruggedness, shrubs, and shattered little lakes appeared beneath us. Somewhere down there was the border to Russia: in this isolated nothingness, it wasn’t even indicated by a fence or wall. But there were also no buildings, just some lonely roads that would eventually lead to either Kirkenes, south to Finland, or east to Murmansk in Russia. We touched down roughly after 8 pm; there were no other planes, and it briefly crossed my mind that it wouldn’t even get dark up here at that time of the year. We were 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.
Embarking from the plane, the cold tundra summer air hit my lungs, and a weird familiarity rushed over me: I had been here before, and I couldn’t stop pointing out places, like road crossings where I rode my bike, to my mom on our way to the city.
On the plane, I listened to a podcast a friend asked me to hear as she was curious about my opinion. It was an interview with a woman from the West of Germany who lives in the German East and fights off endless conflicts with nazi neighbors in the little town she now calls home. I didn’t know what to think about it because she seemed to be just another person from the West who wanted to explain how the East functions or how it doesn’t. But it also strung a cord as I had just experienced a change in Germany myself and started to feel an intense alienation from the region where I was born and raised. I began to realize that when living abroad, you continue to value a culture and identity based on your experiences from when I left Germany, and my perception and construction of my identity couldn’t keep track of how Germany develops. My identity, which has a solid East German aspect, got quite shattered, and I was hoping to sort myself out while in Norway. But this place confronted me with yet another aspect of my identity that is also constructed as a result of the family into which I was born. The Northern region of Norway and Finland, the so-called Finmark, was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945. About 160,000 German soldiers were stationed in the region around Kirkenes as this area was valuable to Nazi Germany because of mining iron ore and intending to conquer the Arctic Ocean port and fleet base of the Soviet Union in Murmansk. My great-grandfather was one of them.
Mom and I visited Grenselandmuseet (Borderland Museum). We learned that this region up here, in Finmark, 15 km from Russia as the crow flies, 180 km by road to Murmansk, with nuclear submarines in the harbor, was a hard-fought piece of land in World War II. Awareness of this left quite some impressions: first and foremost, history repeats itself, on a different scale, yes, with the war in Ukraine. The artifacts and displays at the museum showed the horrors of war, and we left with a heavy heart. Natural resources, access to the sea, and expansion of the country’s borders. They didn’t reckon with the cold, ice, and hunger. I read many things in the museum today, many thoughts crossed my mind: what will be written in museums about Russia’s war in Ukraine in 70 years? Many war crimes are being repeated right now in Ukraine. There were Nazi war atrocities up here on the Arctic Ocean. That should never happen again. Also, I was scared to eventually come across my great-grandfather in some of these pictures. It is not a family secret that he was stationed up in Norway, it is not a secret that he was taken prisoner in Stalingrad, and it was never a secret that he was a prisoner of war and only came back from Siberia sometime in the 50’s. But being in the Finmark, being confronted by the realities of this area in a museum and seeing bunkers in the tundra and talking to people whose parents or grandparents were partisans during the war and fought against the occupants made family history very real and reminded of a responsibility we should never forget.
Mom and I spent a couple of nights in a rustic hotel above a Chinese restaurant in the „city center“ of Kirkenes. It is time to reveal why Kirkenes is so important to me in the first place: when I was a little girl in the 80s (in the GDR), my grandmother used to look after me after Kindergarten and Primary School. We spent many hours flipping pages in an old Atlas. I was fascinated by places whose names suggested exotism and distance. There were two places, in particular, I was staring at as if this would instantly beam me there. That was Urumqi in the Northwest of China and Kirkenes in the Northeast of Norway. Remote places, nothing overly attractive to find there.
I was always interested in something other than obviously pretty places. Repeatedly, I put my little finger on those places on the worn pages of my grandmother’s old Atlas. I marveled and wondered how these places were. My grandmother laughed at me and said it was impossible to get there. Back in the days of the GDR, our travel realities were limited to summer retreats at the Baltic Sea. Everything was out of reach. But then 1989, the wall came down, and the world changed. I didn’t have to be a „Jungpionier „(a youth organization for schoolchildren in which they were prepared to become valuable and functioning members of the GDR) anymore; I graduated from high school, graduated with a master’s in four different disciplines and found myself traveling to Urumqi in 2008 as I made the best out of my time while I was teaching German in China back then. I went back there again the following year, taking my mom along. We found ourselves in a locked-down city as the conflict between Han Chinese and Uighurs escalated. It breaks my heart to hear and read sparse news about this province of China these days. A whole ethnicity is suppressed and forced to assimilate. But Urumqi was no longer an exotic and distant place; it became a real place, forever connected to me by memories, experiences, and mental pictures.
„Kirkenes“, the name of that other place, suddenly appeared on a road sign in the middle of nowhere in northern Finland. Back then, for a few weeks, I was on a bike trip, and I started with the idea of going north, wondering how far north I would cycle or what this North even is. The monotony of the long and lonely roads through endless birch tree forests that at some point got replaced by pine trees and then shrubs suddenly had to give way to amazement. If I’d continued straight, I would eventually make it towards Sweden and the Northern Cape in Norway. If I turned right, I’d reach the Norwegian-Finnish Border … and Kirkenes. I didn’t even stop riding to contemplate; I immediately turned right, and sudden adrenaline flushed through my body. Kirkenes did not disappoint: it was the barren, rough, weather-tortured town I imagined over 30 years ago. I loved it; however, the ever-shining midnight sun added a surreal touch to being there. If only my grandmother were still alive.
Now, I was back to this place, this time with my mom. It is home to about 3400 people and is located at the north-easternmost tip of Europe. This idea of being so far away from the busy hustle of central Europe only added to the barren and wild feel of being up here. This town also brought up some geopolitical realities. As Russia is so close, Kirkenes was a bustling place for Norwegians and Russians alike. There was even a visa waiver policy for people living within a 30 km border perimeter. Russian fishermen had their boats repaired in the shipyard in Kirkenes, Norwegians went to the Russian side for shopping, and families used to live on both sides of the border. Now, the border is closed. Opposite the Russian consulate, you can find a makeshift memorial for Nawalny; families are separated, no Russians are shopping in Norwegian supermarkets anymore, and no Norwegians are buying cheaper alcohol in Russia. This significantly impacts the town as jobs become redundant, and now people leave the area to search for employment elsewhere. The only people who move to Kirkenes are Asian doctors and nurses because Norway lacks these professions. I can only imagine how they adapt to the area in which the sun only shines for half a year and where everyone who didn’t grew up there struggles.
