By: Fritjof Meyer / Der SpiegelLa Javie, 1981
The country is communist, but almost nowhere, not even in Ronald Reagan's America, have such outrageous caricatures of both Brezhnev and Mao been published. National hero Skënderbeu, after whom the central square in the capital Tirana, a football club and an alcoholic drink are named. He was a practicing Catholic who was chosen by the Pope to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. But Catholicism, like any other religious practice, is punishable by law; even possession of the Bible is punishable by death, by firing squad. Taking foreign loans is prohibited by the Constitution. However, 200 million dollars came to the country from the Soviet Union, and even, five billion - according to Beijing - from China.
And when people in this country voted three years ago, every citizen cast their vote for the state party, exactly 100 percent (in the German Democratic Republic, it was only 99,86 percent in June 1981). A single voter with the right to vote did not exercise his right to vote.
The great leader of Albania is an intellectual who had his educational experience in France. He behaves like a feudal lord. The fact that his subjects nod when they agree, but nod and say "yes" when they mean "no", is considered a relic from the Orient.
In Albania, where people still pay homage to Joseph Stalin – even though his monument now stands in a place where the sun never shines; in Albania where the simple life is propagated, but at the same time the officials and their families go to a noble, the Hunting Lodge (Hunting Hotel on the outskirts of Lezha) that once served as a shelter for the Italian fascist, Count Ciano - in Albania everything it is different.
The 2.7 million inhabitants do not even call themselves Albanians, but "Skipetaren" ("Sons of eagles"), as Karl May already said. Therefore, their country is called the "Socialist People's Republic of Albania". And, compared to the walled German Democratic Republic, it is the world's most isolated state on the Adriatic, and yet it seems like it's on another planet.
Access to the inaccessible mountainous region is possible only at a border point in the north, at the half-Yugoslav, half-Albanian lake of Shkodra, and via the small airport of Rinas on the outskirts of the capital Tirana, where a Czechoslovak or East German plane arrives twice a week and the Greek "Olympic Airways" that have been "seated" once.
Visitor delegations, hand-picked by Albania's diplomatic missions abroad (individual visas are not available), must undergo rigorous checks: In the customs declaration, the brand of camera and everything brought with them is required, as well as a wristwatch, or an alarm clock, as well as for magazines and books that are brought individually. The content statement will be listed; the importation of Bibles or other religious literature is strictly prohibited.
The children of the country, carefully kept away from temptation, must not be terrorized by high consumption, distracted by foreign ideas, or—to which they seem to be especially susceptible—re-exposed to the belief in the old gods. They should also not be familiar with any foreign and unfamiliar fashion, which may suddenly irritate them.
This is why the foreign guest is not allowed to wear a mini or maxi skirt, or too baggy, or tight leather pants, and for male immigrants, long female hair and a full beard are prohibited: “The part between the ear and the chin , must be beardless," recommends a leaflet. (p. 147)
Not so long ago, at the airport a barber stood ready to trim the "violators" of this rule - in an adjacent room. Finally, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hang in the drawing room, their cheeks thickly overgrown with mustaches and long beards.
In the hidden corners of the old city, of the capital Tirana, the stranger often appears as the first stranger in decades - he looks at him with extraordinary curiosity, without turning his head, then crosses his path, but sees him only from the corner the eye. The "skippers" do not respond to greetings, withdraw from anxious conversations, and children who wave their hands in greeting receive a slap on the hand from their mother.
A special reception for uninvited visitors to Albania has already been announced at the airport of Tirana: around the runway, the place where like everywhere in the Republic of the "Scepter" is dotted and lined with small concrete hemispheres, open from behind. Front: bunker against a potential enemy.
There are dozens of them in fields and schoolyards, at road intersections and on mountaintops. Like chickenpox, the entire "Skipetare People's Socialist Republic" is covered by tens of thousands of communist-style buildings.
Compulsory military service of three years, plus one month in each subsequent year, applies as for men. The military salute is the raised fist, modeled after the Weimar-era German Red Front Association. The constitution provides for the death penalty for surrendering to the enemy in time of war.
Until now, since they were built three years ago, the bunkers have "scared" every opponent. In some cases the concrete is already crumbling, in others flowers are growing from the humus that has been piled up for camouflage. Only the bunker chains at the airport, under the apple trees, are occupied by soldiers.
"You wait", explains Aleks Buda, sophisticated historian and president of the Academy of Sciences of Albania, meaningfully and at the same time dismissively, for this unique precaution.
They are waiting - and for good reason: "Throughout its history, Albania has always been a prey to its neighbors, a transit zone for powerful people from all four sides - Greeks and Romans, Huns and Ostrogoths, Normans and the Slavs, Byzantines and Turks, who mixed with the existing Illyrians and imposed their own religions on them - particularly successful were the Turks, who stayed for centuries and cut the Albanians out of Europe, just as the Tatars once did the Russians or as they did the communists now, the Albanians.
Albania, otherwise communist xenophobic, allowed itself to be industrialized first by the Soviet Union, then by China, and now has messed with both red superpowers, with neighboring communist Yugoslavia anyway – Balkan strife in which a world war could break out again, as an Italian TV movie has already predicted.
Albania's irredentism, the Albanian-populated region of Kosovo but part of Yugoslavia, has been in open revolt against Slavic domination for months.
If war broke out between the two Balkan states, the Soviet Union could use the opportunity to intervene as an arbiter and advance into the Adriatic – and in the process retake possession of the four Soviet submarines based in the Albanian military port of Vlora (now part of of that small state), was simply commandeered when it split with Moscow in 1961.
Then the "imperialists" in the Kremlin, whom the leader of the Albanian party Enver Hoxha accuses of being "warmongers", with the aim of world domination, would finally have gained the base in the Mediterranean (Pashalimani) that Russia has desired for centuries. right in front of Italy.
The suggestion that the presence of the US Sixth Fleet can protect Albania from such developments almost leads to the collapse of the worldview of a factory director (national pride), trained in the German Democratic Republic: military aid from abroad, especially unsolicited, it is unthinkable for him.
Ever since her country became too dear to the Soviet leader, Khrushchev, 20 years ago and also to the Chinese three years ago, Albania has lived in complete and blissful isolation from the environment.
The odd country the size of Belgium is a member of the UN, but walked away from the Warsaw Pact with impunity during the Soviet occupation of Prague in 1968. Albania is the only European country that has not signed the Helsinki Declaration on Security and Cooperation of 1975, nor the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
There are no diplomatic relations with Washington and Moscow, nor with Bonn, which Tirana has recently seen as a failure. This is the only country in the world that still erects monuments to Stalin and also actively practices Stalinism. But unlike other parts of the world, where such experiments have been abandoned, Stalinism works very well here, at least for now:
A tidy country, well-cultivated fields, well-fed people who, though modest, live up to their standards. Standards by the standards of today's enlightened youth produce a suitable standard of living, completely independent.
This is - similar to North Korea - a kingdom of dreams of the "Greens" where there are no private cars, where the traffic police in "Skenderbey Square" almost only guides cyclists and pedestrians, where according to the Constitution no tax is imposed and where buses ( overcrowded) are zero fees, why not since everything is state owned anyway?
Farmers don't even have private gardens, 200 square meters like in China or two hectares like in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; there are still individual private farms in the mountains, but according to Hoxha (Enver), they are "step by step disappearing and disappearing".
All land, all livestock, all instruments of production belong to the state, which punishes theft of its property with at least four years in prison, while theft from private individuals is punished with at least one month in prison.
After all, all people belong to the state and its single party. "The party", says Hoxha, "guides and controls everyone, it demands accountability from everyone"! George Orwell's "Animal Farm" has come true here before. Enver Hoxha, now 73, re-elected to office by his party earlier this month, won power over Albanians at the age of 36 when Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Hoxha's mentor Stalin were still in office.
The son of a Mohammedan cloth merchant from Gjirokastra (southern Albania), where the people speak the Tuscan dialect – today the official national language – began his career: With a government scholarship he began his studies in Natural Sciences in France, where he was said to also write articles for the organ of the Communist Party "Humanite" and "Jura" in Belgium. There he became the secretary of the Embassy. But, because of his articles with a communist spirit, he was fired and returned to Albania in 1936 where the self-proclaimed King, Zogu, ruled.
Hoxha taught French at the high school in Korça. When the Italians invaded Albania, in the spring of 1939 (without much resistance), Hoxha opened a tobacco shop in Tirana, (Kinkaleri "Flora", our note) from where he is said to have plotted against the invaders.
A photo from those days that hangs in the house where he was born in Gjirokastër shows him as a "provincial dandy in Breçe" with a pistol in his belt and a cigarette casually in his hand.
Finally, on November 8, 1941, the day after the famous revolutionary parade in front of Stalin in besieged Moscow, Hoxha founded the Communist Party of Albania in the gorges of the Balkans and with it his fighting group which soon received Western help: the Anglo Command - American in Bari, from now on, no longer supported nationalists, religious and anarcho-partisans, but communists and Hoxha's partisans.
After the change of the Italian front in 1943, the Germans came who blew up the port of Durrës and in their torture cellar in Gjirokastër, they wrote the slogan: "Mr. Hoxha, who is with us, today demands two billion dollars, plus interest, from Boni and Zog's gold treasure deposited in the United Kingdom, in London banks. In the case of Italy, Hoxha was satisfied with damages of 2.6 million dollars.
When the Germans withdrew again at the end of 1944, Hoxha's 200 Communists took power and their reclusive Colonel-General Enver Hoxha also appointed himself the interim head of government.
Communists were considered nationally untrustworthy; they had agreed to a post-war settlement with their fellow Yugoslavs, on whose support they depended in the war against the Italians and Germans. Afterwards, the Albanian province of Kosovo had to be returned to the Serbs to whom it belonged since 1913, since the founding of Albania in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
Shameful for Hoxha and his comrades: the Italian invaders had shown more respect for the national feeling of the conquered than the Albanian partisans, and had united their colony of Albania with its eastern province of Kosovo. But, Hoxha was - at least at that time - not a nationalist, above all he knew how to correctly evaluate his realities and opportunities.
However, four years later, his fellow Yugoslavs thanked him badly for his sacrifice: Tito expanded his territory into the South Slavic Empire, which Bulgaria had already agreed to. Now Albania should be connected as well.
Then Stalin - who feared a powerful, communist and independent Balkan federation - saved Hoxha, broke with Belgrade and approached Tirana.
With the help of Stalin and later Mao, Hoxha did not regain eastern Albania, but made western Albania "flourish", his Albanian Republic.
He had found a desolate and isolated mountain landscape in which bandits and Muslim saints lived akin to Karl May's Mubarak, in which clans carried out their respective intergenerational blood feuds (hence why their fortified farms were far away), where people lived on maize porridge and could rarely afford a meal of meat, and where malaria crept from the swamps to the coast.
Today the swamps have dried up and malaria has disappeared. Every scrap of usable land is carefully cultivated – and that's about the best that can be said for a developing country.
Where corn and peppers have been harvested, the land has already been plowed with wooden plows or Chinese tractors. Many mountains are terraced, following the Chinese model. The markets sell tomatoes, peppers, melons and apples and you don't see any lines of buyers; the butcher sells prepackaged portions of meat and poultry.
Bread wheat no longer needs to be imported for five years. A network of paved roads connects villages and towns, and hydroelectric plants harness the power of mountain rivers. Albania has been fully electrified for eleven years and now electricity is exported to Greece and Yugoslavia.
Many mineral resources, first developed by the Italian conquerors, bring currency to the mountainous region: chrome, bitumen, copper and even more profitable thanks to a factory built by the Chinese, copper wire. The volume of trade with the Federal Republic (1980: 54 million marks) doubled this year.
The country now produces textiles, plastics, garbage, paper and radio equipment. "Sabotage", explains an official, and this is how he assesses the delay in the construction of a thermal power plant by the Chinese.
What is considered a success in Albania is that the population has doubled within 30 years. In the past, only one in seven residents had primary education, while today only one in two villagers has less than eight years of education, since Enver Hoxha came to power. There are 38 academicians in the country and since 1957 Tirana has a university, with currently 16 students.
A "Garden of Eden", in terms of material development, although created and cultivated by the sweat of its inhabitants. But they don't seem to reward their Stalinists enough for material progress. In any case, Enver Hoxha is currently exercising the most draconian dictatorship in Europe, against his own people, whose propaganda plus police characteristics are evident everywhere.
Albanians, as if they did not know the difference, are constantly reminded to whom they owe their standard of living. Apart from street signs and extensive shops, there is only one inscription in the whole country, on every building, on tiles every few kilometers, along the village road and in letters ten meters high, even on the walls of the mountains: "Long live our leader , Enver Hoxha" (Glory to Comrade Enver Hoxha), sometimes supplemented with slogans for the glory of the Party or of the "saints" Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
The single, but massive, picture ads show the leader, not in a Stalin robe, Mao jacket, or general's uniform, but in a striped vest and tie. As far as we can see, he is the only Albanian wearing a Western European hat.
The bailiff enforces loyalty to the state and order at every street corner. Only when an official hits a cyclist in a car is there no police officer to be seen. After trying in vain to steer the bike, the gentleman simply continues on his way.
According to the statements of the refugees, who in no way deny the increase in the standard of living in the country, peace is also ensured by a totalitarian surveillance system, which is also being promoted under the motto "Raise the revolutionary vigilance"!
Even a quick visit to Enver Hoxha's empire shows camps with watchtowers equipped with machine guns and, just before Shkodra in the north, even two hundred teams of shaved-headed forced laborers digging a drainage ditch, watched from a few hundred meters away. away from a chain of riflemen in military uniform, all at full alert.
Those intellectuals, whom Enver Hoxha once used as polyglots and cosmopolitans, are now particularly affected by repression. They are completely cut off from the rest of the intellectual world, and the censorship does not allow any printed text to pass that might be disturbing.
Shadows of the past, in the last century, reactionaries poisoned a teacher who had smuggled ABC primers from abroad into Albania. The Durrës Theater is named after the Berlin actor of the 1920s-30s, Aleksandër Moisu, whose father came from Albania.
However, none of the pieces in which he appeared under director Max Reinhardt have ever been performed in Durrës. The only bookstore for international literature in Tirana offers about 50 titles, a quarter of which come from abroad: specialized books from the German Democratic Republic.
As in China's Cultural Revolution, every high school graduate must do manual labor in the countryside or in a factory before, during, and after studies, at the same time testing their political affiliation. No matter how talented he may be in his subject, he is not allowed to continue teaching if he proves to be ideologically unreliable to the collective.
Mao's "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" offered Hoxha the opportunity for an act of terror against the religious needs of the people, which the regime apparently could no longer afford, except by attacking churches and mosques. Different religions, an observer explains, in Albania "where the unity" of the people is endangered, as if conditions, like those in Lebanon, had been announced.
On February 6, 1967, while the world watched the rampage of the Red Guard in China, Enver Hoxha, without attracting much attention outside Albania, called on high school students to attack religious buildings. They occupied the country's 2 houses of worship, turned some into dance halls, museums, warehouses, and razed most of them.
It was a blast for Durrës high school students! They were the first to be allowed to drag mullahs and priests through the streets and mock them, put them in "productive work" or bring them before a "people's court". This too has a tradition. In Roman times, the first Christians were thrown to the lions in the amphitheater of Durrës.
Enver Hoxha's Albania, an isolated country in which when he came to power in 1944, over two-thirds of the inhabitants were Mohammedans and the rest were Orthodox Christians and Catholics, no longer has a single place of worship. Hoxha's Albania is (according to her self-assessment) "the first atheist country in the world".
Some art monuments remained standing, chapels from the Byzantine period, the Mosque of Haxhi Et'hem Bey in Tirana. But, they are difficult to reach, and even when the chief Albanian archaeologist wants to show the treasures to a group of scientists from the West, who have come for this purpose in the old city of Berat, there is a fierce debate with the local security officer State.
After an hour, perhaps after asking the Ministry, the gates were opened when the Byzantines encountered ruins and debris in front of the uncovered frescoes.
The Albanian agitator proudly points to the Cathedral of Shkodra, which has been transformed into a "beautiful sports hall". The tall arched windows have been bricked up, the towers have been cut and corrugated iron now covers the nave. The local Franciscan monastery was burned down by atheist communists in 1967, and the Bishop of Shkodra, Çoba, made a living as a charioteer.
In Shkodër there is also an "Atheist Museum", not so furnished with stolen church property as the one in the former Leningrad Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, but in the same Der Sturmer style, posters, photos, discovered weapons, confiscated, devotional objects and so on, Bibles smuggled under Marx's revealingly misquoted words: "Religion is the opium of the people".
The exhibitions teach the besieged believers of Shkodra that religion is unscientific, contradictory and dishonest: "The church, this international drug trafficker, justified violence and exploitation, got rich at the expense of the people and occasionally collaborated with the fascists".
A still valid idol whose ideology was similarly flawed and whose party committed at least the same sins stands in granite a few feet from this chamber of horrors: Stalin.
Following his example, this red state is also striving for a strong National Socialism as a replacement ideology for the abandoned religion and celebrates the national heroes of the past, such as the feudal prince Skanderbeg who resisted the Turks 500 years ago (in the end without success). And, while the national flag showed a red meringue, with the black eagle on it.
Skanderbeg's successor, Enver Hoxha, has recently extended the history of his people to Roman times, similar to his Romanian colleague Ceausescu, who for this purpose declared the Dacians as the direct ancestors of today's Romanians.
In Hoxha's case, it is the Illyrians who disappeared from history no later than the fifth century AD, but some of their completely unknown language is said to live on in modern Albanian. As with the Dacians of Romania, it is significant that the Illyrian ancestors (rediscovered in the 19th century) were not Slavs.
Daily life in Enver Hoxha's People's Socialist Republic of Albania continues to remind us of the past, especially the Mohammedan one. According to good old customs, heavy agricultural work and road construction are reserved for women. Beneath the massive white cloths, which look like a shadow, they stoop barefoot in the fields and hand the harvest to the overseer at the edge of the field, to be weighed and credited to their personal budget.
In the middle of the day, able-bodied young men walk in herds along the streets and populate cafes (in which there are no women). Apparently, they are shift workers, an explanation that was also heard in Yugoslavia and China before mass unemployment was accepted there. At the party conference in November, Hoxha admitted the structural mistakes. Efforts must be made to create jobs "where the people are".
In the cities they live in unroofed, wood-heated tenements that resemble slums even when completed. A family with two children gets two rooms. According to the plan, an average of five people live in each new apartment.
Since the family bond is still intact, relatives get together when possible, for example, two brothers get a bigger apartment with their relatives, and if all the adults earn money, they buy a TV together. It is classified as a luxury good in the official goods table and costs you the average salary of two years of work.
On average, the Albanian worker labors a day for a kilo of meat, three hours for a kilo of fruit or a toothbrush and a week for a pair of plastic shoes, the same amount of time as a month in a nursery (food included).
Every year he spends a salary or two on a child's textbooks. The state pays tuition fees, only if the student's parents are underprivileged. As in all socialist countries, medicines cost a lot; patients are queuing in front of the Durrës hospital.
Mothers get up to 36 days off a year if a young child gets sick as well as three hours off work to breastfeed. The emancipation of women is shown - as everywhere in real socialism - mainly in their participation in paid work. Arrival of Albania: Recruit girls in uniform, with a red bow on their hat as a gender symbol, march over the gravel roads of Albania under the command of a sergeant (male) with a carbine.
It is hard to imagine that this way of life is the desired goal of the student rebels in Pristina, the capital of the "Autonomous Province" of Kosovo in the Yugoslav Republic of Serbia. It is hard to imagine that they would want to trade their rights as citizens of Yugoslavia, such as freedom of travel and private agricultural land, for the social-totalitarian security of Albania.
It's also hard to imagine that Albania – as Belgrade claims – really wants them: The reunification of two socialist states, one strictly Stalinist and the other more social-democratic in orientation, brings with it the benefit of a dangerous protest potential. for Albania. Because, in Yugoslavia, about half of the Albanians live in Albania itself.
It sounds believable when Enver Hoxha insists - as he did recently at his party's conference - that Albania is not striving for unity, but that it is up to the Kosovars themselves to fight for their rights and form their own Albanian republic, within the state of Yugoslavia.
"Albania is not thinking about a violent solution", explains academic Aleks Buda. This means: In any case, World War III will not break out here. Bunkers, according to Buda, wait and "do nothing".
A Greater Albania, in fact, would have to start from scratch, that is, to re-educate every third citizen away from Allah and towards Hoxha. The loyalty of the Albanians, who have been subjugated for 35 years, is now uncertain.
When evening falls, in the settlements of the "sons of the eagles", the Albanians demand their freedom. Married women walk next to their husbands (lovers are not visible), with red lips and high heels, not exactly conforming to the system.
On November 1, Hoxha called it "a big ideological problem" and "a big evil", "mentality and way of thinking as a micro-bourgeois, which have deep roots in our country". Above all, "the large masses of young people have not yet been hardened by the seriousness of life".
Under cover of darkness, the stranger is carefully asked if he would like to sell the watch. Teenagers in ragged clothes beg for chewing gum and quickly disappear down a side street in front of the nearest police station, only to reappear a hundred meters away to ask again.
In the apartment blocks of a workers' settlement in Durrës, most of the television antennas are not directed to the East, towards the government broadcaster Tirana (four hours of politics and sports every day), but towards Italy, towards the West.
Even if everything else is different in Albania - Albanians are not different people than anywhere else. In the city of Saranda, the district party secretary is organizing a party for 200 guests. Half sit on the hotel terrace in the background – only men. The chief, in ribbons, greets them one by one with a gracious handshake.
But the chosen couples who sit on the dance floor, eat and drink, receive kisses on the cheek from their employer. After a song where Enver Hoxha's cult is raised, they move on to tango, sirtaki - the Greek border is not far - and Serbian kolo where the driver of the district party secretary is allowed to dance on the tete.
The car of the district party secretary, a "Mercedes", is parked in front of the hotel. /Memory.al/
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