Café Bagdad: stories from a new Iraque
by Christoph Reuter and Susanne Fischer
Original title: Café Bagdad. Der ungeheure Alltag im neuen Irak
C. Bertelsmann
352 pages
October 2004
Book description:
Iraq ought really to be Paradise, dripping with oil, water, and fertile land, in view of the five-thousand-year-old story of Mesopotamia. And yet it seems that mankind has turned this Biblical Eden into a Hell: it has seen Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship of terror, three wars within twenty years, the American occupation, and the festering civil wars of dozens of militias and terrorist cells fighting against the Americans, against the police, and against one another. Christoph Reuter, a seasoned Near East correspondent currently living in Baghdad, set out to find the soul of a country that isn’t a country – in the process collecting stories, personal fates, and biographies which he uses to draw a picture of Iraq and its people that’s as personal as it is authentic.
Christoph Reuter witnessed the Iraq War not as an ‘embedded journalist’ but, rather, as the guest of a Baghdad family. His view on this war- and crisis-ravaged country by the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers is far removed from the hectic job of war reporting, and is steeped in the Iraqui people; their biographies; and their daily struggle for normality in a time of upheaval. He has created a mosaic of stories, episodes and highlights in an attempt to help people in the West to grasp the magnitude of the political catastrophe.
The author doesn’t just describe life in Baghdad: he got to know people over the whole country. His travels took him from the mountains and valleys of Kurdistan in the north via the holy towns of Karbala and Najaf to the palm forests and swamps in the south; from the last Christian monks in 1,500-year-old monasteries and the PKK guerrillas to the nostalgic Baghdad bourgeoisie and the people who became rich overnight after the new occupation; from the nomads in the desert to the last Marsh Arabs inhabiting the Shatt al-Arab. He describes ‘his’ family, with whom he experienced the silence that preceded the fall of the dictatorship; the anger, joy and confusion that followed it; and how a profiteer who has made his fortune out of the American military missions can sit together with the daughter of an underground Baath party big-wig. And in between, we find episodes from normal everyday life: the confusion of the headmistress who no longer knows what to teach the pupils; the courage of the ballet teacher, and the wine trader’s fear of defending himself against islamistic bully boys; the melancholy of the gifted jazz pianist; what it’s like to be woken up by bombs dropping early in the morning.
Reuter, who has long been familiar with the region and its inhabitants, weaves his stories into an impressive picture of Iraq, without neglecting political analysis. By bringing the country closer to the reader and explaining history and the current political situation, he also addresses the questions to which the whole world wants answers: to what extent is ‘off the peg’ democracy the universal panacea for an Islamic world that has been ensnared in dictatorship and religious radicalism? What moves peoples, and what influences them? What are the effects of miltary intervention and invasion? From the perspective of the Iraqui population, he also casts light on the role of the Americans: to the people they liberated, they appear to be occupiers and outsiders, and it is suspected that their planned withdrawal in mid 2004 will leave a greater or lesser vacuum.
Reuter’s stories are characterised by the tragedy of a destroyed land. His stories are raw, shocking, moving, and sometimes absurd. Above all, though, they are characterised by the author’s familiarity with and fondness for the people he writes about, and whose future he views with pessimism rather than optimism.
This is Iraq in a state of upheaval: a place where, as if in fast-forward, every conceivable political and religious movement, mistake, and sidetrack of the last decade is as it were simultaneously tried out. Communists, Islamists, Nationalists and Democrats form groups and build alliances; fight against one another, and against the American occupiers. Their big neighbours Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are drawn into it bit by bit, and the entire region threatens to be thrown seriously out of balance. Iraq will continue to provide us with headlines – and Christoph Reuter’s book is a highly readable contribution to our attempts to understand one of international politics’ most important flashpoints and its people.
About the authors:
Christoph Reuter was born in 1968 and studied Islamic Studies. For ten years, he has reported from the Islamic world from Morocco to Kirgistan, focusing particularly on the Near East, for newspapers and magazines. In 1997 he won the Springer Journalism Prize. His book on suicide bombers, Mein Leben ist eine Waffe [My Life Is A Weapon], has been translated into several languages.
Susanne Fischer, graduated in History and Political Sciences, class of 1968. After concluding the course at the Henri-Nannen Journalism School, she worked as a political writer for “Woche” and during two years wrote for the “Spiegel” in Berlin. In October 2003, together with Christoph Reuter, she travelled to Badgad as an independent journalist, where during seven months she wrote articles, among others, for the "Tagesspiegel", "Die Zeit", "Brigitte" and for the Swiss newsmagazine "Facts".
Crédito da foto da autora © by Christoph Reuter
Crédito da foto do autor © by Kai Wiedenhöfer
Also available:
Mein Leben ist eine Waffe [My Life Is A Weapon]
Selbstmordattentäter [Suicide Bombers (updated paperback edition of My Life Is A Weapon)]