dash of thought - contemplations with a cosmopolitan purpose

Happier in Hyères

23. August 2025

by Vince

“I was only happy once; that was at Hyères;”
Robert Louis Stevenson: Letter to Sidney Colvin, March 19, 1891

Growing up, I felt a strong urge to change places, in the hope that this would increase my overall happiness. What I longed for was a “Tapetenwechsel,” a wallpaper change, as we call a change of scenery in German. Leaving my hometown, so I believed, would rid me of the stale air and stuffiness that surrounded me, hampering not only my physical and intellectual development, but also my love for life and my luck in love.

Pizza in Transit
Part I: Casa Pizza

11. July 2025

by Vince

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Marseille / Place

“Please allow me to invite you. I don’t have the means for a proper dinner. But I could treat you to a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza. Come sit with me! What would you rather see? How they bake pizza on the open fire? Then sit right next to me. The old port? Then you should sit opposite me instead. From here you’ll be able to see the sun go down behind Fort Saint-Nicolas. I’m sure that won’t bore you.”
Anna Seghers, Transit

Anna Seghers’ 1944 novel Transit begins with bad news. On the run from a Nazi concentration camp, the protagonist reaches the port of Marseille. Here, he’s greeted by the rumor of a ship named “Montreal” having hit a naval mine and sunk with refugees on board. Any hope of leaving a continent drowning in fascism seems dashed from the start. And the reader is led to believe that instead of Transit, a more fitting title for this novel may have been Terminus.

Vignettes des Vestiges
Part II: Joseph Roth (c)

22. February 2023

by Vince

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Place

In this age of digital nomadism, we often forget how intense and ambiguous the relationships can be that humans entertain with geographic places. Some places attract us, others reject us. Some entice us, others bore us to death. Some places poison us, others intoxicate us only to eat us alive. In the same way as places are haunted by people and their afterlife specters, places can haunt us in return. They lure us to always sink back anew into their sweet yet suffocating embrace.

Vignettes des Vestiges
Part II: Joseph Roth (b)

3. February 2023

by Vince

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Marseille / Place

“Please, save me, believe in me, in my sanity!” Stranded in Marseille, in the heat of July 1934, Joseph Roth sent out a cry for help to his friend and benefactor Stefan Zweig. What was the matter?

Vignettes des Vestiges
Part I: Joseph Roth (a)

23. January 2023

by Vince

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Place

When I visited Marseille for the first time, I already knew that some of my favorite authors had been here before me. The writer and journalist Joseph Roth, for instance. I had a vague notion of him sitting in the lobby of some grand hotel by the Old Port writing his articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Or did he actually come to Marseille seeking shelter from the Nazis, to be right at the port and out of Europe as soon as another World War would erupt? As I knew, Roth foresaw the imminent atrocities much earlier than most of his intellectual contemporaries.

Vignettes des Vestiges
Introduction

14. January 2023

by Vince

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Marseille / Place

Marseille has a record as an ancient city without monuments. The oldest city in France baffles visitors with a glaring lack of remnants from its twenty-six-hundred-year-old history, adding to its bad reputation as uncultured, poverty-stricken, and dangerous. For the longest time, centralist France seemed to have all but abandoned its greatest harbor, once a lifeline supplying the entire Hexagon with colonial riches. And until recently, the age-old trading hub has been unable to sell itself as a heritage sight in the marketplace of global tourism.

Hortative Cultures

29. August 2020

by Vince

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Contemplation

Where I’m from, you learn what borders are from an early age. The fence separating my own little world from the neighbors’ garden was a demarcation line toward enemy territory. Neighbors’ disputes were said to be the germ cell of war. And plucking low-hanging fruit from a branch of your neighbor’s apple tree, I was taught, was the one-way entry point to a life of crime. Where I’m from, the petty-bourgeois values of domestic peace, property protection, and Sunday-mow-day were not to mess with.

“A Human Ribbon”

22. August 2020

by Vince

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Place

Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse was once praised and disdained as a symbol of modern metropolitan life. Today, it might partly regain its former status, as the street is part of an ongoing experiment about revitalizing urban space.

“The spirit of Friedrichstrasse has rubbed off on the whole city,” German philosopher Martin Heidegger once wrote home to his wife Elfride, whom he addresses in his letters as “Mein liebes Seelchen!”—”My dear little soul!” “People here have lost their soul,” he continued his rant about the German Empire’s capital, which he visited while stationed in nearby Charlottenburg during the last months of World War I.

“Happiness”

15. August 2020

by Vince

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Review

Sometimes you have to cross a line to find true happiness. Sometimes, crossing a line takes you from happiness to hell. If only it were so clear in which direction you are crossing. Life isn’t always signposted that well, and sometimes the signs to happiness and those to hell point in the same direction. Agnes Varda’s film Le Bonheur (1965, English Happiness) gaily depicts such a journey with an ambiguous orientation. Does the film come with a happy ending? I wouldn’t tell you if I could.

Safety in Numbers

7. August 2020

by Vince

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Event

Meeting up with a couple of people for an easy ride through the city—this would be any cyclist’s dream, if only there weren’t so many cars that prefer to have the streets to themselves. This is precisely the reason why there is Critical Mass. The concept originated in San Francisco, where the first bicycle gathering under this name took place on the last Friday in September 1992. Since then, the idea has spread, and bikers in numerous cities across the globe reclaim their streets, which have long been dominated by motorized traffic.